Manila, March 5, 1905.

I wrote in the morning yesterday, and after the heat of the day we drove outside the town to a nursery garden. To get there we passed through long streets of untidy suburbs, not of palm-thatch huts and bamboo groves like those in Iloilo, but very broad and treeless, with mean, low houses at intervals, and bits of waste ground strewn with lean dogs and rubbish. There are not scavenger pariahs here as in Turkey and the Near East, and I suppose they could not exist in such a climate, where the rubbish would be too putrid even for their savoury taste. There are a good many hawks about, but they don’t scavenge either, like the hawks in Egypt; all they seem to do is to hover over poultry, and every now and then get away with a young fowl or chicken. When we were driving round between Molo and Jaro a week or two ago, near the village of Mindoriao, we heard a great squawking and a scream, and looked round in time to see a hawk rise up from near a nipa hut with a fair-sized hen in his claws. The people rushed about the plantation and sang out, and the hawk staggered once or twice, and nearly fell with the hen, which was very big and heavy for him; but he got away at last, and the people were left gazing after him into the sky, like in the picture of “Robert with his Red Umbrella” in Struwwelpeter. But the scavenging is, or should be, done by the half-wild pigs with which the native quarters teem—lean, rough, black and white animals, generally very mangy, and with long legs and snouts.

A great deal of the way to the nursery we followed the route of a new electric tram, which is to be opened in the course of a few weeks, and is to connect all the suburbs with the main town. Manila is immensely proud of this tram, which is such a token of progress that it somehow or other makes up for the lack of paving and other primary symbols of civilisation. There is a railway here too, the only one in the Philippines, which goes about 150 miles inland to a place called Dugupan. There is constant talk of railways to be built all over the islands, the concessions for which are being granted, of course, to American speculators; but those who know the islands well say the railways will not benefit anyone, even the speculators, for what are wanted besides labourers are roads, just good traffic roads, kept in good repair. However, it sounds imposing to talk of so many millions of dollars to be spent on railways “to open up the Philippines,” and a great deal of philanthropic energy is, somehow, inferred.

The entrance to the nursery garden was up a narrow, sandy lane, where a lot of little, half-clad, brown children ran out after us and offered small, tousled bunches of faded flowers. Queer little souls, these Filipino children, with thin limbs and fluttering muslin garments.

On each side of the sandy lane was a field planted with rose bushes; in the garden itself nothing appeared but rows and rows of flower-pots containing green plants and ferns—the sort of plants and ferns one only sees in conservatories at home. The garden was laid out in formal earthen paths, bordered with tiles, but the gardener was anything but formal—a huge, fat, old native with Chinese eyes, got up airily in white bathing-drawers and a muslin camisa.

We went about, and my friend chose ferns and plants, some of which were lovely, and I very much wished I could have taken some home with me to Iloilo, but for the difficulty of transporting them by the Butuan. There was a charming old grey stone well in the garden, with steps leading up to it, some of them formed of beautiful old blue and green Chinese tiles, the whole shaded by big, drooping trees, which made that corner of the garden quite dark. Overhead, along the greater part of the paths, was a pergola of orchids, while all sorts of orchids grew from bundles of what looked like dried sticks tied to the posts. The sight of the orchids made me realise once again the temperature we live in, for I thought of how, on a summer’s day at home, one would find the outside air quite cold after an orchid house. It also occurred to me that it sounds all very fine to think of orchids in cheapness and profusion, but I have never yet seen an orchid that could compare as an object of beauty with a dog-rose out of a hedge.

On the way back we halted to hear some jolly tunes played by the band on the Luneta. Again there was the blue dusk; the orange and saffron horizon; and the moving crowds in white on the bright green grass plots round the bandstand. We stayed in the carriage, which moved slowly round with hundreds of others, all going in the same direction. I believe the only carriage that has the privilege of moving the other way is that of the Governor.

Going in and out of the crowd, everywhere, were two little American girls, seated astride on a bare-backed pony, with their hair floating loose behind, and tied with an immense bow of ribbon on one side of the forehead in American fashion; their thin little legs dangling side by side on each flank of the pony. They looked very happy and solemn, and the way they stuck on was simply wonderful.

