Panorama. Vol. VII, No.8 July 1955

Media

Part of Panorama

Title: Panorama. Vol. VII, No.8 July 1955
Issue Date: VII (No. 8) July 1955
Year: 1955
Language: English
Rights
extracted text: JULY 1955 VOL. VII MANILA, PHILIPPINES No. 8 An able and practical economist defines the Philippines' economic position and suggests realistic solutions to her pressing problems Our Economic Goals By FILEMON RODRIGUEZ Coordinator of U.S. Aid T HE ECONOMIC goals of the Philippines are directed principally and ultimately to the economic security and stability of the Philippines and the happiness, prosperity and contentment of the Filipino people. We can have all the political instit~tions necessary, all the social organizations that we require, all the cultural background that we need, but unless we attain economic stability, we cannot have national security and happiness for our people. So there in brief is the synthesis of the supreme goal. Now, what are the economic goals which are necessary in order to attain that ultimate nationai goal? I wish to discuss these problems against the backdrop of our present difficult economic position. What is our present economic position? First and foremost, we have an economy which is dependent upon the fluctuations and the demands of a foreign market. Forty percent of our national income comes from our exports which are sent and sold abroad and on which we depend for the necessary income with which to buy the requirements of our people from safety pins to large machinery. Because of our increasing population and our increasing demands and wants, induced by our educational system which provokes our desire for the better things of life, we continuously demand more and more goods that we need in our daily life. Our capacity to import, however, is limited by our capacity to export. So then, the first requirement to solve this situation is to produce more of the things that we need here, to promote what they call "domestic supply and demand economy'' in which most of our requirements will be supplied locally and we will produce more and more of the things that are to be imported from abroad. In this manner, our demands can increase by 1 e a p s and bounds, without limit, because our capacity to supply and pro2 duce will al',· be able to expand without Emit. There will be no outside limitation then to our capacity to consume the things that. we are producing·. THE OTHER problem that is confronting us is the problem of unemployment. There are varied statistics on this subject. We do not exactly know what our unemployment figures are but the estimate ranges from 1,200,000 to about 1,800,. 000. This does not take into account the under-employment which means the limited utiliza-. tion of our manpower especially in the agricultural areas, which is estimated roughly at about 31/2 million. The degree of unemployment is of course an indication of the fact that a good number of our people are not given the opportunity to earn their livelihood and contribute to the national production. At the same time that they are deprived of thtiii opportunity to earn a decent living, they are exposed to the possibility of subversion to outside political ideologies. The other problem is insufftl. cient production and income. Statistics indicate that the per capita production in the Philippines is about P340 annually. This amount is indeed very meager taking into account the price of things nowadays. If you consider the fact that this is the average figure you will PANORAMA Photo b11 l>ERR!CK KNIGHT, Shell Pbotoeraphic t:nit, London GREATER EMPHASIS on industrialization is the first principle enunciated J:iy President Magsaysay under the 5-year economic development program. Above, a Manila mill spins jute bags out of local raw materials. realize that there are numerous people who earn much less and therefore can have nothing more than bare subsistence level. There are other problems connected with this, among which are the unbalanced distribution of the fruits of production; the underdeveloped condition of our rural areas; the unbalanced employment situation; and the great disparit~ between the so called "rich" ahd the so called "poor." On top of all these, is the foreign control of the channels of distribution and the inefficient condition of our trausportation and communication systems. If we were not basically a contented people, if we were not basically trained in the philosophy of "bahala na," I believe that this situation would have raised more dangerous signals than we see today; yet what we see even now are dangerous enough if we take into account the potentialities for deterioration in the future unless proper measures and remedies are taken in due time. J HA VE given the problems in order to indicate the lines of action that are opened to us if we are to improve our economic situation. The first objective of our economic plans should be the creation of employment opportunities and the increase of our national production and income. 4 These measures can be put into effect by a series of correlated plans and programs as embodied in our draft of the 5-year economic development program duly enunciated by President Magsaysay. There are basic principles that underlie our present program in its attack on these economic problems. The first is greater emphasis on industrialization. This is very evident because so far we have b e e n always an agricultural country. Fully 7 5 7o of our people depend on the land. We have to depend for our national employment and income largely on our export products and we import finished goods from abroad. In line with the idea of promoting the domestic demand and supply in the Philippines, we should resort gradually to the program of industrialization in order that in the Philippines we can transform some of our raw materials into finished products that we can use here. In that way we can increase our national production, increase employment of our people, reduce our dependence on foreign markets and increase the capacity and ability to consume. The next principle is the attainment of a balance between production and employment. In this rush to produce we are ljable to fqrget employment. In many advanced countries in the world where there is labor shortage, they have to resort more PANORAMA and more to the use of mechanical equipment in their process of production. We want to follow the same system in so far as possible in order to promote efficiency and multiply the production capacity of our workers, but at the same time we should not sacrifice the employment goal that we have. T HE OTHER principle is the expansion of domestic demand. Our domestic demand is expanding because of certain forces in action within our society. First is the increase of our population which is variedly estimated at from 1.9 to 2.3 millions annually. The second is the fact that our educational system has succeeded to provoke ambitions or aspirations among our people to improve their living standard which manifests itself in the increased demand for goods necessary for modern life. The expansion of domestic demand must however be channeled to the utilization of local products. It will be dangerous to provoke the desires of our people, to expand the domestic demand if the things that we need are not produced locally Our Economy at a Glance Sources and Disposition of the Gross National Product, 1952 and 1953 1952 1953 Amount I Distri- ' Item bution Amount: Distribution ' I Million Percent Million Percent Pesos Pesos Source: I Compensation of employees .......... 2.4~3 31.·l ~.649 I 31.7 Entrepreneurial and property income of ! persons ····························. 4,190 i>2.9 4,437 i 53.1 Other private income . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 3.0 262 3.1 Property income of government ....... 29 0.4 27 : 0.3 Total National Income at Facto'!" Cost J 6,952 87.7 7,376 88.2 Depreciation .......................... 390 4.9 432 I 2.:; Indirect taxes less subsidies ........... 583 7.4 549 I G.G ---I Total: Gross National Product at market prices ········ ...... ·············· 7,925 100.0 8,356 I 100.0 - - - - Disposition: Private consumption ·················· 6,858 86.6 7,123 85.2 Government current expenditures ····· 593 7.5. 606 7.3 Gross domestic investment ············ 686 7.4 697 8.3 Net exports and investment income ... 