THE PHILIPPINES.*
Amorte the grave and various studies which the aspect of affairs in the unsettled corners of the world has recently pro- duced, it is a relief in its way to come across a humorous treatment of the subject from an observer none the less quali- fied to speak from a residence at Manila quite long enough to justify his observation. It is a very young and a very pleasant face that looks at us from the photograph in the frontispiece, and we defy the &cutest critic to distinguish the original from a healthy specimen of the English race at Lord's or at the Oval. When a man of the name of Joseph Earle Stevens presents us with a counterfeit like that and discourses to us in such good samples of the common tongue, where is the use of attempting to make any definite severance between the two branches of the stem ? Mr. Stevens went out to Manila in 1893 with an associate as the representatives of Messrs. Peabody in the hemp business, and they were there for two years, for the only house doing business in the Philippines, and making up between them, as the writer puts it, 50 per cent, of the American business colony in Manila. Such was the strength, so short a time ago, of the country which now rules the possession ; and that there is much to be made up in the education of the Philip- pines may be gathered from the fact that many of the inhabitants in the inland imagine themselves to be self- governed, and so far from having heard of America, have not up to the present learned the existence of Spain. It will be like the sudden installation of the electric light in places where gas has never been known.
Foremost in the temptations of Manila comes the amazing cheapness of existence, which in these days of financial storm and stress goes so far to balance the advantages of a boasted civilisation. Where in the States—or in what other States, indeed—can you rent a suburban house and grounds, keep half a dozen servants, and pay for your food and drink, for less than a dollar a day in all ? For forty cents, a day the cook supplies you with dinner enough for four, and for five Cents. extra will put peas in the soup and orchids on the cloth. A dinner of six courses, including generally a whole chicken and a roast, with vegetables, salad, dessert, fruit, and Coffee, seems, as our traveller says, ridiculous at the price. Ira New York a drive of a dozen blocks in a hansom coats you about the same. But there are trials the Other way. A fire is sudden and instant, and becomes a conflagration before there is time to turn round. So vivid and effective is Mr. Stevens's picture of one of these portents , • Yesterdays in the Plidippines„ By Joseph Earle Stevens. London ; Sampson Wyr. arston, and Co. [7s, 6d. that we almost seem to assist at it, and to feel that a better special correspondent could hardly be found. A half-yearly holocaust he calls the one he saw, announced by the fire-bells calling out all the carriage people to look at it, and bringing out the Manila Fire Brigade, consisting of half-a-dozen hand-
engines and a few hose-carts, to play with the fire till it is stopped by a river or a mass of banana-trees. On the alarm of fire the new Volunteer Firemen, in no hurry, strolled to the engine-shed with nicely folded red shirts, brass-buttoned coats, "helmets with Matterhorn summits, and axes that shone from lack of work.* The same absolute leisure was characteristic of the whole soene, while the homes of the poor natives were being destroyed far and wide, and hundreds of families were moving out into the wet rice-fields, carrying in order—first their fighting-cocke, then their babies, then pigs, chickens, and dogs, then ice-chests and images of the saints. The houses, to the very roofs of them, seem so prepared for
fire that the thatch-dealera are often said to be responsible for many of the big tillage conflagrations. After the fire, the typhoon ; after a week's warning from the local observatory, managed by the Jesuit priests, that storms were brewing to the south and east. In perfectly calm and peaceful weather five signals had been mounted in succession to the flagstaff of the look-out tower, and all was got ready for "the invisible monster." The steamers
and ships in the dock put out extra cables, and the vessels in the bay fresh anchors. No small craft of any kind were per- mitted to pass out by the breakwater, and later navigation in the river itself was prohibited. A kind of town-crier, with a white shirt hanging out of a black coat, white trousers, and a tall hat, no shoes, and an ornamental cane, walked down the street, and sang out a warning. Then it burst. The clouds 'suddenly rose and the surf roared, the sliding windows were all shut, and all valuables moved from the parlours :—
"Our house trembled like a blushing bride before the altar, and for the triumphal music of the Wedding March' the tin was suddenly stripped off our rain-shed roof like 20 much paper. And then the racket ! Great pieces of tin were slapping around the house like all possessed; the trees in the front garden were sawing against the cornices, as if they wanted to get in, and the rush of air outside seemed to generate a vacuum within."
The description that follows is like the recent stories from the West Indies over again. All the wires in the main streets came down, the rain "sizzled in through the cracks like hot grease when a fresh dough-nut is dropped into the spider" (we give this quaint Americanism for whatever it may mean), over went half-a-dozen native houses at a blow, and the streets were a mass of wreckage, with scarcely a sign of life. All the lamps were stooping under their weight of broken glass, and the bath-houses and fishing-houses washing up the road for driftwood. After the typhoon, the floods :—
"The water concealed the road to the uptown club at Naztajan under a depth of several feet, and one could without difficulty row into the billiard-room or play water-polo in the bowling alley. Two of my friends were nearly drowned by trying to drive when they should have swum or gone by boat. The pony walked of with their carriage into a rice-field in the darkness, and was drowned in more than eight feet of water. The boys only crawled out with difficulty, and just managed to reach 'dry land' (that with three feet of water over it) in the nick of time. As it was, one of them practically saved the other's life, and has sine been presented with a gold watch, which dues not run."
The little touch at the end of the paragraph is characteristic of the keen sense of fun, and buoyant health and animal spirits, which carry our young adventurer through his experiences, in a way to make him a very pleasant companion. There is a little too much of the rattle about it at times perhaps, but never once have we detected him lapsing into the vulgarity which is always the besetting danger of a style like his. We laugh with him all the way through, even while extracting the more serious morals from his work, and he has plenty of them to draw in his own careless but observant way.
There is a pleasant suggestion of Artemus Ward in the open- ing pages, when the skipper of the P.M.S. Company's steamer bound for the Far East, found the means of check- ing the enthusiasm of some worthy missionaries whose zeal
went beyond their duty. Scarcely had the ship left the Sandwich Islands when, without asking the Captain's leave in any form, they posted a notice in the companion-way to the effect that on Sunday, at 10 a.m., they proposed to hold a service in the saloon, when the Rev. X. Smith, of Wang- kiang, would speak on mission work on the Upper Yangtse. But missionaries propose, and the Captain disposes. He
made his own arrangements for crossing the meridian, when the calendar is kept in order by dropping a day. And when the passengers came to their Sunday breakfast they saw a bigger notice underneath the first :— "Sunday, Nov. 29.
Ship crosses 180th meridian 9.30 a.m.
After which it will be Monday."
Nor does Mr. Stevens fail to have his little joke at the " Manilla " of our more ignorant days, and to rejoice that at last "the average citizen" no longer supposes that a city of a third of a million people, capital of a huge group of islands "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 Indies," is spelt with two "l's," and floating around somewhere in the South Sea between Fiji and Patagonia. The war has advanced the sum of human knowledge, and it may be of human life, in other fashions besides this. Crushed and bewildered by the dull misrule of Spain, the new province may blossom like a rose when she learns where and how she has been grafted upon America. But at present Mr. Stevens realises with great clearness, and his position in Manila lets him speak with authority, how grave in this instance is the renewal of the old problem,—What will she do with it
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