The Luneta is a pretty sight in the evening, and even amusing, but I must confess I was very much disappointed in it, because I have read so much about Manila in American magazines, in which the Luneta is described as “an evening assemblage where all the nations of the world jostle one another”;—or phrases, more lurid, to that effect; followed by “word pictures” of Jew and Moor, Chinaman and Turk, Cingalee, Slav, and Hindu, all rubbing shoulders in their respective national costumes. So I looked out for this sight particularly, but have never seen anything but men of varying degrees of white and Malay in linen suits, and women and Gibson Girls in the last scream of Paris-Manila fashions. I have asked people about it too, in case I should have been to the Luneta only on days when the Jews, Moors, etc., were unavoidably absent; but I only got laughed at for imagining such nonsense, and when I said, I had read accounts by American eye-witnesses, my friends only laughed the more.

March 6.

I am afraid I am not seeing as much of Manila as I had hoped, after all, for I find I am not well enough to go about a great deal, but what I do see I try to remember in order to tell you. Having these letters to write is an amusement in the long, hot hours in the house, so don’t think that I am giving up delirious joys to find time to write to you! All the same, if I did go out more into Manila Society, I should not have any more to tell you, for there would be nothing to describe but Bridge. That is the only thing anyone ever does. Manila was pictured to me as a very gay place, in fact the Manila papers even go so far as to label it the “Gayest City of the Orient”; but it is really a dreadfully dull little town, with a very occasional dance to enliven the interminable round of dinner and Bridge parties, and those curious and costly luncheon parties which American women give to each other. So much I had already inferred from the Society Columns of the Manila papers, which come to us in Iloilo as a breath from the wide world! When I arrived here and saw the place, and asked some questions, I found my worst fears realised, and that far from being the gayest city of the Orient—think of Cairo, Calcutta, Colombo!—Manila is probably the dullest spot of the East or West, and any gaiety or intellect it might have is choked and strangled by Bridge and Euchre. In a country like this, where there is little or no housekeeping and no shopping to fill the minds and time of the average women, card-playing seems to attain colossal proportions, for they actually go out of their houses at eight in the morning to meet and play cards till lunch (the Americans do not use the word tiffin), and after a siesta they begin again, go home to dinner, or out to a dinner party, and probably play half the night.

The Americans in Iloilo are just as keen, however, and the first question they ask you is if you play Bridge; and if you don’t they take no further interest in you, and never dream of inviting you to their houses.

The Americans are fearfully down on the Filipino national game of Monte about which the natives are infatuated, and over which they ruin themselves, but the indignation of the ruling race carries very little weight, as it is all precept and no example.

I went for a little drive yesterday evening, through the old Spanish Intramuros, the Walled City, within the high old walls, which stand in a neglected moat, and are all covered with moss and grass and trailing weeds. The narrow streets are cobbled, and the quaint houses, with deep, barred basement windows, have a delightful air of repose, after the half-finished, skin-deep, hustling modernity of Americanised Manila. The whole quarter seems a far more appropriate setting than the rest of the town for the “mild-eyed lotus eaters,” which the Filipinos really are by choice, nature, and instinct. I think that if I lived in Manila (which heaven forbid should ever be my fate!) I should like to live in the Walled City—that is, if I survived the awful smells—and imagine myself in an East where there were no arc-lights, no electric trams, no drinking saloons, ice-cream sodas, “Hiawatha,” or Bridge, and where the natives would be humble, civil, prosperous, and happy.

There are some fine old gates to the Walled City, but the Americans whose idiosyncrasy it is not to reverence antiquity unless it has cost fabulous sums at Drouot’s or Christie’s, are pulling them down for no reason at all.

A great many natives bustle about American Manila in European or white linen suits, and it is a very exhausting place; but one can’t quite see the good of it all. I asked an American official (what they call “a prominent citizen”), whom I met at dinner the other night, how the Filipinos were to profit by all this bustle and book-learning.

“Why,” he said, “I guess they will learn to appreciate our civilisation and then want it, and want all the things that civilisation entails, so there will be a demand, and trade will come right along, and these islands will wake up and flourish.”

