*This article was submitted in the Prize Essay Contest, 1938.
“L’appetit vient en mangeant”
I
As japan sweeps like a holocaust down the cultured and once mighty land of China, it is important for the United States to consider seriously a problem that Americans in general think has been settled for good—if they have thought about it at all. It concerns the future relation of the Philippines to the United States, with all the imponderable effects upon the destinies of the two countries this relation will have. Some who have considered the question seriously know that the present solution does not settle the matter. Realizing that the futures of our countries will mingle long after the Filipinos gain so-called independence in 1946, they are troubled bitterly by consideration of dangers that will surely arise in decades to come.
Some forty years ago Kaiser Wilhelm, stirring from dreams of world conquest, dramatically pointed to a sprawling map of Asia and in a voice of prophecy declared: There are the Philippines, key to the Pacific . . . and to much of history that is to be. The long arm of his navy was at that moment reaching after this strategic land, and but for the grace of God and Admiral Dewey might have had it. In which event Japan would today already be in possession without having to wait the few years more or less before she will make it her destiny to take the islands.
The Kaiser appreciated their value; so did newly awakened Japan at that early stage of her ambition; but the United States did not then, has not since, and does not today, else she would not relinquish them. To a few Americans their importance is clear, but not to this vast, blundering democracy of ours—neither their value commercially, their strategic position, nor their place as a pawn in the far- sweeping, ruthless, titanic struggle taking shape on the wide longitudes of the Pacific.
As Japan proceeds uncheckably step by step on her road to greatness, the hour grows swiftly nearer when the Philippines and her star will mingle. As her “Monroe Doctrine” of Asia for the Asiatics becomes more brazenly Asia for the Japanese, the “glorious independence” the Philippine Islands are to know is doomed swiftly to pass—if, indeed, it ever is to exist. Already three years of the decade of grace given the islands to become strong enough to stand have fled by. And the pity of it is that they will never stand strongly, nor weakly long.
That we may understand why these things are to be, and the tragic course the United States is taking, we should look a little at Philippine history, at the conditions there today, at the characteristics of the little brown inhabitants-—children of the sun— and at the part this archipelago is destined to play in the great scheme of things Pacific.
A few of us may think of the Filipino as a savage heathen. Yet Indians were still chipping arrows on the Potomac in 1619 when Spanish priests founded the College of Santo Tomas for instructing cultured young Filipinos at the ancient commercial center of Manila. Indeed, for a thousand years Chinese trading here had mingled their blood and culture with that of the natives to produce a civilization in many if not in most ways as highly advanced as that of Europe. Before the first colonists saw our continent, there existed here cannon, metal works, woven textiles, skilled agriculture with whole mountain sides traced by giant terraces, a written alphabet, books, even poetry of a sort.
Outside Manila and lesser focal points the natives lived primitive existences, of course, split up into many tribes. Through centuries waves of Malays rolling up from the south—and on beyond even to Japan so that the two countries are anciently kin—had become isolated in the thousand miles of islands, forming separate tribes. Speaking different tongues, these warred on each other as aliens, and the Moros warred on them all.
So the Spanish found this archipelago, and so to a large extent after 3 ½ centuries they left it. The priests achieved a miracle in converting all the islanders except the Mohammedan Moros and a few other wild tribes to Christianity. Otherwise there was little change either in social or political development, or in education, the populace being kept ignorant and therefore more easily divided and ruled. Trade was stagnant. Even as late as 1811 the laws of the domain provided that the total foreign commerce be carried in a galleon that once a year lumbered off to Mexico. Agriculture and economics showed corresponding lethargy. One writer aptly concludes that Spain’s sole outstanding economic contribution was to poultry science—in teaching the natives how to encourage hostility between roosters.
II
The United States’ Philippine administration commenced unpropitiously. A bloody insurrection stamped out by death and terror was not the happy beginning the champion of liberty wished for its first overseas dabbling in the empire-grabbing game of European nations. Yet once the natives were “civilized with a Krag,” according to a well-known song during the insurrection, the United States settled down to redeem itself by a colonial policy in many ways outstanding.
Advances in the material elements of Philippine civilization have been a credit to American energy. Men still go about with their shirt tails flapping in the wind, but more of them have shirts. A favorite article of diet is still the baluta, an egg incubated to the embryo point and then cooked—similar in aroma to the American restaurant egg—but more people get the chance to enjoy the pungent flavor. Retail trade as ever in the ancient days is still largely controlled by Chinese, but the latter’s signs have been enlivened by the native wisdom of soldier and sailor into such jewels as “Jelly Belly the Tailor,” and “Tickle Breeches—Woolen Pants Made to Order.”
