"Govern or Get Out"

Laboriously sawing wood on the Tariff at the special session last fall, the Senate struck a new and screechy knot--independence of the Philippines. Great has been the growth among U. S. beet and cane growers of the notion that the free importation of Filipino sugar menaced their industry. Senator King of Utah (beets) and Senator Broussard of Louisiana (cane) offered amendments to cut the Islands loose and thereby put their sugar production outside the U. S. tariff wall. Their amendments were defeated, but the agitation for getting rid of the Philippines to reduce agricultural competition by no means subsided. U. S. husbandmen producing vegetable oils warmed to the idea of Philippine independence. Their Congressmen lustily cheered the proposal last month in the House.

In Washington last week arrived a Filipino Commission headed by Manuel Roxas, Speaker of the Philippine House of Representatives, to plead before Congress for the islands' immediate independence, to take advantage of this new economic, rather than moral, sentiment for their liberation.

A much longer and more disinterested view of basic problems was taken by Henry Cabot Lodge, grandson of the late great Senator from Massachusetts, in an article "Our Failure in the Philippines" in the January Harpers. An experienced newsgatherer, Grandson Lodge last year toured the world. In the Philippines, he says, he had a shock.

Wrote he: "In the eyes of more than half the world we are making an exhibition of ourselves in the Philippines. . . . Conditions exist there which are at present nothing short of scandalous. . . . The attempt was made to impose the nationalist ideal upon a group of peoples having no need for it ... on the highly unsound assumption that what was good for us was good for the Malays. . . . While the Spaniards killed the Filipinos with cruelty, we are reducing them to nothingness with kindness. . . . The American Governor General of the Philippines is one of the hopeless creations in the whole of governmental history. . . . He can get nothing done without licking the boots of ... the mestizo [half-caste], the only class literate enough to govern. ..."

U. S. education has created an enormous white-collar class of Filipinos who become lawyers but, as the country is too poor for litigation, "have gone into the most profitable occupation in most poor countries--politics."

The economic maladjustment is that "we have turned out crowds of American-educated natives wanting American luxuries in a land unable to support them. . . . It is like putting a Rolls-Royce body on a Ford chassis. . . . We are doing the islands more harm than good. . . . They are doing us more harm than good. They are too poor to be an important market for our manufactured goods. . . . With the Philippines we are in a weaker military position than we should be without them. Our naval forces in the Asiatic waters could be swept off the seas by the Japanese. . . . Our military forces could not withstand a determined attack. . . ."

Assuming that the Philippines are not ready for independence, Observer Lodge proposed alternatives: 1) Govern them as they should be governed, as the British, and Dutch govern their Oriental possessions; or 2) Sell them to a power with colonizing experience and the capacity to govern.

"Politically speaking, the Orient is like a jelly--poke one part of it and it all shakes," acknowledged Observer Lodge. But, he suggested, Europe might be benefited if a colonial safety valve were permitted to a certain country with well-known colonizing experience. In short, perhaps it would be wise to sell the Philippines to Germany.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.