ippines, nor is it showing itself to unusual advantage under the American administration. It is, indeed, the chief drawback to the effective working of the municipal code which was put into operation by the Taft Commission in 1901; but, at the same time, there are evidences under that code of a popular opposition to the rule of the boss. Caciquism was the prime feature of the village life of the Filipinos during the entire three hundred odd years of Spanish control; indeed, one may not unfairly say that the Spanish structure of local government was builded upon it, and fostered not only its continuance, but its growth in new directions. But one may not blame the Spaniards for the existence of caciquism; it was a native institution before they came, and they merely accepted it; indeed, they lessened it in some ways beneficial to the people. The word cacique (old Spanish spelling cazique) was the name for a chief or local magnate in Hayti when the Spaniards came there, and they carried the word elsewhere to describe petty local chieftains of the undeveloped communities in South and Central America, and in the Orient. The word really has, therefore, a tribal signification, and may well be taken as the equivalent of the datto among the Moros of the Philippines to-day. In effect, the Moros of to-day represent the local organization and government of all the Filipinos of the archipelago at the time of the conquest, with the exception that the Moros, being Mohammedanized, have taken unto themselves certain formulas of religion, certain customs of local law, and even certain touches of civilization, which the primitive Malays of the archipelago did not have, while the religion they have adopted has given them a touch of brutality, or at least of fanaticism, which the primitive Filipinos did not have. In some ways, we may better look for the prototypes of the primitive Filipino communities in the regions of the non-Christian and non-Mohammedan Malays of the archipelago as they exist to-day; but here, again, we find these people mostly in the hills, away from the fertile river valleys and seacoasts of the archipelago. Hence we must suspect a ruder type of civilization than that which prevailed in the more favored regions when the Spaniards came. The Filipino leaders of to-day will protest vigorously against their Christian population being compared with the Malays of the hills. Yet these are less savage than their lowland brothers think, even if there are head-hunters among them. Their sturdiness and straightforwardness help in some degree to support José Rizal's contention that his people had degenerated in character, if they had improved in customs, under Spanish control. The simple truth is that the affinities between them, historically, and even in actual customs and beliefs to-day, are plain. One has to allow for the undoubtedly greater progress, at the time of the Spanish conquest, of the seacoast and river valley populations; that done, we may apply the caciquism that exists among the mountain Malays of to-day to the lowland Filipinos of the sixteenth century. Caciquism is not a very oppressive kind of bossism. In their rather crude way, justice is ofttimes better secured, life is perhaps almost as safe, and one may guess that contentment is more common, among the "benighted heathen." The petty rivalries among chieftains, and the tribal animosities, however, make against any progress whatever, and in innumerable ways the social organization works toward the fulfillment of the Scriptural dictum that to him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Herein lay the evil of the social organization which the Spaniards found among the Filipinos whom they Christianized. Tribal or chieftain's jealousies laid burdens on the masses, holding them firmly in their subordinate stations or thrusting them under continually harsher yokes as the chieftains grew in importance. The Spaniards did not build deliber- government, modifying and destroying ately upon this social organization and rule through the chieftains, as the English now do in the Straits Settlements and elsewhere. Though they often recognized, at the outset, the prestige of the chieftains themselves, and sought to exercise control of the people through the aristocrats of the communities, they really crushed the tribal organizations as rapidly as possible. Indeed, the introduction of Christianity, with its rather democratic tendencies in various ways, helped to this end. Still, the families of power and prestige were bound in some degree to hold their place at the top, for some time at least, in any social organization. They gradually fell into place in the Spanish scheme as a new aristocracy, holding the petty offices of a civil character, and serving the missionaries, too, as chief aids in mustering their people under the church, gathering them in the village centres or in barrios "under the bells." They were the local tax-gatherers, the local administrators of justice, and the go-betweens for their people with the religious and civil authorities of the Spanish régime. The old caciquism, in other words, simply readjusted itself to conditions and, once settled into place, stayed there more firmly than it had in the old days of less complex social organization, when the whole was not held together as a unit by ecclesiastical domination, and the chance for individual talent to rise was probably greater. It is hard to recognize any but the cruder elements of democracy in the primitive Filipino society; but almost certainly there was more democracy in its comparatively loose organization (maintained, moreover, by the Filipinos themselves, of and for themselves) than in the hardand-fast society into which they speedily crystallized under Spain's inelastic ecclesiastical régime. Judging Spain by modern standards of colonization, we might praise her if she had taken over simply the social structure she found, and builded upon it her only where its tendencies were anti-progressive, working through the already constituted sources of authority over the people to introduce peace, better methods of cultivation of the soil and of living. When Spain chose instead to reject the old social structure, because it was felt to be anti-Christian, to introduce the people of the Philippines not only to the European religion, but also to the customs and laws of Europe, she adopted a programme which is much more ambitious, which strikes deeper into the essentials of a colonized people's life, than the policy which England is to-day pursuing, for instance, in the Malay Peninsula. "Colonial experts" may differ as to the results of such a policy, may feel confident