Beyond this froth, Manila itself has been converted into one of the most attractive and prosperous cities of the East. In some manner unknown even to themselves Americans have retained that lazy loveliness overlying the usual filth and disease and disorder of the tropics, while at the same time ridding the metropolis of much of this ugliness. The mysterious old Spanish walled city with its arched gateways, narrow streets, silent shuttered windows, is still the heart of Manila; but illiteracy, filth, and leprosy are gone, and replacing the hovel-covered mud flats outside is a modern city of Spanish tropical architecture. Broad avenues are lined with palms and parks; immense public buildings stand like white palaces in a riot of green and brilliant blossoms; trees and flowers burst into glowing life so that many residential sections have the appearance of being parks. This is by day; by night it is fairyland where golden lights softly glow in a dusk of velvet. The band will be playing on the Luneta while thousands of white-clad natives, moving slowly to and fro, talk softly but talk madly. The soft, dreamy air will be nostalgic with starlight and fragrance. Palms with their shadowy fronds silhouetted in the moonlight will lean over the dark and silent waters of Manila Bay glittering in the darkness except where the full moon has laid a path of gold bright and shimmering—and cold —to far off Mariveles Mountains at the gateway to this inland sea. Yes, it will be so night after night, year after year until the end—which is soon. It will be so until some night of terror when war will roar across that dark jagged mass at the entrance to Manila Bay, sweeping down from the South China Sea with the wild monsoon, sweeping away peace and nostalgia, and the murmur of voices in the dusk, and hope.
This is the capital the United States will leave her foster child with roads and railroads radiating north and south, symbolic of the manufacturing, trade, and shipping that have developed to make this a great port; and leaving past much of the old ugliness and squalor, in themselves symbols of weakness in the greatness. The small trade of the Spanish era has grown into more than half a billion pesos during good years, giving employment and raising the scale of living throughout the Philippines, and on a lesser scale in the United States. With only a few million inhabitants the Philippine Islands are nevertheless high on the list of our customers. In return for something like three-fourths of their total exports—primarily sugar, copra, hemp, and of late years gold—we ship them dairy, cotton textile, steel, iron, and other manufactured products. American ships have held the predominance in this trade, but they are being replaced by Japanese— a significant forecast of future events.
The city that dreamed so quietly under Spain beside the smells of the Pasig River has not only developed beauty, and great wharves where ships that wander the earth come and go, but it has acquired many manufacturing industries (in which laborers are the best treated and best paid of the Orient). Sugar and cigars, movies, hats, and beer are some of the products.
In health and education the strenuous Yankee has followed his usual high record here. Although sanitation methods are still poor and weakening intestinal diseases common, he has brought maladies of many sorts under control, including leprosy. No longer are there years of terror in which death in one of its virulent epidemic masquerades sweeps through the islands. No longer, either, do Filipino children have to cry to go to school. The day after Manila surrendered in 1898 the First California Volunteers’ chaplain strode up the Escolta looking for a school building, and having found it walked in, took off his hat, and started teaching. It was the beginning of the grand ideal that in 1901 brought at one time a whole shipload of teachers to the task. In the neighborhood of a 1 ½ million young Filipinos are yearly obtaining at least a rudimentary education with a faith in written words almost heroic if it were not tragic.
Americans have also sought to train this little nation politically, unwisely striving to graft upon oriental nature the occidental forms of government. The East, far more philosophically than our country, accepts that he who has power and wealth rules. One of the herd is wiser and better off if he keeps his head out of the noose of affairs. In the ultimate, death and taxes will take it all, anyhow. What value to a man that he puff his lordly little pride with the feeling of running things, when in fact he never is. Nevertheless the United States has tried; and certain Filipinos have given the appearance of being apt pupils. The graft, money scandals, and political chicanery some twenty years ago following the Jones Act are not as apparent in this second period of supervised self-government. But Time is long.
Despite this fallacy of democracy being the best type of government for all peoples, on the surface it appears that the United States is blessing the Filipino with a favored start. We have given this people the highest scale of living of any nation in the Far East. Taxes have been low; food, simple necessities, and some luxuries plentiful. A stable currency throughout the islands promotes commerce. Not only have there been no taxes for supporting the Army and Navy, but the subsidy resulting from their expenditures has been considerable. Health has been improved, plagues eliminated, education given to eager hearts, peace and order maintained. Under American rule the common islander though lacking independence of government is endowed with a rarer thing— liberty of action such as no other Orientals dream of. On the whole, with his easy life, peace, and light responsibilities, the average Filipino is probably among the happiest of earth’s humanity.
III
Yet education, health, material goods, happiness, and a band playing on the moon-drenched Luneta are not sufficient. This comfortable scale of living is based precariously upon free trade with the United States. Without economic spurring, agriculture has fallen behind the rest of the Far East. Sugar and rice farmed by primitive methods produce much less to an acre than in other countries that will soon be competitors. When the United States’ tax barrier goes up, Filipino farmers will begin a desperate and losing struggle with their more highly developed agricultural neighbors. The resulting economic maladjustment will cause suffering and unrest through the islands. Then as now the Japanese plantation operator will be most successful in the struggle to live.