I wanted to argue, however, so I said: “But why should the Filipinos wake up? Why not give the poor creatures lots of cheap food. If they have a little rice, and a banana patch, and a nipa hut, and no priests to bother them, that is all they want, and there will always be an inexhaustible market for the produce of the islands. It seems such a pity to daze their poor brains, and hurry them about like this.” But he said it was no good trying to talk about this to me, as I evidently could not understand the American Ideal.

So I dropped the subject, for when it comes to the American Ideal, I am hopelessly at variance, and think it better to say no more. The Ideal is this, you see, that every people in the world should have self-government and equal rights. This means, when reduced from windy oratory to common-sense, that they consider these Malay half-breeds to be capable, after six years of school-teaching by the type of master I described to you (about which type, by-the-bye, experience has given me no reason to change my mind), of understanding the motives, and profiting by the institutions which it has taken the highest white races two or three thousand years to evolve. They are supposed to be so wonderful, these flat-faced little chaps, because they have shown a sudden aptitude for the gramophone and imitation European clothes, a free and abusive press, and unlimited talk—endless talk. But it seems to me that these are the traits one is accustomed to in the emancipated coloured person all the world over. In fact, when I come to think of it, America with this funny little possession of hers is like a mother with her first child, who has never noticed anyone else’s children, and thinks her own bantling something entirely without parallel or precedent; quotes it as a miracle when it shows the most elementary symptoms of existence, and tries to bring it up on some fad of her own because it is so much more precious and more wonderful than any other child any one else ever had.

March 7.

Yesterday we went to buy prison-made goods at Bilibid, which is the big jail of Manila, and of the whole Philippine Islands. When anyone has committed a serious crime, he is sent up to Bilibid to eke out the period that has to elapse before he is carted back to his original island to be executed. The prison is a mass of half-finished-looking grey stone buildings, where prisoners in yellow-striped jerseys, like gigantic wasps, were going about behind iron railings.

We went into a huge stone hall, where there were quantities of all sorts of basket-work furniture on show; a row of carriages, all prison-made; and at the farther end a white man standing behind some glass-covered tables containing little objects for sale. I wanted to get some small souvenirs to send home, and examined carefully all the little trifles and curios in black wood, bone, and silver, with which the cases were filled; but I could not see anything that was uncommon or characteristic, or even worth buying at all. All the things looked to me as if someone had been to Naples or Colombo, and come back and told the Filipinos what to make, for here were souvenir teaspoons, paper knives of black wood, bone hairpins, and so on, and not one of them of a pattern one has not seen prepared for the traveller in every city of the world. I hunted all through the cases, and amongst the furniture in the hall, but could find nothing distinctive—everything was well made, but utterly banal. However, this did not concern me much, as what I had really come for was ordinary furniture, and this I managed to get to my satisfaction, and a little cheaper than in the Chinamen’s shops in Iloilo, which is to say exactly double the prices of Hong Kong.

Amongst a great many things stored in a corresponding hall upstairs were some basket chairs of an uncommon pattern, with a back like a huge spreading peacock’s tail; but, though they were pretty, these chairs did not strike me as characteristic of a people living in nipa huts, but much more like the suggestion of a wandering admirer of l’art nouveau.

Besides the chairs, I noticed some small columns of hard Filipino woods, intended for flower stands, but the price asked for them was 10 pesos (one guinea) each, which I thought ridiculous for plain, flat, polished wood. It appeared that they were derelict from the St Louis Exhibition, or, as it is called, “Exposition,” and on each was resting, temporarily, a little figure carved in wood and painted in bright colours, representing a Filipino man or woman—the woman in red skirt (not sarong) and camisa, and the men with their shirts outside, and carrying a fighting cock under one arm. By-the-bye, there is fierce indignation and terrible offence taken by the Filipinos about that same “Exposition,” as the Philippine section was got up attractively barbarous, with too much of the savage element, wild-men-of-the-woods in fantastic hovels, and so forth, to please the educated and high-class natives and Mestizos, who want independence, and think they are more likely to get it than the prehistoric savage.

