PUBLIC LIBRAR

N THE preceding number of this magazine I endeavored to present the history of territorial expansion in this country and to show the powers of Congress over the whole subject of legislative control of the Territories. The following pages will be devoted to a consideration of the Oriental Problem and of the policy of acquiring the Philippines.

Both England and the United States, under the persuasive appeals of Mr. Burlingame thirty years ago, were led to believe that China had reached a stage in her progress which gave promise of a nation. able to take care of herself and with which treaties could be made on the assumption that force was no longer needed to compel terms of commercial intercourse. Both these countries entered into an agreement with China, obtaining from her no great concessions, but practically agreeing to leave China to work out her own destiny in her own way.

There was at that time no premonition that Russia would ever interfere to rob China of her statehood, or that Germany or France would take possession of any part of her territory, or that Japan would ever dare to invade her boundaries. England and the United States, the two leading commercial nations of the globe, gave no serious consideration to the cloud which even then hung over and later broke with such fury upon the people of China. The weakness and imbecility of her government, the cowardice of her soldiers and sailors in battle, and her utter lack of preparation to defend herself were astounding revelations.

Russia, however, did not share the optimistic views of other nations as to China. Her contiguity of territory and more intimate knowledge of the Chinese people gave her an insight denied to others, except perhaps Japan, of which she has been preparing for years to take advantage. Her great transcontinental rail

ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS

road was but a step towards the ultimate control of the trade of China, and it is believed by many that it meant the subversion of self-government by her people as necessary to that control. Slowly this process of absorption has been going on, but it was greatly accelerated by the Japanese war, until the spectacle was presented to the world not long since of the oldest and most populous nation on the globe about to be carved in pieces and parceled out as merchandise. Among the results of the Spanish-American War has been the arrest of this process of disintegrating China.

But what concern is this to us? you ask. It is vital. We are to hold the Philippines because of their nearness to this vast hive of human activities; and we are concerned because we are to be thus near to China. A profound student of the situation thus writes of this country of four hundred millions of human beings:

The commercial nations par excellence are the Anglo-Teutonic whose interest, in spite of an occasional freak of hot-blooded Kaisers or the like, is not to break up old "China," but rather, if possible, to rivet the cracks in it. By the introduction of such improvements as railways, steamboats, mining, and manufactories, by the infusion of the Western spirit as a new nervous force into the country, and of Western principles of action, the resources of China, in men and material, would be rendered capable of providing fertile employment for white men for centuries to come. This is the great undeveloped estate which the present generation of Anglo-Saxons have to leave to their everincreasing offspring,-an inheritance richer far than all the prairies and all the goldmines in the world, because crowned with a wealth of humanity of the most efficient quality, an enormous hive of industry needing direction, and with capacities for consumption commensurate with their unrivaled powers of production.

And this is a country now lying at our doors, which the rapacity of certain nations not long since was about to demand should be dismembered and robbed of the right of self-government; the fruits

of whose toil they would proclaim shall not mingle freely through open doors into the channels of the world's commerce, but shall be monopolized by and made to contribute to the power and the wealth of the few predatory nations which thus threaten to sweep down upon this doomed and apparently helpless people.

China is not yet disintegrated or destroyed. Shall the United States longer remain neutral or indifferent to the fate of this great empire? In this our interests are the same as those of Great Britain. Thomas Jefferson was not alarmed at the thought of an alliance with her when the fate of the South American republics hung in the balance; nor should we now hesitate to invite her co-operation in staying the hand that would destroy China and close her ports against the free commerce of the world. I repeat what Mr. Jefferson said to Mr. Monroe: "With Great Britain on our side, we need not fear the whole world." In our new and greatly enlarged sphere of governmental control, which happily coincides with and is in no wise. antagonistic to the aspirations of Great Britain, except as friendly commercial competitors, there is every reason why we should eradicate whatever of feelings of hostility we may have heretofore felt towards the mother country. It is our duty, as I conceive, to show to our people that the time has come (I hope to remain forever), when these two great Englishspeaking nations are to be found "once more side by side in the same cause It is for us to urge as Jefferson did in 1823, that we should most sedulously cherish a cordial friendship" with our English our English cousins.

