Yesterdays in the Philippines

Yesterdays in the Philippines

By the victory of our fleet at Manila Bay, one more of the worlds side-tracked capitals has been pulled from obscurity into main lines of prominence and the average citizen is no longer left, as in days gone by, to suppose that Manila is spelt with two ls and is floating around in the South Sea somewhere between Fiji and Patagonia. The Philippines have been discovered, and the daily journals with their cheap maps have at last located Spains Havana in the Far East. It is indeed curious that a city of a third of a million peoplecapital of a group of islands as large as New England, New York, Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey, which have long furnished the whole world with its entire supply of Manila hemp, which have exported some 160,000 tons of sugar in a single year and which to-day produce as excellent tobacco as that coming from the West Indiesit is curious, I say, that a city of this size should have gone so long unnoticed and misspelt. But such has been the case, and until Admiral Dewey fired the shots that made Manila heard round [xiv]the world, the people of these United Stateswith but few exceptionslived and died without knowing where the stuff in their clothes-lines came from. Now that the Philippines are ours, do we want them? Can we run them? Are they the long-looked-for El Dorado which those who have never been there suppose? To all of which questionseven at the risk of being called unpatrioticI am inclined to answer, No. Do we want them? Do we want a group of 1,400 islands, nearly 8,000 miles from our Western shores, sweltering in the tropics, swept with typhoons and shaken with earthquakes? Do we want to undertake the responsibility of protecting those islands from the powers in Europe or the East, and of standing sponsor for the nearly 8,000,000 native inhabitants that speak a score of different tongues and live on anything from rice to stewed grasshoppers? Do we want the task of civilizing this race, of opening up the jungle, of setting up officials in frontier, out-of-the-way towns who wont have been there a month before they will wish to return? ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 60842
Author: Stevens, Joseph Earle
Release Date: Dec 3, 2019
Format: eBook
Language: English