112 1.4 -70 .. o.8 Total: Gross National Product at market prices ···························· 7,925 100.0 8,356 100.0 - I -- -- -and which will therefore require importation that we cannot afford. All that we will do then will be to create discontent and unhappiness. The next principle is diversification of exports and expansion of world market. In our desire to promote domestic demand we must no11 forget that we are a part of a larger economic unit which is the world. We must expand and diversify our export. We should also try to spread our trade to other countries, to Europe and to our neighboring countries 'in Asia, instead of channelling most of our export as we have done in the past to the United States almost exclusively. Another principle is balance between consumption and investment. This is a principle which our educational system could very . well take into account and include in its program of public instruction. There must be a balance between consumption and investment not only in the family but also in the nation as a whole. We cannot prepare for the future unless we save and invest. We cannot establish within the Philippines industrial plan.ts and other productive fa· cilities, we cannot develop . our resources, unless we invest and we can only invest if we have savings to invest. 6 A NOTHER principle is the modernization of our produc· tion facilities. I think we have heard time and again that our agricultural practices are primi:. tive, and for that reason our production is very inadequate and that contributes very greatly to our low income per. capita. We have to modernize our productive facilities. We have to train our farmers in the modem techniques of agriculture. The President has always advocated the progressive development of our rural communities. That has to be one of the· important principles of our economic. development because unless we can convert our rural community to a more productive unit of production, we will not be fully successful in attainin& our goals of economic and social betterment. The other principle is emphs· sis on the proper role of private enterprise a11d the balance. between public and private investment. We have always been told that the government should get out of business and that everything should be left to private initiative. I am one of those who are strong advocates of giving due emphasis to private investment. We have to develop private initiative and encourage investment in the private sector because that is the only way in the long run by which we can develop to the utmost our naPANORAMA tional economy. However, in this stage of our national development we can not escape the fact that the government will have to take a leading role in promoting certain commercial and industrial enterprises. Where there is insufficient private initiative on which to rely, the government has to take an aggressive role because unless it does so we \vill proceed very slowly which in effect will be retrogression. I am the first to confess that government administration of pindustrial enterprises is not the best that there could be. In my experience in the National Power Corporation where, modesty aside, we have attained a certain measure of success, this success has been achieved with a great deal of sacrifice and extraordinary effort in resisting outside pressures and undesirable influences which would have affected adversely our operations. Industrial enterprises a n d commercial ventures of the government will at all times be subject to terrific influences that will make them inefficient, incompetent and wasteful and in the end make them fail. But notwithstanding this situation, I will still say that we have to take an aggressive action on the part of the government to pave the way for pri,vate initiative. JULY 1955 J N ,JRDER THAT action can proceed toward the goals of economic development, naturally, we must ·have plans and programs. The most recent program was the one made last year upon instruction of the President to the National Economic Council. This program has for its goal the increase of the national income by about 5 to 10 percent annually during the next S years. We have to increase the national income at least by that amount in order that we can provide for the increasing population annually and at the same time have a little margin that will support an increase in the stapdard of living of the people. To accomplish this, the program includes targets of production in agriculture, in mines, in jndustry and in all phases of economic activity. For example, pur food crop has been estimated to be increased from the 1953 level by 64 percent by 1959 and mineral products are to be increased by about 30 percent. Some say that the plan is ambitious. But what is wrong with ambition? The planners must of necessity be optimists. It is up to the implementation to keep up as best as possible with the pace of the plan and if difficulties should arise and the objectives set cannot be attained . fully, we can always revise our targets correspondingly. 7 Ifs the world's most versatile fruit! 8 By Nicetas V. Epistola a N THE Philippines one fruit occupies a seat of undisputed popularity-the banana. To most families no meal is truly complete without it; to others it is a meal in itself, eaten with a plate of rice. Among the old folks banana rates high in ac" ceptance because their den'~ tures, incapacitated by long faithful service, find it tender. Toothless gums can actually enjoy the soothing, delicious pulp. And to the infants, banana is just as popular. It is one of the very first solid foods served to them, as a matter of fact. Mothers know this only too well: banana makes an excellent choice because it is cheap and easy to serve. Banana eases pain just as well as it appeases hunger. If one should accidentally lodge a fishbone in his throat, banana comes to the rescue. It helps dislodge the fishbone, or any bone for that matter. It helps PANORAMA stop pain. And when pills and tablets become to be disgustingly too large to swallow at e,pse, banana again comes in handy. It carries the stubborn J'lills in its sweet slippery pulp down through the sensitive esophagus. Indeed so versatile is the banana that an American medical group once endorsed it as a wonder food with no less than a1 desirable features! In the Philippines where the fruit is abundant at all times, it is generally taken for granted. Yet it remains the No. 1 favorite. BANANA, ACCORDING to the encyclopedia, is a typical "tree-like herb of many varieties growing about twenty feet high and bearing a long hanging cluster of sweet pulpy fruit." It is known that some three thousand years ago China first cultivated this plant. Since then lhe banana has been transport~ ed from one country to another. Today almost all moist tropical regions of the world grow banana. ... In the Philippines there are over a hundred varieties of this fruit known. Most of them, however, are grown for fancy purposes. Dr. Nernesio Men.diola, a noted Filipino agriculturist, gives in one of his agrioultural bulletins at least seven of the most popular varieties in the Philippines. These are: JULY 1955 1. Latundan which is the most common of the varieties. 2. Bungulan which is accepted for its good flavor. 3. Lakatan which, with its long keeping quality, its pleasing aroma and good flavor, makes it very popular. 4. Saba which is the most popular of the varieties for cooking purposes. 5. Katali which has good flavor but which is inclined to be seedy. It is often prescribed as a sure cure for digestive disorder. 6. Arnbon which is the most popular of the newly introduced variety. Many fanciers take am bon as an improvement of the bungulan, which it resembles quite closely. It is especially liked by Americans. 7. The Chinese dwarfs or cavendish which are similar to the bungulan both in appearance and in flavor. The difference between the two seems to lie in the structure of their plants. The C hi n e s e dwarfs have low but stocky plants. A number of these varieties are raised in backyards without proper cultivation. Most of them grow wild. Never raised locally for export, banana could nevertheless be a dollar-producing item. Neighboring tern9 HOW RICH IS IT? f.,at:~ndan n1p1._r1ulro:, [.c;hnfan Saba Glor ya Calories 91 90 106 88 138 Protein 1. 2 1.0 1.4 1.4 1.1 Fat 0.5 0.7 0.7 0.7 0.7 Carbohydrates 20.4 19 .9 23.6 19.0 31.9 Calcium 14.3 7.1 14.3 7.1 . 