Furthermore, the United States has not given these little brown men a common language, nor more than a semblance of political unity. There are 43 ethnographic divisions of Filipinos. Wherever they became isolated the waves of Malays formed a different people with different customs, traits, language. Within these groups are 7 major lingual divisions and 80 additional dialects; not one of them is understood nationally. The years of teaching English, so superficial has been education, have left only a smattering of it, primarily around Manila. Spanish is more widespread, having entered into most dialects; but it is not national. Here lies a serious handicap to unity.
The weakness underlying all others in the Philippine’s future is the Filipino character. To understand what chance this nation will have to survive in our civilized jungle of national lust and greed where even great and honored China is failing, we should look into the psychology of its people. Although they speak many languages and are of many tribes, there are fundamental traits common to all these Malays. However little certain tribes like to admit it, they are all kin under the skin.
Different observers, Filipino or foreign, will give contradictory impressions of the islanders. Taking the opinions sincere and biased of many others and striking a balance with my own limited observations in the islands, I arrive at a point that is midway and by that very result bleak in prospect for the singing, unworried, dusty peasant who today follows his carabao into golden sunset; and tomorrow, like the once happy-hearted, laughing and wise Sons of Han, meets up bewildered with a hell on earth as unforeseen and unknowable in the peace of his quiet homestead as the Apocalypse.
Like other servants of the soil. Filipinos are in many ways lovable. They are hospitable, friendly, courteous, genial, carefree, happy. There is much of the child in them still as adults. Indeed there is more truth than mere liquid rhythm so appealing to their heart in the designation “children of the sun.” Like a child they form devotions easily upon trivial favors, and hold them deeply unless enraged by similar trivialities. They have poor habits of sanitation but are personally clean, taking frequent baths. The story has it that Spanish authorities complained of this characteristic because it taught their soldiers the same bad bathing habit. All love music, beauty, poetry, adoring them with an intensity that seems poignantly tragic if we lift our eyes to the dark horizon a few decades or less ahead. Each village that has been truly touched by civilization has its own brass band with the outside-hanging shirt tails waving to and fro in every blast of the big bass horn. Funerals are a strange mixture of solemnity and ludicrousness as the procession— even in Manila where I have seen it— winds along a dusty street bearing the corpse to ancient American jazz, modified but still recognizable as “Red Hot Mama” and “There’ll be a Hot Time.” Their oratory is a flaming, gorgeous, riotous poetry of expression, deeply serious and deeply empty. It is the froth of sensitive minds filled with the passionate vitality of the tropics-—and the fickle impermanence. A famous English reporter attempts to explain this trait in the wording he saw at the end of a silent movie in Manila where the Spanish script was ordinarily followed by English translation. Two lovers were parting forever. The last tearful embrace had faded into the darkness of unlighted celluloid; and the lover’s final words to the girl he would never see again appeared in Spanish:
Child of my heart we part forever. This is the end. I go hence to die and you to a living death behind stone walls. Adieu! my love, my heart, my soul, adieu!
Underneath was the American translation (that is, as even a cosmopolitan Englishman would remember it):
Bye bye, Kiddie. So long.
Our islanders have a passion that has no end for education—especially if it involves no physical labor. With this commendable aspiration goes an alert, serious mind and a good memory. With it, and part of it, is intense pride, childlike vanity, and an ambition for advancement that may be a result of the other characteristics. The love of freedom, that is debased to their own ends by some politicos, may also be founded on pride. The vague, glorious terms of the demagogues portray independence as a symbol of great stature that raises them to the level of the United States or Japan, a magic lantern that gives them the importance in world councils equal to their self-dreams.
A small nation clinging precariously to its place in the roll of nations needs men of energy. Some of these little brown men are; most have the typical tropical habit of conservation of muscular effort. Admitting that the climate is partly at fault, we can nevertheless understand what will happen to the prosperous nation when the restless Yankee leaves. The Filipino’s ambition for improvement is limited mainly to the mental field, and even there is often more wistful than real—the daydreams of children drowsing in the withering sun. To learn a thing from books is indeed sweet. A vast new universe is opened to daydreams. To put it into practice with the hands is a godless sacrilege the Yankee would foist upon them. To discuss it—that is different. Talk is adorable. It is a pleasant thing to become lost in the rich, empty magic of words. There the world vanishes; and there one day will vanish their present gifts from America, including peace.
The love of rhythm along with love of oratory and sonorous words has both created among Filipinos more than their share of demagogues and has presented these parasites a fertile field for their art. They are more powerful than even their prototype in the United States. The well- entrenched system of political bosses, caciques, would redden Tammany’s war paint with blushes of misspent achievements. The evil that can come to a democracy from this art is only too well realized by Americans. What can occur in nations less buttressed by social ideals is tragically portrayed in the history of dictatorships, murder, revolution, and suffering in some of our southern neighbors.
