Editorials
Media
Part of The American Chamber of Commerce Journal
- Title
- Editorials
- Language
- English
- Source
- The American Chamber of Commerce Journal Volume 7 (Issue No. 10) October 1927
- Year
- 1927
- Rights
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- Fulltext
- 10 THE AMERICAN CHAMBER OF COMMERCE JOURNAL October, 1927 EDITORIAL OFFICES American Chamber of Commerce 180 CALLE DAVID P. O. Box 1638 Telephone 1156 THE HEGIRA We cannot be so sanguine as we should like to be over the political hegira to Washington. However, less harm may come of it than the possibilities suggest. Pilgrims have set out for Washington .before and valiantly sought advantages there, yet the country has kept on forward. Good men and fertile countries are hard to keep down, you can’t keep ’em down. In Manila the critical note in the younger element of the press should continue to be sounded with increasing vigor, for it wails justly about anomalies grown all but intolerable. Let editors all remember that the textbook situation isn’t improved by two men’s going away, nor the shipping situation, nor the crop situation; and that all these are present problems to be discussed and solved under any circumstances, new or old, that may continue or be created by political maneuvering. Jealous of its position as the fourth estate, the press should keep on probing so the people may know. Let us consider as put behind us definitely the day when at the beat of the tomtoms the public would figuratively don tight silk breeches and mother-of-pearl roundabouts and join the martial ranks of the barangays and pangulos. CAPITAL The best advantages from capital a country may enjoy are those adhering to domestic capital. All men who live within their income amass a little of this capital, and many men in the Philippines have a good deal of it. The terms therefore on which the National Development Company would dispose of the several government companies subsidiary to that company, to adequately financed entities, preferably going domestic concerns, are the soundest that could be suggested. It ought to be possible at least to sell Sabani estate and the Cement company locally. PHILIPPINE TONNAGE As we go to press the newspapers are pessimistic over the chances of the interisland shipping bill in the legislature, where it does not seem to have the sanction of the senate president. His statement cabled back from China to the Tribune rather too deftly sidesteps the issue, leaving it all to his colleagues, who may not know how to please him and are likely to decide upon no action whatever as the safest course. This is regret table. Made a common-carriers act, the bill ought to become law. Such action has been urged by the chambers of commerce, and they are the bodies best acquainted with what the public has been compelled to endure. Practically in this instance they are the voice of the people. Governed by the common-carriers clause, foreign owners might safely be given author ity to replace their old tonnage with new ships. There are at least two advantages in this: the new ships would be better than the old tubs now being used, which will continue in service if the act fails of passage, and passage of the act would make the common-carriers clause effective. If members do not wish to permit the foreign owners to buy new ships, then they might at least pass the common-carriers clause; but,’for a period at least, the two should go together. NEW SCHOOL TAXES The proposed new school taxes to bring 1-1/2 million pesos more into the school fund annually are less objectionable because they are excise taxes, but it is absurd to think that they would in any degree whatever solve the schools problem. It is founded in too many errors. Apparently it has been assumed that books take the place of qualified teachers. This can never occur, even when the books are excellent, and excellence is not a quality of many of the adopted textbooks. Suppose there were no books, then what teacher would be fit to stand before a class? Only the teacher to whom the textbook is an aid, not a complete reliance. But the text book question, though important enough to claim more of our attention at a later time, is after all a minor one. There are about a third of our children of school age in school, with the schools absorbing about a third of the tax revenues. Why? Because of the centralized system. This territory will one day discover what Japan discovered when she undertook popular education, and that is that the centralized system defeats itself because of the excessive cost. When this discovery is made the insular government will fix the scholastic qualifications of teachers in several gradations, maintain normal schools and possibly prescribe examinations; and it will leave the qualified teachers to deal with the local authorities for jobs, having first granted to the towns the right to impose the necessary taxes. When the schools become the main business of the towns, more of them will be maintained at less cost. Some communities will have shorter terms and some longer, but all will have what they can afford and there will be a balance between work and school. SCOTT NEARING Most of what Scott Nearing exploited in his speeches at the Y. M. C. A. (not under the auspices of that institution, however) and the Uni versity could be admitted as the obvious faults of society—for which bolshe vism is not a remedy. As an antidote to Nearing, Junius B. Wood’s unbiased paper on Russia today in the November 1926 Geographic ought to be read. Nearing himself said that society in Russia had been erected into seventeen classes by means of a wage scale. This single fact dismisses his whole argument, for outside Russia no such aristocracy exists in the modern world. These classes of his are parallel and rigid. You get into one of them and you stay put. Russia is still bubbling from the heat of revolution that hasn’t simmered down. When it finally cools, Russia will be like the rest of the world and share its respect for property. This respect for property doesn’t rest with men, but with women. Man is a mystic, but woman makes him work-a-day and practical. When man espouses celibacy, he goes up into a mountain or immures himself in a monastery and communes with mystery—calling it God. But when he espouses woman he works, and he works for her and her cubs. He works, too, for a particular woman, one who has put the Indian sign on him. In this city there may be 150,000 women. One of them, we know, has just had a birthday. She is the one who has the Indian sign on us—caus ing us to work through this beautiful Sunday—so she is the one whose birthday was honored with some plate for the table. We don’t give a hang for plate, there isn’t another darn table in town we’d care to buy a piece of it for; but we certainly do wish we might load this particular lady’s table down with it. Nearing’s case isn’t different from ours, nor Russia’s either. Communism doesn’t work, it makes the women cross, it isn’t biological. GORDIAN KNOTS Much has been done toward clarifying our organic act, but it is not enough so long as P3,500,000 of public works funds and other moneys loaned to the provinces are held from expenditure because the board pro vided in the law to apportion them seems to be an illegal one like the board of control which was abolished, and the board of university regents which still functions. Some authority should cut these Gordian knots at once and have all the agony over with. The improvements are needed. Who ever could go to court and doesn’t do it, is the fellow who is to blame. The insular auditor believes the loan board illegal, he has so ruled. Then let the supposed members sitting illegally be eliminated, so that they may have their day in court and the country may have the money. NEWSIES We hope no attention whatever will be paid the proposal to register newsboys and number them with brass tags. If the residents of this town have to depend upon the police to chastise an occasional delinquent among these jolly ragamuffins, then the residents have fallen to a hope less ebb in citizenship. The proposal is only designed to evoke fear of government in the juvenile mind, and the best part of this mind has always been that it flicks its nose at government and finds means of beating all regulations—so as to distribute more papers in less time, and please more customers. The self-reliance all these boys acquire offsets over and over again the petty infractions of the law some of them may commit. It may rain, but your morning paper comes; and typhoons may blow down trees and electric wires, the newsies somehow get through the entanglements and bring your paper. Let ’em alone.
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The Hegira
Capital
Philippine Tonnage
New School Taxes
Scott Nearing
Gordian Knots
Newsies