71 Phosphorus 15.5 8.9 13.3 15.5 15.5 ~on 0.7 .35 0.3 0.7 0.7 Vitamin A 247 122 10 Thiamine .02 .08 .04 Riboflavin .04 .03 .02 Niacin .50 Ascorbic Add 10.0 Note: Except for Ascorbic Acid v0 :hich is given in International Units, all figures stand for milligrams. perate countries such as Japan, for example, may want it. Or if proper refrigeration and packing methods can be devised, the fruit may go even farther in the world trade channel. From the standpoint of nutritive value, banana is a giant in its own class. It offers a wellrounded supply of vitamins and minerals, the elements extremely essential to the growth and maintenance of the human body. Dr. Isabelo Concepcion of the Philippine Institute of Nutrition, leading nutritionist and dietician, conducted experiments to determine how rich the foods commonly served at our tables are. A careful study was made of the banana, among others. H'\e found out that of the seven varieties given, the saba varie10 ty is the richest from the standpoint of nutrition (See table). The others have more or less the same nutritive qualities. variety rich in one food nutrient is usually outdone in another. Similar studies have esta.,. blished that banana contains very little fat. This accounts for its being very digestible. Very old as well as very young people whose digestive organs are not as reliable as those of others, find banana· very compatible with their digestive systems. The banana is a mild laxative; it may be used to manage constipation. But it is also used to control loose bowel movements or diarrhea. It does not contain much sodium either. Those afflicted with high blood pressure and heart PANORAMA disease can take the fruit with impunity. But that is not all. Banana is used as both a reducing and a high-calorie diet. The energy value of the food we eat is determined by the amount of heat it gives off when oxidized in the cells. Calorie is the unit of measure of heat. The banana contains much calories. But though rich in calories, it is still prescribed in reducing diets. Its value in such diets lies \n the fact that .the fruit leaves the stomach rather slowly, thus preventing the person from getting hungry between meals. It prevents nibbling, the mortal enemy of the half-hearted reducer. Not the least quality of all is the fact that banana is the easiest food to handle, to eat or to prepare. It is "sealed by nature in a dust-proof package" and can be readily and safely eaten out of hand. It can be cooked in many varied ways. It can be baked. It can be fried. It can be broiled. In milk shakes and in salads it makes good ingredient. In short, banana is truly a versatile fruit that comes the whole year round. * * * The Malolos Congress, which met on September 15, 1898, was the first genuinely representative body convened in the Philippines. Representatives to the Congress were elected in all the provinces where peace and order prevailed. Members for the provinces where elections could not be held were appointed by the Revolutionary Government. The elective and appointive delegates represented the cream of the Filipino intelligentsia. The purpose in convening the Malolos Congress was to advise the President on the prosecution of the Revolution. Soon after its organization, the Congress ratified, on September 29, 1898, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed on June 12 of that year. Its most important achievement, however, was the framing of the Constitution of the Philippine Republic. * JULY 1955 11 The story of slaver}' Honor the C9hain-18real~ers 1=1 By MATHIAS SEGOVIA ("{"'HEY are rounded up on a 1 beach and then baptized with holy water from a sprinkler,'' wrote Father Mercado. "This is monstrous, for after having been made· Christians they are then treated like animals, embarked on an old tub of a ship and then fastened up in the hold like so many pigs." The entry is from a journal dated 1562. Yet it could just as well be the report of conditions centuries before Christ or as late as 1835. In the early nineteenth century slavery still flourished in the colonies of European coun:.. tries and in North and South America, nations otherwise · highly developed. Yet within half a c~ntury slavery was everywhere abolished. Why? Because a few courageous men refused to believe that history must repeat itself. The tradition of slavery is so ancient as to seem respect12 able. Babylonia's earliest laws recogniz~ one man's right to' own another, as he might own a goat. Egypt, Greece, Rome, and most of the ancient Orient practised slavery. Even Aristotle said, "The lower sort of mankind are by nature slaves, and it is better for them, as for all inferiors, that they should be under the rule of a master." Sometimes men ~old themselves or were legally enslaved. to pay a debt. Sometimes slaves were simply' persons conquered in another land, foreigners generally being considered inferior to one's own people. Caesar once sold 60,000 captives outright. Slaves were the machines that built Pharoah's monuments and Rome's aqueducts; that manned the oars of galleys or mined the earth. Sometimes, as in Athens, slaves dressed like other residents and could buy their freedom. In PANORAMA Rome they were not only farm hands, acrobats and gladiators but also teachers and physi~ians. y ET SLAVES could never own goods or take part in public life. Their children belonged to their master. The most formidable slave uprising was Spartacus' in Rome (73 B.C.). Escaping from the gladiator school, he gathereq an army of 60,000 runaway slaves like himself, on Mt. Vesuvius. For two years he held off army after army. But finally he was slain and 6,000 of his followers were crucified along the Appian Way. Their next chance· came with Christianity and the doctrine of brotherly love. At the same time, the Chinese emperor Kuank!.Wu passed laws to protect slaves from murder and mutilation. For his part, Mohammet declared, "He who frees a slave redeems his entire body from the fire of hell." In India, where cleavage followed caste, slavery was seldom practised; in J a pan it was evidently unknown. In Europe after the 4th century slavery was replaced by feudal serfdom, which bound a man to a section of land rather than to another man. When the land was sold, he and his family went with it. He could not even give his daughter in marriage without permission. Serfdom ceased in England after the great Peasant Revolt of 1381; in France' in 1789; .in Russia in 1861, when Czar Alexander II liberated 40 million serfs. Slavery revived in the 15th century when Europeans reached Africa. ' The "cargoes of despair'' were familiar sights on the seas to the New World. In 300 ·years over 32 million negros were shipped to America! For one negro who arTHE LONG BLOODY MARCH "The march to the African coast was a terrible experience, often lasting three months or more. The slaves were usually roped or chained together by their necks, their hands bound behind their backs; sometimes they were gagged by having a piece of wood like a snaffle tied into their mouths. If suspected of trying to escape tney were shackled with beams of wood, some of which were as thick as a man's thigh, and six feet long with a fork at one end in which the neck was secured by an iron pin. If a halt was called for trading the gang was herded together in a hastily built stockade." JULY 1955 13 rived alive, four died in African manhunts or during the crossing. Conditions aboard ship were indescribable. William Penn, as early as 1697, urged abolition. Thomas Jefferson favored it so strongly that only one vote was lacking to make the end of slavery part of the American Constitution, in 1787. <D ENMARK was the first Western nation to abolish the slave trade (1792). Through the efforts of William Wilberforce,· England followed example in 18(};]; the United States in 1808. Only slave commerce was forbidden; slavery itself continued. By a decree of its National Convention in 1794, France became the first great nation to abolish slavery itself, thanks to Abbe Gregoire who also restored rights to the Jews. When Napoleon reestablished slavery in the colonies, abolition had to wait until 1848 to be practised again. Around 1856, forty slaveships left North America every year and brought in 17 million dollars' profit. Only a bloody civil Wqr and a constitutional amendment (in 1865) could end slavery in the United States. In Latin America, Ecuador (1851) was first to liberate its. slaves; but Brazil held out almost 40 more years. Because Brazil's negroes often were more literate than their masters, just as often they rebelled, retiring to jungle settlements called quilombos. The most famous was the quilombo of Palmares, established when thousands of fugitives in the 17th century fortified a series' of villages for over 240 miles. For 70 years they defied the Dutch and Portuguese succe!:isfully. In 1831, public opinion in Brazil forced the freedom of any slave who had his purchase price; in 1871 children of slaves born after that year were born free. Under the impetus of violent spokesmen such as Joaquin Nabuco 8.nd Ruy Barbosa, the last 600,000 negroes were emancipated by royal decree in 1888. When the full history of such movements is finally told, how few will be the men who dared to break the chains of inhumane custom! * * * * 14 Labor disgraces no man; unfortunately you occasionally find men disgrace labor. -Ulysses S. Grant PANORAMA Francisco Benitez, education dean of the University of the Philippines for over 30 years, died on June 30, 1951 at the age of 64. He was considered the country's foremost