Naturally Filipinos show talent as lawyers. So far they have revealed no evidence, as a nation, of either aggressive business ability or statesmanlike leadership. Whether this condition results from the energy-destroying tropics or till now lack of need to try is of little moment to this question: Who will control their economic destiny a quarter of a century from now? Most of the larger business of the islands is today conducted by foreigners of one nationality or another; virtually all the small retail trade by the Chinese. Outstandingly successful on the great hemp and coconut plantations are the Japanese. Only rigid immigration and property ownership laws have prevented the Filipino from being in economic servitude to Yankee, Chinese, and Jap.
Could he conquer these other barriers, the Filipino would still be doomed by his mind. It is not the instrument to bring either his business, his economic, or his political problems to the happy conclusions his wishful dreams see for them. Of all his weaknesses that of the mind is most serious. Although blessed with an alert brain and a receptive memory, he lacks mental depth and power. He has been denied both the energetic reasoning processes of the Japanese and the deeper, broader, philosophically rich mental equipment of the Chinese.
None of these traits is reprehensible or mean or degrading. In fact, the combination of them under American rule probably brings the Filipino more happiness and satisfaction from life than that attained by Americans on their restless road from birth to grave. They do not add up, however, to a citizen who with unrestricted self-rule will keep his nation strong or long independent in a world of ruthless greed that in particular the Western Pacific has become. They add up to the happy romantic character of a child —the child of the Orient—caught in forces beyond his knowledge; and even more unhappily, beyond his control.
IV
The Filipino is not entirely leaderless. There are outstanding men in the islands, capable in many fields. They are largely the mestizos in whom native blood is mixed with a foreign one, usually Chinese or Spanish. This small but highly talented group seems to combine the best qualities of the races united, and some defects. The alert mental keenness of the Filipino when united with the mental profundity of the Chinese or white produces such geniuses as Rizal, the Philippines’ George Washington who was in one man doctor, poet, novelist, linguist, artist, statesman, and courageous martyr. It has produced such capable leaders as Quezon and Osmena, and will produce others.
These leaders, however, will be limited in number; and a share of them, as elsewhere, will be motivated by fundamental, selfish concepts unrestrained by rules of high conduct. When independence does come it will be these people who will govern, first in the semblance of a democracy, then as an open oligarchy, last in anarchy. The die is loaded with despair; for a last weakness upon which demagogues will surely play goes to the root of the nation. Could these carabao-driving children of the sun by some miracle overcome all their other insuperable defects that presage certain economic and political tragedy, could they by united effort pass all barriers, they would be destined to fail nevertheless; for there is little hope that they can ever remain united after the Yankee rein is removed. Demagogues in any country, for their own purposes, stir up rivalries of class and sections. The Philippines are a fertile field, and will be more so after deterioration in economic affairs has brought on suffering, revolt, a stirring of passions. In this evil day of freedom the certain struggle between unpatriotic men for graft and power will grow intensely. They will naturally employ the strong weapon of baiting the hatreds, never under American rule entirely dormant, between racial and linguistic groups. These are too numerous to consider other than as the three major divisions of the Visayans from the south; the northern Tagalogs who are distrusted by the powerful Visayans; and the Moro who doesn’t consider himself a Filipino at all but so hates the others that his smallness in numbers is no measure of his weight in war against them. There is more cause for political and economic irritation between these groups than there was between North and South m our Civil War, and less facility in these wide-flung islands for ironing out differences.
Instead of liberty—which the Filipino has in greater measure than any other people in the Far East—it seems inevitable that we are giving these children of the Orient certain despotism of one sort or another; and, from that, chaos which will offer Japan excuse for intervention to protect her nationals and the “peace of Asia.” Once there she will not leave again. She would not imagine such madness, for these islands are the spearhead of her Pacific dream, the gateway to her greatest ambitions in Asia.
Sincere Filipino leaders realized the difficulties facing their nation at the time the independence bill was passed; and they must be thinking soberly indeed now with fate’s shadow dark across the South China Sea. Newton W. Gilbert, writing a few years ago, states that some of the very Filipinos on the Independence Mission come to my office and talk it over with me and say they do not want it at all. But they have talked it out there so long they think they have to be for it. I think the masses are all probably talked into it, but many of the leaders understand that it will ruin them.
