Manila, P. I., June 21, 1900: Philippine Islands and Filipino
In the light of these considerations it is not wonderful that the people should regard the return of the friars to their parishes as a return to the conditions existing before the revolution. The common people are utterly unable to appreciate that under the sovereignty of the United States the position of the friar as curate would be different from that under Spain.
This is not a religious question, though it concerns the selection of religious ministers for religious communities. The Philippine people love the Catholic Church.
"The feeling against the friars is solely political. The people would gladly receive as ministers of the Roman Catholic religion any save those who are to them the embodiment of all in the Spanish rule that was hateful. If the friars return to their parishes, though only under the same police protection which the American government is bound to extend to any other Spanish subjects in these islands, the people will regard it as the act of that government. They have so long been used to having every phase of their conduct regulated by governmental order that the coming again of the friars will be accepted as an executive order to them to receive the friars as curates with their old, all-absorbing functions. It is likely to have the same effect on them that the return of General Weyler under an American commission as governor of Cuba would have had on the people of that island.
"Those who are charged with the duty of pacifying these islands may, therefore, properly have the liveliest concern in a matter which, though on its surface only ecclesiastical, is, in the most important phase of it, political, and fraught with the most critical consequences to the peace and good order of the country in which it is their duty to set up civil government. We are convinced that a return of the friars to their parishes will lead to lawless violence and murder, and that the people will charge the course taken to the American government, thus turning against it the resentment felt towards the friars.
"The friars have large property interests in these islands which the United States government is bound by treaty obligations and by the law of its being to protect. It is natural and proper that the friars should feel a desire to remain where so much of their treasure is. Nearly all the immense agricultural holdings have been transferred by the three orders -- by the Dominicans to a man named Andrews, by the Recoletos to an English corporation and by the Augustinians to another corporation; but these transfers do not seem to have been out-and-out sales, but only a means for managing the estates without direct intervention of the friars, or for selling the same when a proper price can be secured. The friars seem to remain the real owners."
President Schurman, of the first Philippine Commission, writing in Munsey's Magazine after his return, expressed his personal view as follows:
"We are not to make the Philippines a dumping-ground for politicians. It must be realized that there is no harder work and none nobler, after that of the President of the United States, than the administration of the Philippine Islands. Think of the Filipino as a negro or as an Indian, and you will never rule him. The men who rule in the Orient must have a genuine regard for humanity, behind whatever features or beneath whatever skin it may look out upon you.
"I believe the only hope of an eventually free, self-governed and united Filipino people is under the flag of the United States. I suppose that three years ago we would not have taken the Philippine Islands if they had been offered to us; but they have come into our hands, and we must do our duty. Nothing worse could happen to the Filipino than our withdrawal, for if we do, one of two things is bound to happen, either of which would be fatal to the aspirations of the Filipinos themselves. They will either fall a prey to domestic dissensions, so great and bitter are the tribal rivalries, or else aliens who have property in Manila and Subig and Iloilo and other places will find their lives and property insecure and ask protection from their own governments, and when once the great European powers begin to protect their citizens in the Philippine Islands the archipelago will be divided among them.
"I fully believe that when the scheme of government is put in execution by the commission which is now in the islands, headed by Judge Taft, the educated Filipinos will be satisfied and the United States will appear to them for the first time in a correct light -- no longer merely as an irresistible power, but as champions of justice, of freedom, and as dispensers of blessings through the entire archipelago."
A well known authority on the Philippines, Mr. John Foreman, an Englishman who has lived there a long time, wrote in an English review upon the future of the islands. He speaks well of Aguinaldo but predicts that an experiment of a native government would surely end in disaster. It would not last one year.