THE PIvANT WORLD 175 



mouldy or will be infested by weevils if kept a long time, and that all 

 their labor of cultivating and harvesting it will be wasted. This has 

 made me realize more than anything else the need of capital, and capital 

 not in the form of rice and corn, which moth and mould may corrupt, 

 but in good indestructible and divisible money. In this way surplus 

 food could be converted into money at the end of good harvests and 

 reconverted into food (imported rice or flour) in times of scarcity. 

 As it is, the people find themselves without resources during the 

 seasons of famine which on this island always follow hurricanes, and 

 the traders will not give them food for the superfluous ribbons and 

 rosaries they got in barter for their copra or surplus food. We ought to 

 take some step to restrict or abolish the present system of barter by which 

 the natives are induced to take all sorts of things of which they have 

 no need at all. If they had a little stock of money on hand they would 

 not have to depend, as they now do, upon charity from abroad in times of 

 scarcity. To-day I came across a record of one governor's efforts to in- 

 duce the natives to make provision for a "rainy day." 



Don Felipe de la Corte, who became governor in 1855, discusses the 

 causes of the stationary condition of the population of the Marianne 

 Islands in a report to the Captain -General of the Philippines. He 

 attributes it to the poverty or lack of accumulated capital on the part of 

 the natives. "To ameliorate the condition of these islanders, " writes 

 Don Felipe, "my predecessors, with laudable zeal, have reproduced 

 without ceasing exhortations, orders, and decrees that they should plant 

 and harvest wholesome and abundant crops. But who would believe it ! 

 With bountiful harvests, of which the grain has at times even been 

 burned for lack of consumers, poverty has continued ; because no steps 

 were taken to store the wealth, then superfluous, so that it might meet 

 the demands in later seasons of scarcity, everything going to waste 

 without accomplishing any good. And what is still worse, it has 

 created in these natives in years good as well as bad, of large crops as 

 well as of small, the idea that the conditions can not be improved, and 

 Ihey logically reason that though they have produced such great crops 

 that they had to be burned they did not thereby escape privations when 

 times of scarcity came, and it was better for them to work little than to 

 work in vain. In consequence of this they are accused of laziness, 

 which they are far from manifesting when they clearly see the good 

 accomplished by their labor. To dispel a prejudice so harmful, I have 

 taken the first step toward the accumulation of wealth, by providing for 

 the storing of the article most important for the subsistence of these 

 natives. This is maize, or Indian corn, which is cultivated with the 

 greatest ease and may be planted so as to yield three crops a year, and 

 in such a way that it may yield at each harvest three times as much as 