V
Japan does not need the Philippines for existence, nor even for safety. If she had, she would have taken them before now. Wisely she has conquered first those areas that provide her most urgent requirements—near-by raw materials, outlets for manufactured articles, land barriers to protect her home shores and to drive Russia into Siberia. Naturally she has not yet required nor felt strong enough to demand the Philippines—beyond the demand that their fortifications remain incomplete—realizing that she will need them some day as the keystone of her Pacific dream. The islands have valuable mineral reserves, small or great, of iron, coal, copper, and gold in Mindanao and Luzon. They have some of the Far East’s richest agricultural land where food to feed millions of factory workers can be grown. Yet in this “most favored spot of the Pacific” whose area equals Japan proper, there is only about a fifth of the Japanese population offering three promising opportunities: (1) A food reservoir for the hungry mouths of Japanese multiplying at more than a million a year; (2) a manifold increase in population providing customers for manufactured products; (3) most important and probable, assuring that this increase in population will be Japanese. Already, despite strict immigration laws, the efficient Japanese practically control the important hemp and copra trade of areas they have entered in Mindanao. Davao, center of this production, is little less than a Japanese colony. It is not impossible that here is the one empty land besides Australia where Japan may find an outlet for her surplus population on a vast scale. No other land in the western Pacific offers this favorable prospect. If Japan can gain these underpopulated islands easily capable of supporting sixty, and by intensive cultivation, one hundred million people, she can double her strength in men of her own race. Such increase of course will mean only one thing—that in another generation or two increased numbers will demand still increased space; for Japan asserts it to be her God-appointed right to multiply. If the law of the jungle—survival of the fittest and most virile—is to apply inevitably and ruthlessly, then there is no end to her growth, for her citizens form one of earth’s most capable races. Today as they approach eighty millions there are more Japanese than Germans who fought and almost won the World War. Prior to her recent conquests in China she possessed an area equal to France, Germany, Italy, and all the Central European countries in size and almost equal in population. Yet still she must grow, as is the nature of life. In Manchuria and China there will never be more than a few million Japanese as overlords. In the Philippines it will be different. The Filipino may some day be a dying, futile race, the untouchables in their homeland teeming with virile Japanese.
Important as the foregoing benefits of the Philippines might be to Japan, their strategical value is paramount. This chain of islands is the next logical step in her sea expansion, the one essential to Asiatic dominion. Three great archipelagoes lie in the Far Pacific: Japan, the Philippines, and the East Indies with Australia. All other islands in the Pacific or world shrink into insignificance beside these three groups. They are an island continent flung athwart every sea road to Asia; and, contrary to what might be supposed, they are progressively more wealthy from north to south. It has not been Japan’s resources that have made her great, but her people. Power shaped out of their burning ambition has been the force driving them to seize resources to gain still greater power to seize still more resources to become greater still. The end of the cycle is not in sight. The Philippines are a fairer land with more economic value than Japan. The East Indies while lacking some of the Philippines’ advantages surpass them in crowded millions of customers, in rubber, minerals, and sorely needed petroleum. All have great ports through which to draw not merely their own trade but that of vast Asia—though few on earth can compare with magnificent Manila Bay.
In the past 50 years Japan has swiftly tightened her hold along the Asiatic coast. Section by section she has absorbed this island continent throttling Asia. Sakhalin and the Kurile Islands have shut off the north. She is not yet ready to reach for the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, but will before the end of her carefully plotted destiny. Men today in Japan speak of the Bering Sea, a thousand miles away, as “an arm of Tokyo Bay.” Japan has objected consistently, and so far successfully, to any attempts of the United States to fortify or even train large bodies of personnel in this invaluable outpost. Korea, the Bonin Islands, and Formosa followed by the 3,000,000 square miles of sea area covered by the Mandate islands have brought Japan practically all the north Pacific beyond Hawaii except the one valuable group of islands there, the Philippines.
Japan is safe in her home waters—as she well knows, whatever propaganda may be issued—from any naval force that is or might reasonably be built. She is not so safe from air attack, but this danger is far greater from Asia than from Alaska, and the Philippines whose islands are little farther from large Japanese cities than central Luzon. It is not that the Philippines are a menace to her safety but that they would be of inestimable value in her ambitious program of dominion over more than half of mankind in Asia.
The process of the rise and fall of nations that we read of academically is going on around us silently for America, dramatically for Japan. She is on the road to world power. Nothing can stop her in the Far East; and there is nothing she does not intend to have there, each in its due time. Any pause is only to gather strength for the next step. China had to fall now because there was danger of her becoming at last unified, and so too powerful to attack. If Japan succeeds, as she must, conquered China without chance to arm will lie helpless under little brown overloads. Every step leads inevitably to the next; from China it will be the Philippines. They will give Japan not merely a vast gateway controlling China’s trade; not merely harbors and inland seas wherein to base ships and airplanes so that her sphere of successful operations by sea can be extended into the South Pacific, towards India, nearer the United States; not merely a next frontier from which the leap to the rich prize of the East Indies will be smoothed so that it will come even sooner than little Holland and tight-belted Britain already fear-—not merely all these other vast dreams of growth and empire that glitter with the passionate promise of things that may soon come true for Japanese greatness, but a vaster more enduring one: He who holds the Philippines, with Korea, and desires, dominates China forever. With the islands in America’s hands Japan might conquer the Chinese coast south of Shanghai, but she could never be sure of it. Always narrowly to the east would be the bulwark of the Philippines, a disadvantage to her in any war into the Pacific, ever a threat of aid to China. Here would be held open against her the southern gateway to Asia.