that the ends for which a colonizing power should work, at least deliberately and consciously, should be material only. But we must recognize that Spain, inspired, to be sure, partly by material ambitions, but still more by spiritual aims, did accomplish in the Philippine Islands in the first part of her domination what no other European nation has ever done in the Orient, and did accomplish it without crushing the people under her heel. We may say that the conditions, and particularly the disposition of the people themselves, were peculiarly favorable to such an accomplishment in the Philippines. However we may view the question on that side, we have to admit that here are a people who have been turned to the Christian religion almost en masse; that, along with Christianity, they have, if not exactly rejecting old social institutions of a semi-feudal character or their half-developed languages, at least taken up the European village habits, laws and methods suitable to a tropical climate; have in considerable degree adopted European social manners and customs; have, so far as their social and political leaders are concerned, adopted European ideas of politics, literature, and art; have virtually adopted a European language; and have lost their primitive method of writing and write their own dialects in European style. This is what differentiates for us the Philippine problem (aside from the Moros and pagans) from the problem of the English in the Malay Peninsula, Burma, or India, or of the Dutch in Java, and differentiates it in a degree that our self-constituted mentors, the "colonial experts," apparently do not comprehend at all. There is something of the English and American misunderstanding of and contempt for the Spaniards about this shortsighted view; scant justice is ever done by writers in English to the Spanish colonial régime, and it somehow seems to be taken for granted that Spain, of course, never altered or benefited the institutions or the peoples with which she came into contact. Spain did alter the Filipinos and their society, and for the better, despite ways in which they seem to have lost in moral vigor since the conquest. Let us be fair enough historically to admit this, and to do justice to Spain. Let us also have sufficient discernment to see that Spain's partial progress, which was interrupted before her régime was much more than half over, but which the Filipinos themselves began to carry farther forward in the nineteenth century, makes it possible, nay, absolutely necessary, to proceed farther, faster, and differently from those who have assumed the task of furthering merely the material welfare of Mohammedan, or at least non-Christian, populations in the Orient. The very fact that the Filipinos themselves had already taken a hand in planning and working for their own progress as a community, as a rising nation, in fact, is what makes such procedure on our part not merely imperative in a political sense, but reasonably sure of success in the face of the warnings of "experts" who have compiled their precedents under different conditions and in a different atmosphere. But, to return to caciquism, we have to note where Spain halted, and where Filipino society "froze," as it were, under her rule. If we have to accord her the highest praise for the comprehensive effort to develop a whole people spiritually, praise which is almost unique for her among the colonizing nations,—we have, nevertheless, to charge her both with lack of continued progress and lack of consistent policy. Her aims, in so far as they were altruistic, were much in advance of her times. But, after she had succeeded in her work of primary instruction, in her introduction of the Filipinos to religious, social, and political beliefs and customs which not only make possible advance and improvement along their own lines, but which demand such constant progress as the requisite of their successful maintenance, she halted and folded her hands, the work only just begun, but her conception of it entirely satisfied. Thenceforward, she was, as a colonizing power, absorbed in the glories of the past and in elaborate self-praise, until, from being the herald of a type of colonization which was not mere conquest of territory and trade, she was branded by her own beneficiaries as a mediæval tyrant and a reactionary. Unable as yet to handle the institutions of modern social life so as to bring religious and political liberty and economic freedom even to herself at home, she could not guide an undeveloped Oriental people, only barely initiated by her into a modified Occidental life, to that stage of development which this people's own leaders dimly feel that they could and should reach. So Spain gradually riveted caciquism in many ways more firmly than before upon the Filipinos. Her structure of government rested upon the local aristocracy (the principalía) of each town, and controlled the masses through them. In all matters of civil administration in the towns, except such as were quasi-military, the life of the people was regulated by their constituted bosses; this was quite as true of matters judicial as of matters purely executive, the two, in fact, being blended in the village communities, where alone, except in case of serious crimes, the mass of the natives would, as a rule, come into contact with the courts. The same overlordship and aristocracy continued to prevail in matters of economic organization, which, until recent years, centred almost entirely in agriculture. Indeed, one almost inclines to the belief that there was more opportunity for the growth of a class of small landholders under the primitive feudalism of the Philippines than under the system set up by the Spaniards, laissez faire, laissez faire, hampered by the creation of an all-powerful official class and by ecclesiastical oversight, - at least in those richer valleys of Luzon, where the land, if not in the hands of a few caciques, was still more completely concentrated in the possession of church corporations. How far such conditions, economic and political, would render null the democratizing influences of Christianity (the religion, not the church), may be guessed. How at the same time they would foster the growth of socialistic ideas, especially when helped by the acceptance, nominally or other wise, of Christianity, may be surmised, even by him who has not seen how in recent years many Filipinos have, in obtaining some touches of European education, turned to European socialism, sometimes of the French Revolution school, sometimes of the up-to-date Latin-European school, even in its most fantastic manifestations. For the Filipino