66

I am not prepared to say that the Philippines are without meaning unless we can have the untrammeled right to compete for the China trade, although the writer from whom I have quoted so thinks; but the Philippines would lose much of their value to us, rich as they are, should the government of China pass into the despotic control of the Czar of all the Russias. In the September number of this periodical I endeavored to point out the importance of China's commerce to this country. I need not further refer to that feature of the subject.

China can no longer remain isolated or

stationary. She is surrounded on all sides. by aspiring and ambitious nations, having more or less of stable footing on her shores; and now by our acquisition of the Philippines a new factor in the problem of the Orient has been introduced with which the nations of the earth must hereafter deal. By far the most aggressive nation. in this field of commercial activities is Russia; and as the map discloses, her advantageous position and her disposition towards territorial aggrandizement make her a most dangerous competitor, threatening, possibly, the very autonomy of China itself. I do not myself believe it, but many who have watched this absorbing drama of the Orient do so believe, that Russia has been for years leading up to the consummation of China's utter subjugation.

It is a most significant fact that the Muscovite and the Tartar races intercross with decided advantages to each. Napoleon's sarcastic epigram will be remembered: "Scratch a Russian, and you will find a Tartar." It is this homogeneity of the two races, coupled with the aggressive movements of Russia in China, that led an observant writer to remark that "No one familiar with the subject doubts that it means the eventual occupation and absorption by Russia of Manchuria, Corea, and all the dependencies of China north and east of the Great Wall.” A glance at the map will show what it means with Russia in control of Manchuria, the Gulf of Liao-Tung, and the Corean Peninsula, and with the terminus of its Transcaspian railroad but a short distance from Peking.

The Manchurians are said to possess all the qualities which go to make good soldiers. In the hands of a power like Russia, with her facilities for moving large bodies of armed men drawn from her standing army, it needs no gift of prophecy to forecast the doom of China, if the rest of the world stands idly by. And the subjugation of China by Russia may disturb the peace of the world.

And now a word as to the policy of acquiring the Philippines.

The acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands is an accomplished fact. Thus far we have gone beyond the power to recede.

The public mind seems to have settled down to the wisdom of acquiring Porto Rico. The objections to the annexation of Cuba relate rather to our avowed purpose respecting that island when war was declared with Spain than to any inherent difficulties to be anticipated in governing the island. This is all non-contiguous territory. We must encounter in all these islands the problem of governing races essentially different from our own. In all of them we are to penetrate tropical climates and enter upon the development of new industries and engage in an agriculture with which we are unacquainted. So far as the Hawaiian Islands are concerned, we have in absorbing them stepped beyond our own hemisphere. It is a voyage of seven days and 2,089 miles to reach them from San Francisco. It seems to me that whatever may be the difficulties that stand in the way of our governing the Philippines, when compared with the islands of which I have just spoken, they present a problem differing only in degree.

Ex-Senator Edmunds of Vermont has condensed the objections in a short paragraph. He says:

In a business point of view, we must take into consideration the cost of governing the Philippine Islands. This cost can not, in all human probability, be met by the taxation of the inhabitants to any considerable extent. If we take them, we must govern them by external power, and not through any autonomy of their own. This means a large and expensive civil list, which must in the main be paid out of the treasury of the United States. The climate is, of course, unwholesome for Americans, and the death-rate of our officers there would be very large. It will also require an American army of defense for the preservation of peace and order of many thousand men, and an American navy of six or more ships and probably two thousand men, all exposed, like the civilians, to the constant hostility of the climate, to say nothing of that of the inhabitants of most, if not all, of the islands.

If to this catalogue of anticipated difficulties there may be added the danger of becoming embroiled in European politics, we have before us about the whole field of opposition. I will briefly reply to some of these points of objection and state some of the reasons in support of what seems to be the policy upon which we have entered.

