Quizzing the governor

Title

Language

English

Source

The American Chamber of Commerce Journal Volume 7 (Issue No.9) September 1927

Year

1927

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

EDITORIAL OFFICES American Chamber of Commerce P. O. Box 1638 Telephone 1156 EXPANSION It is very fortunate that the project to expand Manila by taking in five towns of the 27 embraced in Rizal was submitted to the legislature apart from the project for revising the city’s charter and improving its finances. To our way of thinking, whether the five towns or any of them wish to leave Rizal and come into the corporate limits of Manila or not ought to be left to them: all talk that they should be taken in, so as to give them a moral cleanup, is hypocrisy: that doctrine would, in the final analysis, make Manila embrace the islands. Property interests are the paramount consideration, and not big properties, but small ones. Taxes are another; and it seems probable that instead of adding anything to the city’s rev enues, the five towns would be an actual and considerable drain upon rev enues already too low. But in these five towns, Caloocan, Pasay, San Felipe Neri, San Juan del Monte and San Pedro Makati, with taxable real property valued at P22,617,520, a small bonded debt, 1’55,200, a population of 62,838 and voters numbering 12,029, are thousands of families with equities in homes which they are buying on the easy-payment plan. They have made careful calculations in order to undertake these obligations; their incomes are either salaries or wages and any unwonted expenditure would swamp them. Their tax rate now is 7/8%, taken into Manila it would be 1-1/2% or almost double; yet it is probable that the actual growth of population followed by greater demands for houses would not be such as to raise the level of rents in these distant places perceptibly, or the level of real estate values. Would such a procedure be due process of law? Perhaps not. Considered from the viewpoint of Rizal, the project appears in no better light; if anything, it appears in a worse light. Rizal now has 27 municipal ities. It is proposed to deprive her of five of her best ones, merely because she is adjacent to Manila—and quite unfortunately so, it would appear. If the legislature can do this without the consent of the people and province involved, then the towns and provinces have no political integrity and are all of them at the mercy of the capital. This absurdity may be the fact, but it ought not to be; and if it is and while it is, it certainly operates all the time to affect adversely the value of property. It should not be possible for the legislature to move a boundary an inch, or take one town or any portion of it and add it to another, without the formal consent of the people concerned. Rizal now has a revenue income of 1’572,012. She may have outstanding bonds; and if not, she should be .in a position to vote them for obviously necessary public improvements. Take away five of her best towns; deduct the revenue she has from them, and then try to imagine how she is to survive the blow. If these five towns are actually taken away, reason suggests that the legislature should not end its depredations there, but that it ought in mercy to go much farther and obliterate Rizal alto gether by portioning it out to the various adjoining provinces. The half measure would be ruinous all round. The Journal believes the suburbs are needed as they now are, and as they may slowly be able to improve themselves. It does not behold them sunk in crime, it would take no joy in sharing the expense of vice squads to adorn them with pretended purity. Manila formerly had a district for its Mrs. Warrens. It was done away with. The Mrs. Warrens thereupon domi'.iled themselves in suburban cottages, where their Manila clientele visits them and where it would be best to leave them alone. They no doubt have to pay the police hush money, as they did in Manila, but they have a chance to take care of them selves and keep off the public streets. OF COMMERCE JOURNAL September, 1927 QUIZZING THE GOVERNOR There is a rule of ethics at the Whitehouse biweekly interviews of the President with news men, that all questions are submitted in writing and if the President makes no comment they are treated as not having been submitted at all. If a similar rule prevailed at Malacafiang, the public would have had a straighter account of Governor Gilmore’s statement on the parliamentary government scheme, which, explicit and complete, follows: “Pending the appointment of a permanent governor general, I think it would be inappropriate for me to express publicly any views concerning the so-called ‘semiparliamentary’ form of government or concerning any policy of administration which would affect a change in the present form of government for these islands. As acting governor general, I am en deavoring to the best of my ability to carry on the executive department in keeping with the proper discharge of the responsibility imposed upon the governor general to see that the laws of the islands are faithfully executed and in accordance with what I understand to be the definitely announced policy of the President of the United States. Any change in the organic act is properly for Congress; any change in policy, for the President. I am more concerned about the practical administration of government and its results than about its precise form. Beyond this statement I do not care to say anything." Some of the papers dimmed the clarity of this by appending comment and surmises of their own, in the morning editions of September 2, and some of them had already said that Gilmore had forwarded a dispatch to Wash ington on the subject, which was later ascertained to be incorrect, for Gil more hadn’t. In brief, the public was given an erroneous impression of this whole affair, that better ethics respecting interviews with the executive would have made impossible. Gilmore’s stand is stated. Stet. SUGAR The Journal welcomes to Manila the members of the Philippine Sugar Association gathered for another annual meeting. Though sugar is not the most widely beneficial of our agricultural industries, it is by far the best organized. For this reason it forges ahead steadily, in good times and bad. Each succeeding year it attracts more capital, the crop regularly increases and new mills are built to take care of it. Prices have been low this year, yet it is reported the best in the islands’ history. The mill at San Fernando has paid off its indebtedness to the Philippine National Bank and the owners are making extensions. If they will, the Negros mills can do likewise. The more of these home-capital mills the better, since a larger share of the net profits from sugar will remain in the country for further and greatly needed farm development. After a while, who knows, the planters may find it possible to pay their help living wages. Sugar has a black history behind it. In some respects it seems to be like democracy, for which some one once said the only cure was more democracy. In Hawaii, for instance, they have apparently demonstrated that the remedy for the evils of the sugar industry is merely more sugar—more to the acre, to the plantation, to the mill. Paying the highest wages and employing the costliest land, Hawaii makes big dividends on sugar by making its yields so high and its mills so economical. The Philippines are most for tunate in having Hawaiian leadership in their own sugar industry. It’s far behind now, but it is catching up. THE GENESIS OF A PIER In Pier No. 7 which may be put down at 1’15,000,000 the islands have at Manila one of the world’s best units for the rapid handling of freight and convenient handling of passengers and baggage. But men complain of the cost, which seems to them, as it does to us, extraordinarily high. However, the rule holds good: the best comes high. With a good deal of asperity the legislature has often been blamed with the expense of this pier, fathering the project, etc., and while it is guilty of many excesses, blaming it with this is to miss the mark. Pier No. 7, if the Journal is correctly informed, was born in Washington and only adopted here—on the understanding that Washington would undertake other port improvements for its own account. But with Pier No. 7 provided, the policy of the ship ping board and fleet corporations changed under the Harding administra tion and the grandiose plans were left in abeyance or abandoned altogether. Quibbling about the pier might well cease, but taxpayers have a right to inquire why, if it is possible to find so much money for a pier in Manila, it is not possible to find a like sum or something near it for numerous piers for which there is much need at lesser ports throughout the archipelago. Pier No. 7 is bonded. It seems to us that the others might be too, and their earnings could be made to pay for them in 30 years.

pages

10

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