It is not for us to assert that these dreams of hers will or will not come true. There is no means of knowing. Japan may gain Asia and be content; she may gain it and want the other half of the world. Our choice is certainly not one of deciding to fight her now; or to wait until later with the prospect that we may have to fight her grown gorged on greatness. We must take the chance that in providing her opportunity to grow ever more powerful and more nearly irresistible we are also giving her opportunity to become satiated. But in choosing this alternative with all its possible dangers and delayed woes, we must choose as practical people with open eyes. We must understand, without hating or fearing the Japanese, that it is in the nature of great and virile nations to grow, and grow, and ever still to grow until whatever strange unconquerable force nature instills into them has reached its last spent tide line. Eating does not satiate permanently. Hunger always returns, grown larger. Nations have eaten before and liked the taste so well that they drove on to world conquest—or tried for it. There is no evidence that we have fallen on less uneasy days for the conservative, contented nations of earth.
Once they are on the world road, nations do not soon stop. Rome did not. Each territory gained made it necessary to win another. Every new frontier revealed newer ones still beyond that had to be won to protect the last conquest. Mohammed’s descendants did not. Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and in our lifetime Germany saw the world to gain and reached for it.
No better evidence of our own self- willed blindness before this eternal force is necessary than the words of leading congressmen during the debate preceding the last Philippine Independence Bill less than four years ago. It was as clear then as now what Japan’s ambitions were and how they were to be fulfilled. In the adult lifetime of these legislators she had annexed Korea—to protect herself from Russia; had in a few more years fought Russia and taken territory from her—to protect herself from Russia; had conquered Manchuria with Jehol, areas as large as Germany, France, and Italy combined, with similar mineral resources —to protect herself from Russia; had attempted to dominate North China in various ways and long before 1937 was laying the groundwork there for an autonomous area—to protect herself from Russia who has finally been thrust back strategically into the heart of Siberia.
Meanwhile during this eastern conquest Japan had reached eagerly southward. Formosa with islands between brought her to the Philippines. Fukien was converted into a Japanese province economically. The Mandate islands carried her 2,400 miles east across the Pacific and south past the Philippines to the equator; from them in the coming age of air Hawaii and all the South Pacific can be swept.
With these conquests accomplished facts in one short generation, we find among hosts of ill-conceived and wishful statements, this one by Senator Borah: “Japan does not covet the Philippines; Japan is facing in the other direction— Manchuria.” And this one by Senator Hawes: “Japan will have her hands full in Manchuria for several generations. That great land is a treasury of her necessities . . . Japan’s investments in Manchuria are above a billion dollars . . . These are pragmatic reasons for giving credence to a spokesman of the Japanese ministry, ‘We have no desire to acquire the Philippines.’ ” And chief among absurdities in a world suffering from aggression and lust is this other statement by Hawes: The United States’ peaceful grant of independence to the Philippines will alone be guarantee of their independence, for surely “no great power would wish to affront the world by attacking the Philippines after their independence has been bestowed by the United States and recognized by all other nations.”
After China the Philippines will be the next goal. Not that Japan will deliberately attack without reason, but because they will be a nation her destiny inevitably demands. They will seem necessary to protect her empire in China from attack and to prepare for the last great southern thrust. They are her next frontier.
VI
If the Philippines are worth so much to Japan, they have at least equal value to the United States. With their small population they have been nevertheless a measurable factor in American trade. With four times the present population and a higher scale of living, their importance in our economic stability could rise greatly. Moreover, the growing commerce would benefit the sick American Merchant Marine that is indispensable to a strong navy and a healthy economic life. As a doorway between China and the Indies they will be one means, perhaps the only one, of maintaining the open trade door to Asia, the trade center of the future. As long as they are joined to the United States there will be still a slight foil to the balance of power that has swung so heavily in favor of Japan that she is becoming overbearing in Asia. Yet the most important value of the Philippines to the United States, as to Japan, is strategical.
By her position the United States is inevitably and unescapably a nation of the Pacific. Her long coast line with harbors superior in accessibility and importance to others in the Americas, and the incline of her northwest coast to the fringe of Asia imply unquestionably that her destiny twined tightly with the world’s will reach its crisis in the Pacific. We cannot again draw within the boundaries of our coasts and expect either immunity or existence. Even in the past when the world was larger than now we could not remain isolated, and for a reason. The only way to endure in this struggle of nations is to be strong, playing one’s part as nobly and wisely as ability permits. As long as the United States holds the Philippines she will not only protect China and the Philippines, but she will be a check on possible Japanese world aggression and will thereby protect her own shores. Attack by Japan seems improbable now. It will not seem so distant when she has won China, the Philippines, and the East Indies.
Many Americans demand that we quit the Philippines in order to prevent quarreling with Japan over them. She will eventually expand into these islands, they say; if we remain we will have to fight Japan, and will lose them in the end, anyhow, because of the impossibility of send- mg a fleet that far. By the same argument, then, should not Russia surrender Siberia and we Alaska whose islands arch to within a few hundred miles of Japan?
