INVESTIGATION OF INTERIOR DEPARTMENT OF PHILIPPINE GOVERNMENT. REPORT BY THE GOVERNOR-GENERAL OF THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL OF THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS, MY DEAR MR. SECRETARY: In accordance with your inquiry as to the facts relating to the administration and sale of friar lands by the Philippine government, I beg to inform you that I have read with great care the speech of Mr. Martin, of Colorado, in regard to the administration of friar lands and other matters in the Philippine Islands, delivered in Congress on Monday, June 13, 1910. Mr. Martin has evidently studied the subject with a great deal of care and used a great deal of ingenuity to make the attitude of the insular government appear to be unreasonable and unjustifiable. I take immediate and entire issue with Mr. Martin; in some instances as to his facts, which are distorted to appear discreditable when they are really otherwise, but mainly in regard to his conclusions, which I do not think he would have reached had he taken the trouble necessary to come out here and inform himself first-hand as to the matters with which he dealt. There are eight millions of people in the Philippine Islands, potentially good laborers, and with the present sanitary methods for improving their physical condition, with the completion of the proposed improvements in the means of transportation and of the handling of freight at the larger commercial centers, with the suppression of the animal diseases which have been so disastrous, the success of the campaign against the destructive insects which have spoiled so many of the fair crops of the islands, and with the stimulus which will follow from the general registration of lands which is under contemplation, the completion of the systems of irrigation to insure the crops from drought and to give two crops a year where one is now obtained, with the better prices which come from the opening of the markets of the United States to the Philippines, there is not in my mind the shadow of doubt but that the one obstacle between the Philippine Islands and their becoming a modern and progressive people enjoying the advantages of civilization and those necessaries of life and comforts which are usually to be found under the American flag is the lack of capital in the islands. It is enough to make the heart bleed to see, as I have seen, these willing, faithful, kindly, docile, and industrious people toiling against almost insurmountable obstacles to get only a fraction of what should be theirs without the expenditure of nearly so much effort and strain. I have passed along roads where the incessant sound of the beating of the rice by wooden pestles could be heard resounding in dull tones as far as one could hear, these pestles of heavy wood sometimes being worked by little children who ought to be in school instead of assuming such burdens, the cruel part of this being that this work could be done with a fraction of the effort and cost by machinery were adequate transportation available and were mills erected and in operation within a reasonable distance. It is sad to think of the waste of human effort to-day existing throughout the Philippine Islands through the loss of sugar due to the fact that not one single modern sugar mill exists in this country and that an amount which the experts estimate equals 40 per cent, or almost half, of the amount of sugar in the cane, under the primitive methods of reduction now existing is allowed to go to waste, thus rendering the effort of the Filipino only one-half as effective as it would be were modern mills to be adopted. In my inaugural address I showed a comparison between the industrial condition in the Philippine Islands and in the island of Hawaii, which I quote in full here: Let us turn our attention to a few comparative figures. The total population of Hawaii is 198,000 people, or about one-fortieth part of the population of the Philippine Islands, now approximately 8,000,000. The total exports from Hawaii in 1907 were $29,000,000; the total exports from the Philippine Islands for the same year were $34,000,000. In other words, Hawaii produced for export approximately thirty-six times as much per capita as did the Philippine Islands. This is not because their laborers are superior, as Hawaii has come here in search of laborers and reports that those few whom they have obtained are equal to their Japanese, Korean, and other laborers. Porto Rico has 1,000,000 people, or one-eighth the population of the Philippine Islands, and in 1907 its exports were $27,000,000. Porto Rico evidently does not exercise the same degree of economy in the use of its labor as does Hawaii, for it produces only one-sixth as much per capita for export, and still Porto Rico exports six times as much per capita as do the people of the Philippine Islands. Were these Islands to produce for sale to other countries as much per capita as Porto Rico the total exports would be $216,000,000. Were they to produce as much per capita as Hawaii the total exports would be $1,179,000,000 a year. The explanation of this lies in the fact that Hawaii has an abundance of capital, employs modern methods of cultivation and manufacture, modern freight-handling devices, and suitable and adequate steamship and railroad facilities. In other words, in Hawaii the work of the laborer counts, in the Philippines Islands it does not. No, it is not labor that is wanted here; it is capital. It is not surprising that the beet-sugar interests of the United States, whose agency in attacking the administration of the Philippine Islands is so thinly veiled by the personality of Mr. Martin that no |