The Philippines: Past and Present (Volume 1 of 2)Worcester, Dean C. (Dean Conant)
History
The Philippines: Past and Present (Volume 1 of 2)
Worcester, Dean C. (Dean Conant)
Philippines; Philippines -- History -- 1898-1946
"While the great Mohammedan island of Mindanao, near Borneo,
with its 36,000 square miles of area, requires that the
Philippine archipelago be described as stretching over more
than one thousand miles from north to south, still, inasmuch
as Mindanao only contains about 500,000 people all told, half
of them semi-civilized, the governmental problem it presents
has no more to do with the main problem of whether, if ever,
we are to grant independence to the 7,000,000 Christians of
the other islands, than the questions that have to be passed
on by our Commissioner of Indian Affairs have to do with the
tariff. Mindanao's 36,000 square miles constitute nearly
a third of the total area of the Philippine archipelago,
and more than that fraction of the 97,500 square miles of
territory to a consideration of which our attention is reduced
by the process of elimination above indicated. Turning over
Mindanao to those crudely Mohammedan semi-civilized Moros
would indeed be 'like granting self-government to an Apache
reservation under some local chief,' as Mr. Roosevelt, in
the campaign of 1900, ignorantly declared it would be to
grant self-government to Luzón under Aguinaldo. Furthermore,
the Moros, so far as they can think, would prefer to owe
allegiance to, and be entitled to recognition as subjects
of, some great nation. Again, because the Filipinos have no
moral right to control the Moros, and could not if they would,
the latter being fierce fighters and bitterly opposed to the
thought of possible ultimate domination by the Filipinos, the
most uncompromising advocate of the consent of the governed
principles has not a leg to stand on with regard to Mohammedan
Mindanao. Hence I affirm that as to it, we have a distinct
separate problem, which cannot be solved in the lifetime
of anybody now living. But it is a problem which need not
in the least delay the advent of independence for the other
fourteen fifteenths of the inhabitants of the archipelago--all
Christians living on islands north of Mindanao. It is true that
there are some Christian Filipinos on Mindanao, but in policing
the Moros, our government would of course protect them from
the Moros. If they did not like our government, they could
move to such parts of the islands as we might permit to be
incorporated in an ultimate Philippine republic. Inasmuch as
the 300,000 or so Moros of the Mohammedan island of Mindanao
and the adjacent islets called Jolo (the 'Sulu archipelago,'
so called, 'reigned over' by the sultan of comic opera fame)
originally presented, as they will always present, a distinct
and separate problem, and never did have anything more to
do with the Philippine insurrection against us than their
cousins and co-religionists over in near-by Borneo, the task
which confronted Mr.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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