On the way out here I met a German who had been to St Louis, and who told me that the two chief exhibits were the Boer War and the Philippine section, and that the latter was nearly all savages in huts, with fish-corrals in artificial ponds, and all that sort of thing. I remember he was quite surprised to hear that there was any other town than Manila, or any civilisation in the Philippines except the marvellous dawn that rose with the Stars and Stripes. I believe that was very largely the impression produced in America, and not quite ingenuously—that the inhabitants of these islands were a race of naked cannibals and savages who were suddenly being transformed into the educated Mestizo, who goes to college in America and returns here to write seditious articles and talk his head off. Well, whatever the impression desired or produced, the way it was brought about has caused endless anger amongst those Islanders who would rather be thought civilised than picturesque.

March 8.

I have been out shopping this morning, going out at such an unusual hour because heavy rain had fallen in the night, and the air was fresh in the morning. It is nice to have a fresh morning, for the early part of the day here is heavy, and day dawns thick and foggy. At least, the mornings are thick and foggy in comparison with the exquisite clearness of the dawn and early hours of the day in Iloilo. Talking of that, I am much struck by the colour of the sky here—all over the Philippines, I mean, or rather, all over where I have been—for though it is very blue, it is a whity-blue, a thick sort of colour, not a bit transparent like the sky of Southern Europe or North Africa. I can’t quite describe it, but when one looks up at the zenith one does not seem to be looking into illimitable spaces of transparency, and the thick white of the horizon stretches far upwards.

On this shopping expedition I went to buy some things for the house that I thought I might be able to get cheaper and better here than in Iloilo. The principal street of shops is, as I told you, the Escolta, and the next in importance is the Calla Rosario, where the shops are kept by Chinamen and one or two Japanese.

On the way there I saw a steamer on fire, which was a great sight, but rather alarming. When the carriage was passing over the bridge spanning the Pasig, I saw crowds running and looking down on the river, so I told the coachman to stop, and stood up and saw a fairly large coasting steamer drawn out from the other vessels at the wharf and pulled across the stream, where it lay in a huge wall of flames like BrÜnnhilde in the opera of Siegfried. When I first caught sight of it, there was a complete steamer, but it burnt up with amazing rapidity, and as I looked, the machinery suddenly sank through the hull, the bows and stem rose up to meet each other, and the whole thing doubled up and vanished beneath the water. Of course there was no one left on board, but all the same it was a gruesome sight, and one I know I shall think of all the way back to Iloilo in that fearful little Butuan with its wobbly candlesticks.

In the evening we drove out to pay some calls, and then took a little turn out beyond Santa Mesa, which is a big residential suburb on some low hills inland. The people living there have told me that the air is appreciably cooler than down in Manila, and there are far fewer mosquitoes. The latter alone would be sufficient reason for living there, as the mosquitoes here are awful, and always hungry night and day.

We drove a little beyond Santa Mesa (which is, being translated, The Holy Supper) over abominable roads through little scrubby coppices. At one place we saw a most curious sight of hundreds of white-clad native people, in the sunset light, passing along a broad field-path bordered with trees; and I at first thought we had come across a religious procession. But when we got nearer, I saw that it was a crowd returning from the cock-pit; for every second man carried a cock under his arm; some sitting comfortably; some draggled with blood, wounded and miserable; some limp and dead.

I can’t tell you what a feeling of sickness came over me, for I thought it one of the most horrible sights I had ever witnessed; and I was glad when the procession was out of sight, and I could no longer see the animal-like, degraded faces of the men and their miserable, blood-stained, dying birds.

I suppose the good folk in the towns and little villages in the U.S.A., the electors who control Philippine affairs, would rise as one man if a bull-fight took place in these Islands; but yet a bull-fight, horrible though it must be, is not so bad as these cock-fights, for at least the toreadors and matadors risk their own lives to a certain extent, and run an equal chance with the animals they torture; so it cannot help being a more noble, or less ignoble sport than this sickening cock-fighting. But so much has cock-fighting become the national “sport” of the Filipino that, as I have shown you, he is always represented, typically, with a fighting cock under his arm. But the significance of that also, and all its natural consequences of brutality, gambling, and cruelty, I suppose, escaped the attention of the benevolent elector, who visited the “Exposition” at St Louis.

