RECENT FOREST PROPAGANDA IN THE PHILIPPINES 743 



clusively of Filipinos. They also comprise a majority of the Commis- 

 sion, or Upper House. On the bench they are in the majority, and the 

 Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a Filipino. All justices of the 

 peace and all prosecuting- attorneys are Filipinos. One departmental 

 portfolio is held permanently, and a second temporarily, by a Filipino. 

 The Bureaus of Justice, of Labor, and of Lands are all under the 

 direction of Filipinos, and in certain other bureaus there are Filipino 

 assistant directors. Even in the other governmental activities directed 

 by Americans the Filipino influence, direct and indirect, must be given 

 very serious consideration. To the Bureau of Forestry, as to most 

 other bureaus, Filipino support in the legislature, or at the very least 

 the absence of strong Filipino opposition, is essential in securing pro- 

 gressive legislation and needed increases in authorized personnel and 

 appropriations as well as for defense against inevitable attacks made 

 from selfish motives, from misunderstandings, or from any of the other 

 causes which find voice in the Philippine legislature as well as in the 

 State legislatures and the Congress of the United States. The very 

 existence of the Bureau as a separate entity — certainly the continua- 

 tion, not to speak of the etxension, of its efifectiveness — depends upon 

 the attitude of the leaders of the Filipino people as interpreted through 

 the legislature, the courts, and in co-ordinate bureaus of the executive 

 branch of the government. 



Linder these conditions, it was long felt that an active educational 

 campaign, waged patiently and tirelessly until success is attained, is 

 absolutely essential to any real and permanent forestry work in the 

 Philippines ; but it was comparatively of only recent date that the Bu- 

 reau's personnel and funds could in any real degree be detracted from 

 the constructive work of essential organization to take up a propaganda 

 long desired but necessarily postponed. The early foresters and ran- 

 gers were engrossed in the pioneer work of making an inventory of 

 the Islands' forest resources ; in creating, even more than reconstruct- 

 ing (for the material at hand was lamentably small), the broad lines 

 of organization on which the present and the future of the Bureau rest ; 

 in studying the people — their needs, their points of view, their psychol- 

 ogy — and thus furnishing the data so essential for any popular cam- 

 paign, but most of- all in demonstrating to the people (which, after all, 

 is the truest and most efifective propaganda) the sincerity of their mo- 

 tives, the wisdom of their advice, the real meaning of their official 

 acts, and theeir own tireless eflforts to promote the good of the people 

 among whom their adopted work lay. Privations, and even dangers 

 (for one forest party was annihilated by the wild inhabitants of the 