The first statement that relinquishing the Philippines will prevent war is unfounded. If the virile force driving Japan °n does not burn out, frontiers will have to spread and there is no reason why the Philippines should be the last. Our quitting the islands will only at the best stave off war; and will possibly have the opposite effect of hastening it by insuring Japan’s growth. When did a powerful, hungry nation ever look with other than scorn upon a people cringing with bribes for peace? That offered is taken, and then, with the new strength, the nation that offered. Peace and greatness cannot be bought. Peace may exist some day on earth between nations humanity-loving and noble and righteous because these nations are made up of humanity-loving, noble, and righteous men who do not quarrel, who live by ideals instead of selfish desires, who are righteous in action as well as in word. Until such people appear in numbers on this earth, however, peace will exist only from fear of consequence of war. This fear can be maintained in the councils of aggressor nations by strength on the part of those they would attack.
Certainly the Chinese—who come nearer as a nation than most people to answering the requirements for peace on earth— were not saved from Japanese ambition by their peaceableness. Certainly they would have been had they been strong. Certainly they will never again have the chance to be if Japan’s plans fall true.
Furthermore, it is doubtful that after we have given the Philippines independence we can stand by and watch her be conquered. After all, we shall feel morally responsible. The citizens are our foster children. We have nurtured them to independence and will think of them with the usual nostalgic affection that blots out discordant memories. A nation no less than a man has a code of conduct it must live by or perish in all but the husk of the body.
If we are fearfully passive when the Philippines are conquered, it will be a fatal madness. By now it should be clear to any people that sniveling acceptance of aggression in the hope it will gorge itself on others and so be filled is the surest way of having it arrive. One by one those that united might have held the conqueror in check are devoured. One by one the weakest and most ill-defended fall. One by one they swell the strength of the hungering nation providing food, men, trade, wealth of material and munitions that once were denied her. Step by step she becomes great enough to absorb her greater neighbors. In the end they that thought a little waste territory might be forfeited that aggression’s hunger be filled, find that they themselves are morsels not too large.
Surely it is clear to all that Japan is on the road that ends in world power or destruction. We can pray that we shall never have to fight her, without shutting our eyes to the danger that we may. We can be ready for the conflict. It is possible that we could not hold the Philippines in a war; but getting out will certainly not lessen the task, should we ever have to go to their protection. Nor is it by any means conclusively demonstrated that possession of these islands would not be an asset in conflict with Japan. It would not be necessary to send a fleet to Manila, or to aid forces besieged in Luzon. The Fleet’s natural zone of operations would be in the North Pacific between Hawaii and Alaska. With it there threatening Japan, the Philippines might well for a time be left to their own present and extended fortifications, supplemented by aircraft and submarines, to protect themselves against any expedition Japanese would dare detach in face of our Fleet. Together the Philippines and Alaska would be strong supporting bases with aircraft and submarines for the fleet.
If in the past thirty years radio and the airplane have hastened the annihilation of distance, what other wonders will the next generation bring! How small the Pacific will become! How many billions we would give in the day of conflict for a frontier of protection a third of the way around this dwindling earth!
Only a century ago the grandfathers of some of us were hearing arguments in Congress at least as sensible, so it seemed, as those of four years ago concerning Japan in Manchuria. The steamship was proving false Jefferson’s statement at the turn of the century that between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi was a wilderness “a thousand generations” would not fill. In a single generation this thing of fire and steam puffing America’s destiny westward had shown that the greatest American of his time was blind as the least of us to what the future holds. Nevertheless despite this miracle of steam that ate space away mile after mile upstream and down, there were wise men in the generation after Jefferson who again conceived that miracles had ended. The steamship plodding up rivers might conquer plains, but nothing could remove mountains as a barrier. Beyond the Mississippi was another empire endless generations would not fill. At its limit was a natural mountain frontier that need never be crossed. The land beyond dropping to the Pacific coast would never interest the United States. It is a “barren waste,” rolled out the matchless Webster’s belief, a vast worthless region of savages, deserts, wild beasts, cactus, and prairie dogs beyond any dream of our nation’s desire. Supporting him was Benton, another leader of the era who advocated that China and Japan be encouraged to settle the northwest coast forming peaceful neighbors for trade by sea. According to his own words, our “natural and everlasting” boundary should be the Rocky Mountains.
While men were so speaking in the 1830’s, the railroad was being born, turning westward, driving towards the setting sun so that in the lifetime of some of them, like Benton, the world and all their earlier concepts of its future were revolutionized. Today a statue of Benton, who changed into a prophet of America’s destiny, stands in St. Louis facing westward and on it are carved his later stirring words, throbbing with the strange urge of our history: “There is the East; there is the road to India.”