One thing I can never understand, and that is why people make less fuss about the cruelty towards an animal in proportion to its size. This sounds ridiculous at first, but when you come to think of it, it is absolutely true; for if horses or tigers were set to fight like these poor fowls—one fight in one palace!—there would be a howl all over the civilised world, would there not?

March 9.

We had tea yesterday afternoon at four as usual, and then drove out to MalacaÑan for me to call on Mrs Luke E. Wright. The grounds of the palace looked even more beautiful by daylight than they had when lighted up at night, and the house is very fine, with huge rooms like halls, and floors polished into brown looking-glass, all crowded with big pictures, arms, and handsome furniture.

Mrs Wright received us on a big open balcony-terrace overlooking the river, with a fine view; and here we sat and had tea and talked. Some other people came before we left, for it was Mrs Wright’s At Home day, amongst them one of the prettiest women I have ever seen, wife of some young man in the American Diplomatic Service, a tall, dark girl with an exquisite face, and perfectly dressed in something very filmy and floating, of delicate mauves, with a big black hat. Her walk, her air, her dress, made one suddenly feel how far away Manila is from all the world one is accustomed to, and what a small, dull, back-water of the stream of life this is.

We went on to call on the wife of Commissioner Worcester, a scientist as well as a politician, and, as his title implies, one of the Americans on the Philippine Commission. The Worcesters’ house was a little higher up the river, and again we sat on a balcony-terrace, but this one was all hung with plants and creepers, and overshadowed by dark green trees, through which could be seen the blue-green soapy-looking river swirling past, and the opposite bank with flat fields of emerald grass and bits of bright blue sky. The rail of the balcony was bordered with plants in pots, while all sorts of queer orchids and things grew on the over-hanging branches. It was like a scene in a play, I thought, and the shade of the deep trees was delightful, though they made the balcony rather steamy and airless. Mrs Worcester showed me some of the most lovely needlework I ever saw; all this native embroidery on piÑa muslin, of which she is a keen connaisseuse and collector. Some of the pieces were as fine as the most delicate lace, and one large shawl, in particular, was a marvel of embroidery on what I took to be very fine net, but discovered to be drawn threads!

I have been finding out about prices here, in case we are sent to Manila later on, and the result of my investigations is that I pray we may be kept in the Provinces! Rents are appalling, the equivalent of our £100 a year being quite a modest rent for a small unfurnished house, and wages are more than double what is given in Iloilo. You can’t get a cook to look at you here for less than 40 pesos a month, which is £48 a year! Most of the cooks are Chinese, I believe, as it is considered rather common to have a native cook, though why this is I am unable to find out, for the Filipinos are excellent cooks. But that is just where the American Ideal of Philippines for the Filipinos begins to fall through, and I noticed at MalacaÑan Palace that all the servants were Chinese, and was told that they were an institution of Mrs Taft, the wife of the last Governor, the man who, as I told you, I think, was the original pro-Filipino. One hears a good deal about this Governor Taft, who is now Secretary of War in the U.S.A. He was the first American Civil Governor of the Philippines, and seems to have a very strong personality, which he flung into the pro-Filipino cause for all he was worth, on which account he has become a sort of patron saint, rivalling Dr Rizal, with the natives, who believe he is working tooth and nail in the U.S.A. for the independence he promised them.

It is as impossible to get a clear idea of Mr Taft as of any other public personage, for while some people tell me he is a high-souled, disinterested philanthropist, who will live up to every word he has uttered, others vow that he is only an American politician with a skin-deep catch-vote policy, and that having got the billet he wanted in America, he is quite capable of turning imperialist if it suits his book. What is one to believe?

One thing they all agree in, which is that he has personal magnetism and a great deal of social charm, which great gifts have stood him in very good stead, I have no doubt, with the Filipinos, and have more to do with his vast popularity with these Orientals than any vows and protestations; and, perhaps helped to make up for the faux-pas about the Chinese servants, which still rankles in the native mind.