The Philippine Islands
by . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1928. 8vo. 2vols. xiv+620+636 pp. Illus. $12.50.
THIS massive work is intended, not for the tired business man, but for the scholar and the statesman. The author was responsibly connected with the Philippine government for nearly ten years, serving under President Taft as Governor-General. He kept copious journals during his period of service, and in the preparation of the present work had the assistance and coöperation of many competent hands.
After a brief sketch of the natural conditions and resources of the Islands and of the Spanish period of proprietorship, Mr. Forbes gives a detailed account of the American trusteeship, first chronologically and then topically. It is a method of treatment which involves considerable repetition, but the record elaborately set forth is one of solid achievement, highly creditable to the two peoples immediately concerned and discreditable only to the former Spanish owners. The cultural leap since 1900 can be no better illustrated perhaps than by the fact that when the Americans arrived insular life was essentially mediæval in character, whereas to-day the moat about Manila has been tilled as a public-health measure and the area utilized as a golf course and athletic fields. Politically the policy of the United States has been gradually to change a government of Americans assisted by Filipinos into a government of Filipinos assisted by Americans, with insular independence as an indefinite future goal. The speed and good faith with which this programme has been carried out have proved a constant source of crimination and recrimination.
Despite obvious efforts to deal fairly with those who have criticized the Philippine policy of the Republican Party, the bias of the author is too strong to be kept firmly in leash. The ‘campaign of misrepresentation and detraction systematically conducted by the Anti-Imperialistic League in Boston’ is blamed for many of the difficulties experienced by the colonial administrators. The movement to terminate American ownership is ascribed partly to the machinations of American tobacco and sugar-beet interests. America’s management of the Islands, on the other hand, is characterized as ‘this great altruistic experiment,’ with no recognition of the tremendous economic pressure in the United States which has sanctioned and supported it. Though grudging praise is later accorded certain features of the Wilsonian period of control, the author’s successor as Governor-General is introduced to the reader as ‘Congressman Francis Burton Harrison, of New York, a member of Tammany Hall . . . the first to be appointed without having had any previous experience in the Islands to equip him for the manifold and complicated duties he was to undertake.’
While such lapses show that the treatment is not a wholly objective one, these two handsome volumes will serve for many years as an invaluable reference work for the student of American colonial policy.
A. M. SCHLESINGER