educator in his time. Starting as a barrio school principal, he rose to the highest academic positions, at one time serving as secretary of education. In the accompanying essay, reprinted in commemoration of his death, a former student records familiar glimpses of the "grand old man." ~Y FONDEST recollections ' ' " of Dean Benitez are associated with the most casual moments I had with him. t think that was one of the secrets of his personality. He could be casual about the most serious things. He could make you feel, when faced with disaster, that you are lucky - lucky, as he would tell you, that worse could have happened to you and hasn't. I remember one afternoon I met him in downtown Manila. I had spent hours looking for a cheap pair of shoes and had finally given up. Then I saw him, ambling leisurely down Carriedo, as he was wont to do, with his folded umbrella slung in the crook of his arm. He readily accepted my invitation to a cup of coffee. Soon we were seated m a restaurant. JULY 1955 "Dean,'' I said, "you are one of the funniest people I know. You can afford to ride in cars, yet you walk and ride in buses." "I like people," he chortled. T h e n a long, characteristic pause. "You can't meet people when you are stuffed up in a car!" Then I remembered that as far back as the time I first met him a few years ago, when I was a senior student in education, he had always come to school in a bus. I remembered, too, he once lost his wallet and at another time h{s fountain pen - picked, obviously, by the same people he loved to ride with. Dean Benitez impressed me as an extremely simple man. He loved nice things, nice food and nice clothes, but his taste was simple. The U.P. presidency 15 had just been vacated. As one of the popular nominees for the post whose names cropped up now and then in the papers and among friends, he was never perturbed. "Suppose, Dean," I ventured once, "suppose they made you president - how would you take it?" He gave a deep chuckle. "That would be interesting, wouldn't it?" he said. "Then I would lose much of my personal freedom. ;Imagine me drinking coffee with you on Avenida Rizal while car No. 18 is parked outside!" He loved his personal freedom. It was his way of life. He would never have admitted it, but he exercised this freedom that all those around him might share with it, that they may be freed of the materialistic shackles of a selfish world. He was never a philanthropist in the outlandish sense of the word. But the people he had helped materially, or those who had come to him broken in spirit and departed with a kind word, know there was not a more kindly man. ()NE AF!E~NO~N I_ went. to see him m his office which he had furnished well and called his second home, but found him busy with a guest. Returning the following day, I mentioned about his visitor. It turned out to be a remarkable sob story. The guest was a relative of 16 some kind, he told me. One of those long lost relatives. She had ridden out to DiEman with him in the same bus, witho-tt recognizing him. Reaching the place, they both alighted arn;l proceeded to the dean's office. It was then that the Dean learned that the old woman was looking for a relative, a certain "Dean Francisco Benitez." She was in some kind of trouble, mostly financial. "It was an interesting reunion," the Dean recounted afterwards. "After she had left; I began thinking how expen} sive it could be to find a long lost relative." Those who knew the late Dean could not help but get infected with his sense of humor. Intellectually, he perhaps had few peers. But you would never catch him showing off. When in conversation he lapsed into a favorite pedagogical mood, he would gloss it ovel' apologetically and say promptly, "I am sorry for you. You came here for conversation and I am giving you a lecture." Of course, it was no lecture: Even to my young mind, years ago when I was taking a course in professional ethics under him, the casual gravity of his wisdom struck a deep note. I remember how he wou!d enter the room without book or notes and converse-for he never lectured-about his subject matr PANORAMA ter for an hour. We would follow his talk as leisurely as he gave it, and watch him relish ~.'ith enthusiasm the seemingly inconsequential anecdotes that filled his talk. And at the end we felt richer by an experience no textbooks could have given us. ")TWAS no secret even to those who had known him only casually that Dean Benitez was a democrat-a diehard democrat. His Catholicity was manifest in all his actions. I used to enjoy calling him a bourgeois. How could he be a good dean, I told him, when he was of the moneyed class? How could he appreciate the bread1¥,ld-butter problems of the poor teacher when he did not know poverty? Of course, he denied it. One day, though, he told me: "I am quoting a reliable source. It says, 'Dean Francisco Benitez-a student of communism, but hopelessly bourgeois/" The statement, he explained, was an official appraisal of himself by some confidential source after a thorough study. It was I think during the time the communist bogey was throwing a sinister shadow in every corner. "There you see," I said triumphantly. But of course I knew he was no more "bourgeois" than-the fellow who cleans his office with a mop. Did he not ride home with the janitor in the same Halili bus? ?It y LATEST recollection· of him was in the faculty conference in Baguio last summer, when I was taking down' notes. Somewhere in the closing remarks the Dean said, "The old should learn to give r.a place for the young . . . For those of us who may not come back here next year, this is our last conference . . ." It was his last conference. Yet to me, he is still the old man, folded umbrella in the hook of his arm, who toddles out of his office late in the afternoon to wait for the bus to take him home. - F. C. Sta. Maria * * * * The biggest problem in the world could have been solved when it was small. -Witter Bynner JULY 1955 17 The Chinese invented it Out of the woods, into print By FENIX MADURA LONG BEFORE man had paper, he tried to write on bones, stones and wood, slabs of clay or metal. Next, he tried fabrics, then papyrus (palm leaves) and finally parchment made from animal skins - a material used by Western lawyers as late as the 19th century. But all these writing surfaces were either bulky or expensive or deteriorated easily. A Gutenberg Bible required the use of 300 sheepskins. Centuries before Gutenberg, however, the Chinese had progressed rapidly from tree barks to bamboo and silk, for surfaces. Because they used a camel's hair brush with fluid for their calligraphy, they needed and did invent true paper (made of vegetable fiber) by 105 A.D. Paper was valued so highly that it was immediately used 18 ornamentally in Chinese temples. Although it did not reach Japan until the 7th century, 100 years after paper's arrival the first printing on paper was accomplished when, at the <:trder of Empress Shotoku, charms were printed on the new material Knowledge of paper spread even more slowly to the West. because the process was a closely-guarded Oriental secret. Nevertheless, Chinese prisoners taken in a Turkestan battle in 751 included skilled papE\1"workers. By 900, paper was being manufactured in Egypt; by 1100 in Morocco, and thence to Spain. EVEN THEN, in Europe paper was higher and more fragile than parchment, and was distrusted for having been introduced by the infidel M&sPANORAMA HOW TO MAKE PAPER The steps for making paper, no matter what kind, can be counted--exactly--on the fingers of one hand. 1) Separate the cellulose fiber from the raw material. 2) Reduce the fiber to a watery pulp. 3) Beat the pulp until the fibers are bf the reqmred thinness and are thoroughft- mixed with certain chemicals. 4) Form a "web" of paper on a fine sieve which lets the water run through but holds the solid parts in a thin, even layer on top. 5) Dry, smooth and finish the paper web in var· ious ways. lems and Jews. By the end of the 13th century, Italian industry finally managed to bring the price of 12 sheets of paper do\VIl to that of one sheet of parchment. The French and Germans used Italian paper for a whole century before developing their own. With the introduction of printing to the West, towards the middle of the 15th century, the great "document battles" of humanism, the Reformation and the counter-Reformation, were vastly stimulated. Nevertheless, paper was still despisJULY 1955 ed in England until the end of the 16th century when a German goldsmith to Queen Elizabeth opened a business which quickly prospered. Because the Dutch, meanwhile, had taken advantage of Germany's being busied with the Thirty Years' War, by the 17th century Dutch paper was considered the finest in the world. It was in Amsterdam that Rittinghausen was trained, who thought later he had set up the first paper mill in the New World when, in 1690, he constructed one in Philadelphia. (However, Mayas of South America had learned to make their own paper centuries before; and since 1580, Mexico had had a well-functioning mill.) The processes of the 17th century (and even the 20th) have changed little from those discovered by pre-Machine Age Chinese. The raw material - bamboo, rags, straw, bark or coniferous wood - still has to be softened and ground. Pressing and drying remain necessary. The vatsman ........ who withdraws the mould which has been plunged into pulp and then shakes the fibers so that they fall in perfect formation - continues to be the key worker in the highclass- paper industry. His assistant, who removes the sheet onto the felt until he 19 has a. pile for the press, is called a coucher. His duties are the same as his ancestors'. However, although man's work has hardly changed, the devices that assist him in this process have often been seriously modified. LONG AGO the Arabs turned to water power, instead of pestle and mortar, for crushing the raw material ir;ito pulp. Their paper mill with its battery of beaters was not replaced until the 17th century Dutch built a water wheel that revolved 36 iron knives, slashing and cutting. In the eighteenth century, Baskerville invented a wire frame which "wove" a paper called vellum perfectly smooth. Meanwhile, Reaumur observing that wasps make their nests from wood filaments that resemble paper, suggested that man could also make paper from wood. The idea, unfortunately, was not definitely accepted until a German weaver_, Friedrich Gottlob Keller, discovered wood pulp in 1844. Likewise, the main operation in papermaking - draining out the moisture - was done by hand until 1824, when machines took over that labor. Before that, from 1798 on, a series of machines were developed which, by enabling paper of unlimited length to be 20 produced, made possible the modern rotary press. Of course, paper has seen many other uses bes~des that df newsprint. Already in the 6th century, under Emperor Kao Tsung, paper money replaced silver in Chinese tombs. Marco Polo was amazed at the variety of ceremonial papers burned by Chinese during festivities. Linings for clothing, sandals, slippers, toys and fireworks took for granted such use of paper. · In Japan the same material1 has had an equally long history: for window-panes (paper, unlike glass, lets in healthful ultra-violet rays), lanterns, screens, umbrellas, overcoats, bags, covers. Plain or finished, oiled or glued paper articles still dominate everyday usage. W HEN RAW materials ll:t America were scarce, in the 19th century, firms tried to use bandages imported from Egyptian mummies! But when wood pulp was discovered, col" lars, cuffs and even shirt fronts of paper went on sale in New York. Within ten years, aprons, hats, carpets, floors, coffins, and houses became paper. London and Oslo each have a paper church! In 1883, a Dresden clockmaker produced a clock made entirely of paper. In 1891, th.e PANORAMA Bell Company used it to insulate cables. In 1897, paper horseshoes came to Chicago. Paper now has over 14,000 uses; but still its most impor- · tant use (besides being the one which annually consumes millions of tons of trees) remains that of newsprint, for the dissemination of truth around the corners of the world. A newspaper weighing almost 2 pound requires ~ver 5 pounds of mate;rials to produce it: 3 pounds of spruce, 1 ounce of sulphur, 1 ounce of bleaching powder, 1.5 ounces of unslaked lime, and red and blue dye-fused by about 2 pounds of coal (itself a form of wood). All this work and the constant care required to guard forests against serious depletion show the value that the world puts on the printed page and its contribution to the freeing of the human mind. * * * * 'Pa/Wt 1(/Md4, PAPER: Plant or vegetable fiber called cellulose< is at the base of almost every kind of paper. In practice, however, only a few kinds are used commercially. Two-thirds of all paper comes from woodpulp; some from hemp, jute, straw, sugar cane waste, rags, etc. A quarter of all new paper comes from waste paper. PULPWOOD: softwood trees used in papermaking, especially spruce, poplar, hemlock, v.~1ite pine, and basewood. WOODPULP: the ground-up pulp made by mechanical crushing or by chemical process. Groundwood pulp contains all the impurities; newsprint is 75% groundwood. Sulphite pulp is wood chips· treated with chemical fumes, to purify the cellulose for book usage. Soda pulp is soft and bulky, the result of boiling wood chips in caustic soda; it adds mellowness to book paper. Sulphate pulp results in strong, dark fibers after treatment with special chemicals; it is used for wrapping paper. NEWSPRINT: machine-finished paper in rolls, using 45o/o of world's paper production. Groundwood ·or esparto (a Spanish-Algerian grass) is used. BOOK PAPER: dries smoother and less absorbant to ink than newsprint, after being dipped in gelatine solution and being worked with metal and fiber rollers. Book paper accounts for 20% of world's paper output. WRITING PAPER: bond and ledger papers; highest grades have linen and cotton rag content. MANILA PAPER: made from fibers of manila hemp. "BIBLE" PAPER: made of linen rags. RICE PAPER: natural tissue from tree pith, not from rice; it is not paper. But paper can be made from rice straw. JULY 1955 :21 Recent visitors to Manila were 192 people from 28 nations who are on a Moral Re-Armament mission to Asia. President Ramon Magsaysay, receiving the missioners, dtscribed the significance of their work when he said that "all-out friendship, one of the MRA principles, is the TI11:Jst effective weapon" in curing the causes of communism. In this article the author, one of the missioners, explains Moral-ReArmament. MORAL REARMAMENT: IT'S FOR ~ou:< By PETER HOW ARD RADIO Moscow, in a series of nine world broadcasts attacking the MRA, complains that "it has the power to capture r a d i c a 1 revolutionary minds" and describes it as "a global ideology, with bridgeheads in every nation, in its final phase of total expansion throughout the world." You cannot join MRA. You cannot resign from it. You either live it or you don't. It is not a:n organization, but an organism. It says that all men everywhere have two things in common - a destiny to remake the world together before man destroys it - and a need for every class, race and nation to change if that destiny is to be achieved. Moral Re-Armament is not a new denomination. It is a new 22 determination to restore God to leadership throughout the world. A diplomat, present at an Asian assembly for Moral ReArmament at Colombo, at the end of ten days rose and said, "I have been with the United Nations since its inception. I have had to negotiate with na:tions from both sides of the Iron Curtain. But I have seen more real unity forged between nations here than I have seen in the United Nations since it began." Moral Re-Armament gets results b e cause it gets men changed. Victor Laure and his wife Irene are on the present Asian mission. They come from France. The husband is a merchant-seaman, founder of the Seamen's Union of France, 45 PANORAMA years a Marxist. His wife was a heroine of the French Resistance. Her son was tortured before her eyes by the Nazis to induce her to betray her friends. She refused. But she and her husband emerged from the war with a burning hatred against Germany. They thought only of reparations and revenge. At their first MRA assembly, Germans y.rere present. T he Laures wanted to leave. But they heard the Germans speak, humbly admitting the mistakes of the past, asking for forgiveness and pledging themselves to fight for a new sort of Germany and a new type of world. The Germans spoke of the absolute moral standards of bpnesty, purity, unselfishness and love. The Laures began to measure their own lives against them. They saw that their hate, however justified they felt it, was part of the division of the world, and contributed to the risk of atomic war. They found an answer. They went into Germany and, in press conferences, in public meetings, over the radio and in personal talks with many of the German leaders, apologized for their bitterness. c HANCELLOR Adenauer of Germany says the Laures have done more than anyone else to build unity between France and Germany since war JULY 1955 ended. And Robert Schuman, former premier and foreign minister of France, says, "if MRA were just another theory, I should not be interested. But it is a philosophy of life, applied in action, which I have seen reaching the millions. It is a world-wide transformation of human society that has already begun." In India, after Frank Buchman, on