propaganda of 1868–98, culminating in the ill-planned revolt of 1896, was in large part a revolt against caciquism. The propaganda, to be sure, originated with the aristocracy, and was, down nearly to the time of actual revolt, mainly carried on by and in behalf of the upper classes. Its open aims were the "assimilation" of Filipino laws and administration to those of Spain, an illogical programme, overlooking the essential differences between the European mother country and the Oriental colony, but a programme primarily designed to confer upon the Filipino aristocracy greater rights and privileges for themselves, regardless of the evident unfitness of the masses for privileges which, because of their complex nature, would more easily degenerate into abuses on the part of those qualified to manage to their own ends the new machinery of legal codes and internal administration. But this campaign was something more than it seemed to be on the surface. Had it been merely a clamor for greater privileges on the part of the principalía, it would not have led at last to actual revolt; for this class is not composed, for the most part, of fighters. The revolt of 1896 was made by the masses, brought into line by new leaders, not of the upper, but of the middle and lower classes. The very life of the propaganda from about 1886 onward a "reform propaganda" we may now call it, with evidences of something more about it than the petition for greater class privileges was the work of a few real "sons of the people," young men like José Rizal and Marcelo H. del Pilar from the heart of the Tagalog country, and Graciano Lopez Jaena from the Bisagas. Their campaign was not alone a protest against ecclesiastical domination, but also against administrative and economic caciquism, as may be best seen in Rizal's novels, which preach to his own people their lack of independence of mind and will and their other faults of character, which remedied would remedy the evils imposed upon them from above. Rizal's deserved preeminence among the propagandists lies not so much in his greater ability as a writer, in the keener thrusts he gave, as in his more thorough perception of the need for arousing his people to their own defects, in his more complete comprehension of the fact that to have a better government they must first deserve it by forming a more worthy society. But, to a great extent, the new school of middle-class propagandists aimed at more of democracy in Philippine society, and to that extent struck at caciquism. The new industrial era in the Philippines, and the expansion of commerce following the removal of the restrictions upon foreigners engaging in business in the islands and the opening of the Suez Canal, had begun to develop, especially in the Tagalog provinces centring around Manila, evidences at last of a real middle class. The masses were captained by the more radical of these men in 1896-97. Their demands were rather blind and indefinite, as they had not yet formulated their programme to themselves; but, along with complete exasperation at ecclesiastical dominance in matters of body as well as of conscience, and with an outburst of racehatred, there was some actual impulse to democracy, some resentment at their own countrymen who were identified with the superior structure of government and society which rested upon them. The revolution of 1898 was organized by these men, the prestige of a few of them among the masses making its beginning possible. As Spain's power so plainly crumbled, and no declaration of intention came from the United States, the Filipino aristocrats joined the Aguinaldo party, a few at first, then all acquiescing at once, except the very small element of very capable men at the top who wished to wait upon the United States and were able to see clearly that the time had not come to go alone. The younger men of the cacique class had, in advance of their elders, quite commonly sought military or civil office under the revolutionary government. The older men did so more slowly, and partly from policy, partly because of the absence of any other programme to be followed. One might, from a superficial view, say that the Filipino upper classes organized and ran the socalled Philippine Republic while it lasted. In large part, they were identified with it, and most generally the rule of the caciques was not altered in the towns. But the new party of young radicals dominated at the centre of this institution, even though they did not accomplish any reform of the old-time boss-ship, beyond the issuance of unheeded decrees against it. The principal interference with the caciques in the towns came from the new them some The military leaders, chief among middle-class and lower-class natives now tasting the sweets of command. masses were not the gainers by this fact; they had, in fact, more bosses under this temporary régime than ever before. When at last the United States began to present a positive programme to the Filipinos, simultaneously with the exhaustion of the country and its weariness of war, this programme quite naturally appealed more effectually to the men of property, to the old cacique class, than to the young radicals. With some exceptions, the latter yielded only when they were forced to, and are quiescent to-day rather through force of circumstances than otherwise; omitting some important districts, where the aristocracy has been tenaciously identified with the prolongation of resistance to the United States, the traditional leaders of the Filipinos are reasonably content with the new régime, particularly if they have been able to regain office and social prominence. The masses are, generally speaking, negligible; they follow their bosses. But they have been, especially in the more populous and advanced districts, in some degree torn loose from the traditional caciques, and, having been subjected to the sway of new leaders during from six to eight years of warfare and unrest, are easily made the prey of political adventurers or religious fanatics. The radicals of one sort and another, a large number of whom are dishonest scapegoats and cheap demagogues, have since 1901 quite generally maintained that the Federal party, which is made up of those who brought peace by accepting the American programme and therefore took office under the new régime, is simply an instrument in perpetuating the old caciquism. There is a large measure of truth in this charge. It is not, however, the fault of the government, nor of the Filipinos who were identified with the formation of the Federal party, but of the social conditions existing in the Philippines. To return to a truth preached by Rizal, |