God's Gift of Thought

God and His manifest destiny gave the U. S. the better part of North America but President McKinley added to that gift 7,083 islands (4,642 of them nameless) in the Malay Archipelago. That was stretching Manifest Destiny to the point of manifest absurdity. In 1916 Congress declared that ''it has always been the purpose of the people of the U. S." that the islands be given their freedom as soon as it could be conveniently arranged. Soon most of the islands' 12,000,000 people began crying in their eight languages and 87 dialects that freedom would be immediately convenient. Year after year they voiced their polyglot appeal, gave their pompous little brown-skinned politicos hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend the winter comfortably in Washington agitating for freedom.

Year after year successive Presidents of the U. S. turned a deaf ear--until Depression's 1933. Then with statesmen fully alive to the burden, political and military, of U. S. responsibility for 7,083 islands half a world away, with U. S. sugar producers equally dismayed by the flood of duty-free sugar coming thence, Congress at last offered the Philippines their freedom, after a ten-year trial period. Out from under the first offer Philippine politicians managed to wriggle. When it was renewed last spring, and served up on a silver platter by Franklin Roosevelt himself, the Philippines did not have the heart to refuse.

Last week a "mission" consisting of U. S. Senators McAdoo, McKellar, Gibson and Tydings completed a three-week visit in the islands undertaken by Filipino request. Already a convention had drafted a Constitution for the forthcoming nation, had made preparations for the "Commonwealth" during the ten-year transition from dependence to independence. The four venerable gentlemen were anxious to find out how their 12,000,000 little brown brothers felt as prospective fathers of their country.

The 6,000 U. S. citizens in the islands have always felt that independence would be unqualified disaster. More & more Filipinos were coming to believe that it would not be an unqualified blessing. Manuel Quezon, president of the Philippine Senate, talked seriously with the visitors about continuing some sort of ties with the U. S. --tariff favors, for example. The Philippine Sugar Association, the Philippine-American Trade Association, the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and numerous local politicians all talked to the same tune.

One who did not so talk was old Emilio Aguinaldo, the patriot who more than a generation ago staged his insurrection against U. S. imperialism. He asked for freedom, not in ten years but much sooner. Senator Tydings turned on him with a curt: "God gave us our brains for thought."

There was no native outcry at this reproof to the island's oldtime hero. Filipinos were indeed thinking, none too happily, of the time when they would have to make their own economic way, fight to preserve their own freedom. Even Governor General Frank Murphy used God's gift of thought. In about a year, when his job ends, some one will get an $18,000 salary for posing as High Commissioner while a native official runs the islands. But the prospect of responsibility without authority made that new job far from enticing to the onetime Mayor of Detroit.

A new dream was last week forming in the minds of islanders, an ideal arrangement: for Filipinos, full liberty to do as they please; for the U. S., the white man's burden without the white man's authority. Tentative names for it: "permanent partnership," or "dominion status." Homeward bound, for Zamboanga. Batavia, Europe and the U. S. Senate chamber (where they should arrive about a month after the first roll call), the four U. S. Senators carried with them no less than 300 memorials of people who on second thought do not want liberty unadorned.

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