The barrier of space is being consumed more swiftly today than in the 1830’s. The railroad, automobile, high speed steamship, airplane—swifter than comprehension they sweep man’s destiny onward into a world where mountain nor water is any longer a barrier. The railroad caused the Rockies to disappear as a frontier, the airplane has swept away the sea. What other space-destroying wonders may yet appear! If 1938 is so different from the placid, leisurely days before the World War, how much more changed from now will be 1960! We can be certain of only one future: No place will be far any more, no water a barrier. The “isolation” that we smugly think we can assume, watching from a safe distance while other nations suffer hell, will no more be here then than some of our slow modes of transportation. There is cause for serious thought in the realization that New York is today closer to Asia for the airplane passenger than it was to Chicago a hundred years ago by any means of transport.
VII
In these remaining years of Philippine Preparation for independence the United States should earnestly consider retaining the islands. The Filipinos will accept, and probably desire, dominion status like that °f Canada in the British Empire. Already burdened by higher taxes, beginning to taste internal unrest, and uneasily aware pf the threat of Japan, wise leaders in the islands are anxious to get themselves out of the trap their oratory got them into. Quezon has openly intimated as much. The most important obstacle will be the general apathy of most American citizens, an outstanding lack of interest except among certain labor and farming groups which will strongly oppose.
But we cannot afford to be uninterested. It is as certain, I believe, that Japan will someday conquer an independent Philippine nation as it is evident that she is not yet finished with China nor with growing. It is not certain she will attack the United States except that after the Philippines hunger will return. I am not one who believes war with her probable; yet who in 1900 would have believed probable what has occurred in Asia during this generation? It is fantastic and unbelievable that Japan would attempt world dominion, but the ugly dream is in the heart of some of her leaders, tinged by the fanatic concept that only Japanese national virtue has not been rotted by the decay in occidental faith, religion, morals, standards of conduct, and strength of soul. It is Kodo, a new word for the ancient, noble, strong- souled, cruel code of the samurai. General Araki says,
Kodo, the great ideal of the Japanese nation, is of such substance that it should be spread and expanded all over the world, and every impediment to it brushed aside—even by the sword. . . . Do not worry about deficiency of strength or material, everything depends on spirit. If anybody impedes the march of this country, he should be beaten down ruthlessly and without giving any quarter. . . .
Let us march for the great idea, showing brightly forth the virtue of the sword included in the three Sacred Treasures, which consists in killing a few for saving many. There is a shining sun ahead of Japan. ... As a divine country in the Eastern Seas and the senior nation of Asia, Japan’s aspirations are great and her responsibilities heavy. . . . We have no hesitation in declaring that we are a military nation in the cause of Kodo and great morality.
Perhaps this is only a mad dream that will know an end as Japan sweeps down Asia. Perhaps all the fear and aggrandizement and hungering of nations will pass away, and with it unhappy, broken Japan. Yet it will not pass away before struggles we dare not imagine come to pass. As we face these struggles, I for one would advocate earnestly and with all my heart our complete abandonment of Asia and the western Pacific if I thought there was any certainty of this step preserving peace. I would advocate that the United States give up trade here important to herself and the world’s economy; give up the prestige of a century and a half of growth in the Far East, with her political, social, and cultural influences there; give up the idealism that has certainly benefited the Orient, and that we hold as highly in our less aggressive way as Japan does Kodo, the flame of new morality searing China; give up the great Pacific and world part that seems inevitably destined for the United States; give up indeed the part of justice and protection of the weak in the knowledge that without war these would ultimately be protected by wiser and less brutal nations everywhere—I would advocate giving up our plainest duty and assigned part in world affairs if such a course would prevent war with Japan. But we cannot be sure it will. No virile nation that started on world dominion has ever in the past been checked short of war; no frontier has ever been the last; Japan must inevitably go on to ambitions only yet partly expressed.
We can hope that Japan’s course will not run to its logical finish, but hope is a miserable and feeble weapon for support. We must be ready for what we hope is not to be. We must in particular be ready to play our part as wisely and capably as it is in our natures to act. A nation like a man is created to do more than to breathe and eat and vegetate from birth to groveling death. It has a place in the scheme of earth’s future more than providing a transient boundary for a group of men to breed, to labor without distant purpose, to pass away contributing nothing. Good men in a community do not long retain their strength nor their ability to influence their surroundings if they ignobly slink from duty. They must stand by their ideals else anarchy and bestiality will rule unchecked. A nation in the community of mankind must act the same faithfully and nobly, otherwise the world will suffer the same chaos. A nation that would leave a great name cannot shirk its responsibility of being as well prepared as it can be for whatever part destiny may bring it to play.
?
If Japan could control the Philippines, directly or indirectly, she could not only blanket the South Pacific coast of Asia as she does its North section, but she could assure the safety of her threefold greater southward trade. For in time of war, if another Power had an adequate naval base in the Philippines, it could cut off virtually half of the total foreign trade of Japan—a trade upon which she is becoming more and more dependent as her transformation from an agricultural to an industrial nation progresses. In fact it may not be too much to say that, by destroying both the southward and the American trade of Japan, she might be so reduced that she could not keep up a war.—Gardiner, Philippines and Sea Power.