therefore, need we take from the fact that the Japanese preserve an active interest in those islands?

III

Why need any one suppose that the Japanese are not clever enough to see (and to have seen and understood ever since 1898) that the United States must inevitably be the chief factor in any future determination as to the fate, internationally, of the Philippine Islands? It would seem clear that it is now a cardinal point of Japanese foreign policy to cultivate most assiduously that friendship for themselves which was manifested in the late war: indeed, to endeavor to maintain such an active friendship and informal good understanding between the two peoples as will make the United States a sort of informal ally of theirs in case of future difficulties. Prominent statesmen of Japan have repeatedly given public expression to views which indicate such a policy of cultivating our country as a sort of "third ally," a passive ally, to be sure, but one whose sympathy they hope would be not the less active and potent internationally. A tangible evidence of the stress which is laid by Japanese officialdom upon the cultivation of friendship with America was afforded by the reception given to the "Taft party" last year. When that party was just leaving the shores of Japan for the Philippines in 1905, the writer asked Secretary Taft if the Japanese officials had discussed with him the future of the Philippines. The reply was that there had been some talk about those islands in an informal way (for no political conferences were held by the Secretary of War in Tokyo, in spite of what has been said to the contrary), and Mr. Taft said without reserve,

"It can be stated positively that the Japanese do not want the Philippine Islands, nor do they propose to do any thing that would interfere with American friendship for them.”

There is good reason to suppose that the government of the United States has been given formal assurances of this sort with regard to the Philippine Islands by the government of Japan.

Under another phase, however, the talk of Japan coveting the Philippines has been for six months agitating the Filipinos. Immediately after it was announced that Governor-General Wright would not return to Manila but would go as the first American ambassador to Tokyo, some British reporter in Washington or New York cabled to London the rumor that negotiations were under way for the sale of the Philippines to Japan. This rumor was transmitted to Manila, and had been stirring up Filipino political circles for several days before it was even heard of in the United States. Most American readers first heard it when Governor-General Ide cabled to Secretary Taft that it was greatly disturbing the Filipinos. In spite of the fact that the latter immediately cabled a positive and authoritative denial, and characterized it as not only false but "absurd," it continues to furnish the Filipinos with material for heated discussion. The Filipinos do not understand American political institutions and American government by discussion well enough to know that secret treaties are with us an impossibility, that such a measure would have to be fully threshed out in the forums of public opinion before it could or would be undertaken, and that, to say nothing more, the corps of American newspaper men in Washington would probably get hold of such a piece of news, if there were any foundation for it, at least as early as their British brethren.

The matter is treated as a live topic, an imminent possibility, in the Filipino press, and not a day passes without some reference to it, one Filipino newspaper maintaining in its columns a symposium of opinions upon it. Out in the provinces, provincial and municipal delegations have met and forwarded their protests against the transfer to Japan in lengthy

manifestoes to the government at Manila, requesting that they be cabled immediately to Washington, in order to stop the negotiations. In some degree, of course, the opportunity is merely improved by certain radicals to "agitate" and to create a feeling of resentment against the United States, some of their comments being most bitter. There is no doubt, however, that the matter is taken most seriously in the provinces, and among a good many in Manila. Secretary Taft's vehement denial is utterly disregarded in this connection, or is spoken of as a merely "diplomatic evasion," as a statement which might be literally true when he made it, but which may cover secret designs for a transfer some time in the future.

IV

The significant thing about this agitation in the Philippines is not, however, the fact that the Filipinos are ignorant of the workings of American public affairs and distrustful of American intentions toward them. The real thing of significance that has been brought out by the whole Filipino discussion to date is that the Filipinos prefer American rule to rule by Japan, or probably by any other nation. Some of our American anti-imperialists appear to be much surprised by the turn which the discussion has taken in the Filipino press, and at finding that even the Filipino radicals are bitterly opposed to any such transfer. The antiimperialists have lately, accepting as authentic all the criticisms of Messrs. Ireland, Willis, and others, denounced the present government in the Philippines as inefficient, burdensome, oppressive, and even tyrannical; and they were apparently sure that the Filipinos would

1 El Renacimiento, Manila, May 18, 1906, has a cartoon wherein Ambassador Wright is represented holding a Filipino in the air, with a hammer in his other hand, auctioning off the Filipino before Japan, Germany, Great Britain, and Russia Germany and Japan vie in the bidding, which Uncle Sam, swinging a policeman's stick, urges on.

turn to any way out of it as a sovereign remedy. But the Filipinos, even the most unreasonable of their radicals, know in their hearts that they are enjoying to-day a more efficient government, greater personal liberties and political privileges and in every way better opportunity for progress, than ever before. Hence, their protest against a transfer to Japan was immediate and spontaneous.

Of course, the protest of the Filipino radicals against this transfer arises in part from a natural objection to their country and people being disposed of without having a word in the matter. It is precisely in this respect that they misjudge and wrong the American people; for it is safe to say that public opinion with us would not consent to such a disposition of the Filipinos being made without their having an opportunity to express themselves, or in face of their plain disapprobation. It is also true that the attitude of these Filipinos arises in large part from the desire for early political independence. Even so, their attitude plainly indicates that they think their chance is better under America than under Japan; if they would rather rely upon the American people than upon the Japanese government for their future independence, it is plain that they prefer American rule to Japanese rule, even with a view only to political rights and privileges. And if they knew better Japan's programme in Formosa and Korea, their attitude in this respect would undoubtedly be strengthened.