The Philippines extend north and south sixteen degrees, and east and west nine de

grees, the southern extremity reaching within about six degrees of the equator, and have a population of seven millions. Of the twelve hundred islands, about one third only are inhabited. The island of Luzon contains more than half the entire population and about half the entire area. In the acquisition of these islands, there has been added to our national domain a territory measuring 115,000 square miles -an area equal to one third the present square miles of all the States comprised in the original thirteen colonies. Compared with foreign countries, this new domain. is more than half the size of either France, Germany, Australia, or Spain; it is four fifths the area of the entire kingdom of Japan; it is almost equal to the combined square miles of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, and is greater than all Italy. It is more than twenty times the area of the Hawaiian Archipelago, with a population eighty times greater than that gem of the island world. This island empire of the Philippines lies nearer to the city of San Francisco than to any other market in the western world; and when these islands are once restored to conditions of peace, and fall under the permanent protection of our flag, the trade of their seven millions of people will naturally turn towards their new protectors and their friends, and will enter the Golden Gate to be here distributed to the markets of the United States and Europe.

The commercial importance of these islands is difficult to estimate owing to the failure of the Spanish Government to make reliable and complete record of its business relations with them. From the "Statesman's Year Book for 1898" it appears that the estimated public revenue collected (1894-95) was about $13,500,000, and the expenditure $13,250,000. The revenue collected annually by the Spanish Government in its misrule of that country has been more than double the State tax in California to carry on our complex system and support all our public institutions on a total taxable valuation of over $1,200,000,000.

The known exports from the islands in 1897, before American occupation, as reported by an agent of the Treasury Department, amounted to $41,342,280;

while the imports were $17,400,000. This shows a trade balance in favor of the islands of nearly $24,000,000. The chief exports are sugar and hemp, tobacco-leaf, cigars, and copra (dried kernel of the cocoanut broken up). Of the import trade the United Kingdom controls thirtyfour per cent.; Hong Kong and Amoy, twenty-one per cent.; Spain, thirteen per cent.; Singapore and British India, ten per cent. Our country has had but little of this trade. Articles of import are rice, flour, wines, cotton goods, petroleum, and coal. In the Encyclopædia Britannica the exports are given for 1880 at $29,996,000, from which it would appear that exports have increased considerably in recent years, notwithstanding internal political disturbances and the repressive tendency of Spanish rule. In all the islands there are but seventy miles of railroad and seven hundred and twenty miles of telegraph lines. The coin in use is the Mexican dollar. All other foreign coins have heretofore been forbidden circulation. Local fractional money has been coined there. The chief products are hemp, sugar, coffee, copra, tobacco-leaf, cigars, and indigo, to which will soon be added hard woods for export. Like all the islands of the archipelago, the soil is exceedingly rich and productive and capable of greatly increased production.

Manufactures have reached no advanced stage, but there is produced there a great variety of textile fabrics (piña fibers, silk, and cotton) some of which are said to be of great excellence and beauty. The manufactures are chiefly hats, mats, baskets, ropes, furniture, coarse pottery, carriages, and musical instruments. Hemp is largely taken to Hong Kong, and there manufactured into cordage by the English. The native has been given neither opportunity nor encouragement to advance in civilizing pursuits. Practieally robbed of all the fruits of his toil by the exactions of his oppressors, life to him has possessed none of the inducements to get on in the world, such as a liberal government, which we shall establish, will offer him.

The contention that the Philippines are politically undesirable, if not impossible of governmental control, because of their remoteness, is a claim that fails to take into

account the modern steamship and the submarine cable. With the inventions that have been made and the improvements that have followed in the development of modern transportation, time only has come to be the factor considered in the measurement of distance. The overland Argonaut consumed more months in reaching the land of his hopes and dreams, than is now required to circle the globe. And for the first twenty years of its AngloSaxon history California was, on an average, full thirty days distant from the capitol at Washington-now it is about four. What the more powerful locomotives, steel rails, air-brakes, and general betterment have done to increase speed and economize expense on land by railways, the steel hull, the screw propeller, and triple-expansion engine have done for the steamship that plows the ocean's thoroughfare. Since its first creation, the improved expansion engine has lessened the distance that lies between Great Britain and the most remote of her extended possessions by more than one half, and has thereby increased the loyalty of her distant colonies more than all the wellstudied legislation that had gone before.