his seventh visit to Asia, had spent seven months there with two hundred people from 24 nations in 1953, the Bombay Chronicle summed up his visit, "Millions for the first time have been made aware of a positive alternative to communism." In South Africa, for the first time in history, inter-racial assemblies are being held for Moral Re-Armament to which come Africans, colored people, Indians, Boers and all European races. The prime minister of eastern Nigeria was on his way to Moscow, a man disillusioned by the way the British had treated him and ripe for revenge. He met Moral Re-Armament and never went to Moscow. He cabled for all his political opponents to meet him at the airport on his return to his country. He became a force for unity and reconciler of nations. He said, "my policy shall be base<;i, not on Who is Right but on What is Right." A member 23 of his cabinet, travelling with the Asian mission, says that bloodshed would reign among Nigeria's 33,000,000 people today, but for MRA. Frank Buchman, initiator of Moral Re-Armament, has been a life-long revolutionary force. In his early years he was in charge of a hostel for underprivileged boys. The six directors tried to economize by cutting down the food. Buchman objected and resigned. He felt all his hopes and plans had been wrecked by the wrongheadedness of those six men. It made him ill. He consulted a leading specialist who advised him to take a hot bath and a cold bath every day. Frank Buchman did so for six months, but felt no better. Then one day he felt the contrast between his idealism and his hopes for humanity, and the ill-will he nourished against these six directors. "I was the seventh wrong man," he says. He chose the revolutionary path of change for himself instead of the reactionary attitude of blaming the other fellow. He sat down and wrote six letters to the directors. "My dear friend I have nursed illwill against you. I am sorry. Forgive me? Yours sincerely, Frank." THAT SAME afternoon a man walking with Buchman, noticed something new in him. 24 "You must stop pulling away" At a University of the Philippines convocation, the Burmese delegate gave what was probably the clearest explanation of MRA's role in the releasing of world tensions. Pulling off her light blue scarf, she held it horizontally, tugging tautly at both ends. Then she said: 'I "There is tension when both persons pull in opposite directions. Moral Re-Armament says you stop pulling away." She bent one end symbolically upwards. "You now pull towards God, end even if the other fellow keeps tugging, there won't be any tension, • Sooner or later, the other end will bend upwards too." Here she joined the two ends of the scarf heavenwards. He asked what had happened. Then he, too, decided to change. So the basic truth of Moral Re-Armament became real to Frank Buchman - that "everybody wants to see the other fellow change. Every nation wants to see the other nation change. But everybody's waiting for the other to begin. If you want to see the world different, the most practical place to start is with yourself." PANORAMA Moral Re-Armament believes that when a man comes into living touch with God, God will step by step lead him to the fullness of truth. a half an hour a day is a basic minimum except when you are exceptionally busy. Then a fuil hour is necessary." How to catch this new .dimension? In a broadcast to the world last month, Frank Buchman said, "St. Francis de Sales says the secret is to listen to the inner voice. He says that And speaking in India he said, "Before a God-led unity, every last problem will be resolved. Empty hands will be filled with work, empty stomachs with food and empty hearts with an idea that really satisfies." * * * REW ARD ENOUGH A passers-by plunges into the Rhine and rescues a drowning man. He discovers it is Hitler. Der Fuehrer offers him 11ny reward he may ask. "But rm only a poor man," said the rescuer. "No matter, come tell me your name," der Fuehrer quickly replied. "Cohen," the man replied. "Cohen, you may have anything you ask for." "Ah, Herr Hitler, I have only one request." "And what is that?" "Please don't tell anybody who rescued you." * * "I have never had much patience with the writers who claim from the reader an effort to understand their meaning. You have only to go to the great philosophers to see that it is possible to express with lucidity the most subtle refleqions." -W. Somerset Maugham JULY 1955 25 atr.e lf ou Wotr.d Wisel j Most of the twenty words given below should be in your reading vocabulary. That is, you should be able to recognize them, although you may not be able to define or actually use them in writini:". Select the proper definition for each, then turn to pue 80 for the correct answers. Fifteen is passing, 1. fastidious- (a) quick in movement; (b) permanent, as of color; (c) difficult in style; (d) hard to please. 2. insatiable - (a) cannot be satisfied; ( b) insanitary; ( c) unpredictable; ( d) unmentionable. 3. nutritious- (a) complicated in meaning; (b) highly confidential in nature; (c) nourishing; (d) full of nuts. 4. haphazard- (a) dangerous; (b) determined by mere chance; (c) irregular; ( d) unfortunate. - ;<,1 5. lingerie - (a) professional loafer; ( b) recess or interlude; ( c) a block or hindrance; ( d) fine underclothes for women. 6. devour- (a) to go around an object; (b) to eat up; (c) a quick· drying paint; ( d) lessen in value. 7. chronic - (a) habitual or confirmed; (b) funny; (c) distant; (d) very noisy. 8. abdicate- (a) to give up a throne; (b) to subject to a test; (c) ta add up; (d) mislead. - 9. bastion - (a) musical composition; (b) depot or station; (c) an em· broidery piece; (d) a fortified place. 10. natal-(a) leading to death; (b) near or close; (c) elastic; (d) pertaining to birth. 11. bouyant- (a) expen;dve; (b) masculine in quality; (c) tending to float on a fluid; ( d) defiant. 12. pouch- (a) secret compartment; (b) a bag or sack; (c) light pat; ( d) to pinch. 13. query- (a) a victim; (b) a question; (c) an explanation; (d) a sharp knife. 14. succulent- (a) JUicy; (b) full of fibers; (c) tem-ggrary in character; (d) excessive. 15. centenni_al- (a) many-legged, like a centipede; (b) economical; (c) given to enjoyment; (d) marking the completion of 100 years. 16. condescend- (a) make shorter; (b) to allow; (c) to dilute; (d) to behave as if one steps down from a superior position. 17. pedantry- (a) undue display of learning; (b) expert horsemanship; ( c) chivalry; ( d) unreasonable delay'. 18. parody - (a) endless talk; ( b) equality; ( c) a humorous imitation of a serious piece of writing; (d) a feeling of uncertainty. 19. budge- (a) medal-like ornament; (b) give way; (c) to protrude; ( d) worthless mass. 20. lend- (a) to please; (b) to ward off; (c) to imitate; (d) to fen<"..J off. 26 PANORAMA. :Atlantis: Pact or Legend? Some fresh arguments over an old controversy • By BEN REVILLA ipoPULAR LEGEND has it that once upon a time there was a continent with a distinct race and civilization occupying the site of what is now known as the Atlantic Ocean. It is of course no mere legend. The story of the lost and f~bulous Atlantis has a basis in fact as a geographical, historical and ethnological sketch prepared by a famed occultist attempts to show. W. Scott-Elliot has pointed out in a book that the testimony of the oldest writers and of modern scientific research alike bear witness to the existence of tpat ancient continent. He clas:fifies those sources which supply corroborative evidence into: 1. the testimony of deep-sea soundings; 2. the distri!Jution of fauna and flora; 3. the similarity of language and ethnological type; 4. the similarity of religious belief, ritual, and architecture; and JULY 1955 5. the testimony of ancient writers, of early race traditions and of archaic flood-legends. Scientific explorations made by British and American gunboats, "Challenger" and "Dolphin" of the bed of the whole Atlantic Ocean show that an immense bank or ridge of great elevation exists in mid-Atlantic. This ridge stretches in southwesterly direction from about fifty degrees north towards the coast of South America, then in a south-easterly direction towards the coast of Africa. The ridge rises about 9,000 feet from the ocean depths around it. The islands of Azores, St. Paul, Ascension, and Tristan d' Acunha are considered the peaks of this land which still remain alJove water. To sound the deepest parts of the Atlantic requires 21,000 feet. The higher parts of the ridge are only a hundred to a few hundred fathoms beneath the sea. The soundirigs also reveal 27 that the ridge is covered with volcanic debris of which traces are found across the ocean to the American coasts. The ocean bed, particularly about the Azores, has been the scene of volcanic