370 The National Geographic Magazine 



provinces lie in the low land, where 

 there is no rock which can be used to 

 be broken up and made good metal. 

 They have to go into the bottom of the 

 streams and get the gravel that comes 

 down from the mountains and use that. 

 And then we have, sometimes, six or 

 eight months of torrential rains. You 

 do not know what rains are, living here 

 in the temperate zone. Think of 52 

 inches of rain in one month ! That is 

 what they have in the province of Ben- 

 guet in the month of August. 



And then take another feature of the 

 civilization which we found there. It 

 would seem as though Providence or 

 nature were playing a joke. The roads 

 are very hard to construct ; but the 

 natives, in order to make it still harder 

 to preserve them, use wooden wheels 

 for their carts and shave them down on 

 the edge. They are solid wheels, and 

 they shave them down to a knife edge, 

 and then load the wagons and take them 

 in this rainy weather over the roads. 

 Well, the wheels cut as a razor would 

 cut your finger, and this plays havoc 

 with the roads. We attempted to cure 

 that by imposing a fine of five dollars 

 on every wagon that had a tire less than 

 2]/z inches broad. But they concluded 

 that this was only for taxation, and 

 they paid the tax and continued to use 

 the wagons. And then we had to im- 

 port wagon wheels to show them what 

 we meant, and we imposed a fine-and- 

 imprisonment penalty for the use of the 

 wagons with narrow-tired wheels. 



Of the three millions of dollars which 

 was voted by Congress part of it was 

 expended in order to break up a corner 

 in rice, which promised to be a rice 

 famine, and two millions of it were 

 spent in the construction of roads. 

 Those roads are not all completed yet. 

 You know that when you go through 

 a tropical jungle with engineering in- 

 struments it is not so easy a matter as 

 in this country, where you can see a 

 long distance ahead, and the very work 



of laying out a road is a long one, taken 

 with the difficulty of getting the mate- 

 rial for making a permanent road. All 

 road building must go slowly. There- 

 fore when a gentleman goes along 

 on an inspection tour in the Princess 

 Irejie, or one of those beautiful vessels 

 of the Hamburg Steamship Company, 

 and lands in India at Bombay, and 

 drives out and sees those beautiful roads 

 all through India, that have for 250 

 years been building, and then comes to 

 Ceylon, where they have for so many 

 years been building roads under the 

 Dutch and English, and then comes to 

 Singapore and into the Confederated 

 Malay States, w 7 here they do not have 

 any taxes, because they raise so much 

 money out of the three-quarters of the 

 tin product of the world that they get 

 out of the mines there — they have been 

 50 years building roads — and then 

 comes here to the poor Filipinos and 

 finds that roads have not been con- 

 structed on every one of the 100 islands, 

 and that the roads that have been con- 

 structed show signs of the previous 

 year's torrential rains — it is a little 

 difficult for a critic, however impartial, 

 not to think that the government is 

 very much to blame for not having con- 

 structed all those roads through all the 

 islands as they ought to be, and as I 

 hope some day they will be constructed, 

 both for the peace of the islands and for 

 the uplifting of the population. But 

 meantime we are doing what we can. 



NEW HARBORS, A PURE WATER 

 SUPPLY, AND RAILWAYS 



Well, to begin with, we have united 

 Manila with every one of the 44 prov- 

 inces by telegraph lines, and this is an 

 opportunity for the spread of informa- 

 tion and intercommunication. We have 

 very good postal facilities. We have 

 just opened 33 miles of street railway in 

 Manila, and that a modern street rail- 

 way. Manila, for its population, had. 

 more teams and more horses and vehi- 