The political bonds of a country are naturally no greater than the strength of the commercial arteries that unite its people. This has been the experience of all colonizing nations, and was the inspiration that led our own Government to grant the lands and indorse the bonds that built our transcontinental railways. Pursuing the same principle of known law, when the United States shall subsidize a Western fleet possessing the speed of the present Atlantic liners, it will have brought Manila within fifteen days of San Francisco and within less than twenty days of the capitol at Washington-a result that will place the Philippines nearer to New York and the capitol than was California during the first twenty years of its history as a State. Furthermore, it will have established a commercial artery assuring to us a supremacy in trade that will in turn make loyal the now distant people, and thereby, in great measure, will have solved their form of government. Even now, under the present unsettled conditions, a man leaving any city on the Atlantic seaboard can reach Manila in nearly the same

time and at about the same expense as was required to reach San Francisco from a like Eastern port at any time antedating the completion of the first transcontinental railway. Moreover, the lessening of freight rates that has followed these improved and increased transportation facilities, permits the shipment of a ton of freight from Manila to New York to-day at an expense no greater than it cost to ship a ton of like freight from San Francisco to New York at any time prior to 1869. With a like encouragement extended to the Philippines that was given to the Pacific States, the American planter and merchant in these islands will find himself much nearer to the continental markets of San Francisco and New York and the capitol at Washington than was San Francisco to the Eastern cities named during the decades of the '50's and '60's.

When so patriotic a citizen and so profound a statesman as Judge Edmunds puts forward the additional cost to our Government in holding these island possessions as a reason for withdrawing our claims to them the objection cannot be ignored; and yet we rested the acquisition of the Northwest Territory and California on no such considerations. Governments do not annex territory as a man adds farm to farm. Motives much higher control the minds of statesmen in determining policies looking towards territorial aggrandizement. But let us consider this point for a moment. It is a part of the history of the Netherlands in India that a reasonable tax upon industries not only pays the expense of the army and navy, but there remains a surplus after expending eight million dollars in constructing public works and four million dollars in public instruction. The cost of administration is set down at $24,000,000, which includes the salary of $100,000 to the GovernorGeneral and $100,000 for entertaining; and, numerous salaried officials, native and Dutch, who receive from $800 to $32,000 per annum. I can conceive no necessity for such extravagance in controlling the Philippines. Mrs. Scidmore informs us in her book of travel in Java that the army consists of 30,000 men, two thirds of whom are natives, and it is only because of the outbreak in Sumatra that makes even this

number necessary. There is no large

force required in Java, where are 23,000,000 people. We have a right to assume, I think, that under such government as we shall establish no large and costly army will be required, and no richly endowed list of civil functionaries.

Whether we hold the Philippines or not, it is certain we are to have a large navy. A large part of this navy will find its natural theater of action on the Asiatic coast. The cost will be the same whether our ships have waters and commerce of our own to patrol and protect or whether they are to observe merely the march of progress of other nations. But whatever the cost it can never reach the material benefits which must flow from our occupation of the Philippines. Secretary Long says that a large navy implies necessarily a large merchant marine, and that a large merchant marine is impossible without a large coasting-trade. The interoceanic islands under our control will enlarge our coasting trade by virtue of our shipping laws which it is not unlikely will be extended over them.

One word as to the danger of being embroiled in European wars by the ownership of the Philippines. Again I invite attention to the example of the Netherlands in India. I believe it was in 1816 when the English finally ceded the islands to Holland. I can point to no page in the history of this century which records that Holland has been involved in any European war by reason of her possessions in the East Indies. I do not recall at this moment that the powers of Europe have engaged in war with each other over any of their possessions in the Orient within the last halfcentury. I can see no European complications which our presence in the East Indies is at all likely to create. We go there as the lawful successor in interest of Spain, whose sovereignty dates back to the discovery by Magellan in 1521. Our rights rest upon the same foundations as those of Great Britain, France, Germany, or any other proprietor to other territory in the East, and are as absolute and indefeasible as those by which we claim sovereignty in Alaska; and the United States goes into possession of these islands with as much assurance of continued peace with Europe as we went into the possession of Alaska.