disturbance on a large scale. ft SCIENTIST believes that in the Eocene times the British Islands formed a part of a larger island or c o n t i n e n t stretching into the Atlantic, and "that a great tract of land formerly existed where the sea now , is, and that Cornwall, the Scilly, and Channel Islands, Ireland and Britanny are the remains of its highest summits." Then it is pointed out that on the continents separated by great bodies of water are similar or identical species of fauna and flora. That a link between these continents allowing for the natural migration of such animals and plants is the logical answer to this long standing puzzle. Fossil remains of the camel may be found in India, Africa, South America and Kansas; it is generally accepted that every species of animal and plant had its origin in one part of the globe, from which it·. spread to other places. Remains of the cave-lion of Europe are also found in North America. It appears too that the greater part of the flora of the miocene age in Europe - found 28 chiefly in the fossil beds of Switzerland - exist at the present day in America, some of them in Africa. A botanist also points out that a greater proportion are to be found in the Eastern States of America than in the Pacific coast, showing that it was from the Atlantic side that they entered the continent. Another botanist asks: In what way was the banana plat'lt (a native of tropical Asia and Africa) which cannot stand a voyage through the temperate zone, carried to America? He supposes that that plant, being seedless, must have been tran3ported by civilized man at a ti;-ne when the polar regions had a tropical climate He adds, "a cultivated plant which does not possess seeds must have been under culture for a very very long period . . . it is perhaps fair to infer that these plants were cultivated as earl.}>' as the beginning of the Diluvial period." This inference necessariiy recalls earlit:r times wheu a civifo:ation r.el.fssary for lhe plant's cultivation existed ar'i'd when there was a link between the old world and the new. Regarding similarity of language, it is said that the phonetic alphabet supposedly first used by the Phoenicians was in vogue at an equally early date among the Mayas of Yucatan in Central America. Mayan tradition ascribes the origin of their PANORAM.!\ civilization to a land across the sea to the east. Le Plongeon, an authority on the subject, says: "One third of this tongue (the Maya) is pure Greek. Who brought the dialect of Homer to America? or who took to Greece that of the Mayas? Greek is the offspring of the Sanskrit. Is Maya? or are they coeval?" Thirteen letters of the Maya alphabet also bear a very distinct relation to the Egyptian hieroglyphic signs for the same letters. It is speculated that the earliest form of alphabet was hieroglyphic, "the writing of the Gods," as the Egyptians called it, and that it developed later in Atlantis into the phonetic. Many words in Hebrew likewise bear close resemblance to words of the same meaning in the tongue of the Chiapenecs - a branch of the Maya race. G THNOLOGICALLY speaking, the ancient Egyptians depicted themselves as red men of much the same complexion as exists today among some tribes of American Indians. The same form of skull is found in the Canary Islands off the African coast and the Carib Islands off the American coast. The first Spanish adventurers in Mexico and Peru were surprised to find religious beliets, rites and emblems bearing close resemblance to those of the old world. The Spanish priests reJULY 1955 garded this similarity as the work of the devil. The worship of the cross by the natives, and its presence in all religious buildings and ceremonies, was a principal subject of their amazement. This symbol was held in profound veneration among the primitive tribes of the American continents; the meaning underlying its worship was identical. In both west and east, the cross was the symbol of life. Both hemispheres then had the practice of worshipping the sun-disk or circle and of the serpent. There is a similarity of the word signifying "God" in the principal languages of the east and west. Baptismal rites were practised by all nations. In Babylon and Egypt the capdidates for initiation into the Mysteries were first baptized. Scandinavian nations practised baptism of newborn children; in Mexico and Peru, baptism is a solemn ceremonial consisting of w at e r sprinkling, the sign of the cross, and prayers for the washing away of sin. Besides baptism, the tribes of Mexico, Central America, and Peru resembled the nations of the old world in their rites of confession, absolution, fasting, and marriage before priests by joining hands. As to religious architecture, the identity of design in the pyramids of Egypt and those of Mexico and Central America 29 is too striking to be a mere coincidence. Aiike in orientation, in structure, and even in their internal galleries and chambers, these monuments of the east and of the west stand as witnesses to some common source whence their builders drew their plan. .fl NCIENT WRITERS offer interesting information about the lost continent. Aelian in his Varia Historia states that Theopompus ( 400 B.C.) recorded an interview between the King of Phrygia and Silenus, in which the latter referred to the existence of a great continent beyond the Atlantic, larger than Asia, Europe and Libya together. Proclus quotes an ancient writer who refers to the islands in the sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibraltar) and says that the inhabitants of one of these islands had a tradition from their ancestors of an extremely large island called Atlantis, which for a long time ruled over all the islands of the Atlantic Ocean. Marcellus speaks of seven islands in the Atlantic, and states that their inhabitants preserve the memory of a much greater island, Atlantis, "which had for a long time exercised dominion over the smaller ones." Didorus Siculus relates that the Phoenicians discovered "a large island in the Atlantic 30 Ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules several days' sail from the coast of Africa." Considered the greatest authority on this subject is Plat©. In Timaeus, he refers to "a mighty warlike power, rushin8 from the Atlantic sea and spreading itself with hostile fury over all Europe and Asia. For at that time the Atlantic sea was navigable and had an island before that mouth which is called by you the Pillars of Hercules. But this island was greater than both Libya and all Asia together, and afforded,, an easy passage to other neighboring islands, as it was likewise easy to pass from those islands to all the continents which border on this Atlantic sea." Q F THE material resources of Atlantis, Plato says: "They, had likewise everything provided for them which both in a city and every other place' is sought after as useful for the purposes of life. And they were supplied indeed with many things from foreign countries, on account of their extensive en'\pire; but the island offered them the greater part of everything of which they stood in need." Race traditions of the Gauls, the Toltecs of Mexico, the Indians of North America, the tribes of Central America, all allude to a common origin of their birth. And there is a uniPANORAMA formity of the flood legends on all parts of the globe. In India, Ch a 1 de a, Babylon, Media, Greece, Scandinavia, C h i n a, among the Jews and among the Keltic tribes of Britain, the legend is identical in all essentials. centre whence they have reverberated throughout the world, does not immediately concern us. Sufficient for our purpose is it to show the universal acceptation of these legends." As the occultist says: "Whether these are some archaic versions of the story of the lost Atlantis and its submergence, or whether they are echoes of a great cosmic parable once taught 94,d held in reverence in some A Mayan account of the catastrophe that submerged the continent describes the series of earthquakes that rocked the land, until unable to withstand the convulsions, it sank with some 64 million inhabitants. * * * * A Good Head For Potted Plants JN JANUARY of 1952, Shepheard's l{otel in Cairo, long a haven for tourists, was destroyed by fire and riots. No more do travelers step out of a horse·drawn gharry and run the gauntlet of Egyptian salesmen. Whatever their trade, such men were always and irrepressibly cheerful. No refusal could discourage them. The aristocrats of their trade were the dragomans, the guides who led foreigners to the Pyramids, old mosques, the museum where Tutankhamen treasures were kept, and so on. These were richly dressed and dignified; they carried exquisite walking sticks and smoked expensive cigarettes with gold tips. But they knew their history