This episode, moreover, serves as another indication of the fact that the Filipinos are in many respects a people unique in the Orient. The Filipinos do not feel themselves identified with the Orient and with other Orientals. It may strike some as strange, but it is a fact nevertheless, that the Filipinos look down upon the Japanese; nurtured and schooled in the religious feelings and prejudices of the oldest established form of Christian worship and organization, the Filipinos look upon the Japanese as "pagans."

They have, in some degree, a European point of view, because in past centuries their outlook upon people and politics and societies in the world at large was through Spanish and Roman Catholic spectacles.

Of course, there is great admiration on the part of the Filipinos for Japan's achievements, — admiration mixed sometimes with a little awe, and lately, as we have seen, with fear. One catches now and then, too, the note that indicates some. feeling of identity with the Japanese, some sense of a special pride in their achievements in the war with Russia, because they were the achievements of other Orientals, other "brown men;" a sense of racial identity, as it were, though still rather vague. And, too, it is an interesting question how far the Europeanized outlook of the educated Filipinos unfits them to be called fairly representative of the ignorant masses of their people, the question will arise whether, after all, the Christianity of the latter, and the social customs it has brought with it, are more than nominal and superficial, and underneath there remains a really unchanged Oriental. If this be true, the educational opportunities now being extended to the Filipino youth en masse will, in the course of time, "let him out," and there will come to light the "real Filipino," just as there will be born the "real Filipino nation," where to-day there is only a sense of identity of aims on the part of the few who can communicate across the breadth of the archipelago, and merely a racial feeling on the part of the many who know nothing beyond their own community.

When that time comes, we may find the Filipinos turning more naturally and cordially toward the Japanese and seeking affiliation with them. But, if this should occur, it would be in no small part because both these peoples were semiEuropeanized, the one under the longcontinued tutelage of foreign rule, the other as a voluntary pupil. And who can suppose that the message they would bear VOL. 99-NO. 1

to other Oriental peoples, by precept and example, would be simply that of hatred to Europe? That idea, that feeling, lurk in the minds and hearts of many Orientals without doubt, but the force of events is against them, just as we have seen how the very Filipinos of revolutionary tendencies have just now been rejecting the sentiment of unity with Japan that was expressed by one of their number in the heat of the war against the United States (in a contribution to Columnas Volantes, a revolutionary periodical printed at Lipa, Batangas, June 18, 1899):

"The sun of the genuinely European modern culture is to-day at its zenith; later it will set in the West and to-morrow it will appear again, brilliant and luminous, in the East. Unquestionably the peoples of the East are called upon, as instruments of Providence, to perform in coming centuries the great deeds which are to startle posterity. The Malay race has taken the forefront and the initiative in this great work of the social and political regeneration of peoples apparently buried in the most abject barbarity. Japan, our elder brother, if the phrase be permitted, the representative of this race having most authority and prestige, begins to cause uneasiness because of her eagerness to put herself upon the level in modern culture of the old nations of Europe, who foresee but too early the danger that threatens them. Her navy, which, at the end of three years, when the modern boats she is building are finished, will be as powerful as that of France or that of Germany, and her determination to attract to herself the Chinese Empire and lead it in the same road to regeneration that she herself has begun to travel, indicate plainly her plans for the future: the union and alliance of the two races, Mongolian and Malayan, and for herself the hegemony. The haughty nations of the West tremble at the mere idea of such a union, which will produce a great revolution in the world, a revolution with which the French Revolution, mother of modern liberties, will not compare. The

gigantic volcano of the East will vomit its glowing lava over the fields and plains of the West and destroy it all; and over the ruins of its cities and towns others will rise, only the memory and the history of the former remaining behind them.

"By the inexorable laws of fate, the other peoples of the Malay and Mongolian race, the other races inhabiting the old, and yet the newest, world will follow the course pointed out to them by the Japanese along the road of civilization. Each people, like each race, has its historic destiny; each empire, like each civilization, has its downfall in history. Providence has reserved for the yellow and colored race the empire of the future."

Here is the outburst of a young revolutionary enthusiast in the days when hatred of things American, as of things Spanish, was zealously preached. Yet the very diction of it is borrowed from the Spanish, a language so rich and oratorical that it easily degenerates into bombast. More yet are the ideas it expresses those of a political reform, of a social “regeneration," of a "civilization" itself, simply borrowed from Europe. This is no such turning of the East upon the West, and upon all things Western, as has been preached to us as bound to come. Even the race-feeling expressed is based upon the ignorant supposition that the Malay and Mongolian can be entirely identified,

and they by no means always lie down together in peace and harmony. If the East can indeed take the ideas and the institutions of the West, and blend them with those of the East itself to make a superior product, something better in civil

if

Our nation has stood for Japanese and Chinese nationality and for the integrity of Chinese territory in the past. Our attitude in the Philippines to-day, in its broader aspect, as looking toward "leading out" the Filipino people as a whole, is one in entire sympathy with Oriental nationality. We shall be wise, merely on selfish grounds, on which grounds national policy is still supposed to rest, we continue to cultivate our traditional position as "best friend" of the Oriental peoples, Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, or others. If some day, in that future which no man can foresee for the Far East, something like a Japanese protectorate should suit the Filipinos (perhaps they would prefer to call it "alliance"), and Japan should emerge as the leader of a little group of Oriental nations, it is hard to see why, on all grounds of national policy, we ourselves should not be suited with such an outcome of the "Philippine problem." But that is mere guessing about a problematical future condition of affairs in the Far East. To-day the Filipinos do not want it, certainly not on any terms that would imply Japanese military rule, which is "thorough" in a way they well know American rule is not. Nor does the task we have undertaken in the Philippines permit us, with honor, to drop it in such a way.