and could relate it well in several languages. The street vendors, with their bundles of coat-hangers and caged parrots were more comic. Sometimes they would even try to sell toy ballons to British colonels in full uniform. Some had gigantic necklaces of toilet paper rolls on a long string around their neck, leaving their hands free to gesture and bargain. Others kept one pot balanced on their head and two more on the palms of each hand. There were plants in the pots, of course. Because the man . could not look up to bargain with women leaning out of windows, he always brought along a }?oy for the negotiations.' If he sold one, the boy would take it off the man's head and re,.lace it with a new one from a little cart. Such antics are missed more than the frivolities of exruler Farouk. JULY 1955 31 ____-; I i I \ I \ I \ Is this Manila? ~qua.tfe'ts' Pa'Ladise By LOURDES CRISOLOGO-SANTOS c ACH INDIVIDUAL in Manila's one and a half million population should have available to himself 25.5 square meters of the city's living space. But the actual facts have a way of not conforming to simple statistics. Actually Manila's inhabitants are clustered in and around downtown districts, in areas so cramped and disease-ridden· that they can hardly be called living space. Largely this condition is caused by the fact, recorded by the City Engineer's Slum Clearance Section, that 4,588 shacks, barongbarongs and lean-to's in the city house squatters. Before the war, squatters existed but not in such numbers as to create a municipal problem. According to Fe Rodriguez Arcinas, writing in the Philippine Sociological Review, multitudes of new squatters were created when war laid waste vast city lands. Others 32 trooped in from the provinces, expecting a surplus of work and liberally-doled GI money. The meager strength of the government was already drained by more pressing problems. Persons who owned lots that were larger than they needed, often allowed others to settf ~ down on land conveniently scattered with rock debris, GI pup tents, wooden crates, and odds and ends of lumber. In some cases, the property of the dead or absent was occupied. Many squatted in the ruins of buildings, churches, hospitals, and embankments of the old Intramuros walls, to sa'44! on housing materials. Others chose school buildings with fences, playgrounds, toilet facilities and excellent water supplies. Unused streets, the wide spaces of the port area, the city dump in the Sampaloc lowlands, the esteros of the Pasig river branches - everywhere, PANORAMA. shacks and shanties mushroomed. Ji T FIRST, when cases came to court, officials for humane reasons were reluctant to eject squatters from private or government land. Gradually, however, as the need for action became more apparent and areas for transfer grew, squatters were ejected in larger num· bers. (Although many returned to the provinces, just as many squatted on new locations.) By the beginning of. 1955, most of lntramuros, school sites, parks and street areas had been recovered, the shanty towns demolished. However, although over half the original total of 10,531 squatter "households" had been destroyed by the ·government, squatters still nested heavily in esteros (over 1400 "households" still stood, ten months ago), in the port areas, on city government property, and along the Pasig river. About 95 % of these groups are provincianos - Visayans, Pampangos, Ilocanos, and Bi.colanos. People from the same provinces have inclined to squat 'together, where they can speak their own dialect; continue their customs, vices and eating habits; and sing their own songs. However, the children of such families use Tagalog and communicating with one anotherand often speak the national JULY 1955 language better than their parents who retain their peculiar provincial intonations, pronunciations, etc. Squatters (and low-salaried government employees) are now accommodated by five Social Welfare Resettlement and Housing Projects, all of them in either outlying sections of Manila or in nearby suburbs. The hope is thereby to alleviate downtown congestion. To date Bagong Buhay (at South Bago Bantay, Quezon City) has only the FOA-Philcusa toilets and office buildings on it, although the beginning of construction has finally been announced. The land already has been divided into lots for 994 families. Bagong Barangay (Pandacan, Manila) has 117 buildings, 11 stores and a building for the project manager's office. Bagong Pag-asa (East Bago Bantay) contains 770 lots, each 240 square meters, particularly for squatters ejected from Tatalon, Quezon City. The Grace Park Resettlement Project has 50 square meter lots, allocated to 14 7 families of 836' individuals. These were squatters ejected by the San Miguel Brewery from the Parola Compound, Tondo. THE BAGO BANTAY PROJECT (North Bago Bantay) was the earliest to be occupied. The SW A began relocating 33 some 164 families there, totalling 863 persons, in 1951. Settlers came chiefly from Sta. Cruz, Nagtahan, Port Area, FEATI, Bonifacio Drive, Sampaloc, Pasay, and parts of Quezon City. The original tenants of Bago Bantay were 25 families who possessed and improved the land for from 10 to 20 years, without written evidence of ownership. Between 1934-39, this land - a Tuazon estate - was sold to the People's Homesite and Housing Corporation, and the old tenants driven out. During the war, however, they resumed farming on the old site; and in 1951 were awarded the same privileges as the newly transferred squatters. Every family was allotted 40 square meters, although the National Urban Planning Commission had recommended 200 square meters for gardens, poultry and livestock. When the danger of creating another slum district finally was clear, the recommendation at last was followed. Today the 82.5 hectares of Bago Bantay accommodate 1,053 families or 8.400 people in makeshift dwellings. According to Fe Rodriguez Arcinas, "The average barong-barong is about four square meters and usually consists of one all - purpose room." Temporary toilets - pits with cement seats on top - are used by 80 families; the rest use shal34 low pits and river banks. The area has no modern sewers. Candles and gas lamps supply the lighting; water comes from 8 artesian wells. Ji BOUT ONE-THIRD of the children of school age are not in school. The SW A conducts a kindergarten; classes are also conducted for grades one to four. Other students are forced to go to San Francisco del Monte or a Catholic high school half a kilometer away - or stay at home! Regular masses on Sunday and holidays, free marriages, baptisms and catechetical instruction are provided by San Jose Seminary nearby. A medical and dental clinic and a pre-natal clinic serve the residents. UNICEF advises on sanitary conditions. Only about 20% of the resi'dents are regularly employed at such a distance that a bus ride is necessary; but no one's work is located in the neighborhood. The average monthly income is P50; the average among the regularly employed is P120; the. highest is P200 a month. The typical family has only one wage-earner. Although the SW A gives rice, sardines and milk, the people's needs are still greater than their income. Very few can afford the minimum monthly rent of P23. The problem of the squatter, though lessened, con· tinues. PANORAMA '\~t \\\"G, HARD BIRTH Of MlJ'a\\'.. E DWARD MACDOWELL was a late 19th century composer who died tryin~ to convince Columbia University to give academic credit for music courses, and to take music out of the control of the philosophy department. However, even if the regents turned a deaf eat. to his suggestions, his lectures on the origin and structure of _music found willing audiences among crowds of average students who eventually succeeded where he failed, in changing the temper of the schools. An animal uttering a cry of joy or pain, according to MacDowell, expresses its emotions in more or less definite tones: and there is the beginning of music. With the addition of intellectual control to such sounds, articulate speech is developed; but music is still left to express emotions, rather than deliberate thought. JULY 1955 Horns for the demons, flutes for the courtier At the same time, all primitive people have accompanied their shouts and dances by striking object on object, sometimes by the clanking of stones together, the pounding of paddle on dugout, the clashing of stone spearheads against wooden shields, in order to express what words alone cannot. Although these concussions are not music, they do constitute rhythm, music's greatest prop. When some early man first struck a hollow tree and heard a sound peculiar to itself; when he learned to cover that hollow with stretched skins - perhaps inspired by his own hide-covered shield - he had completed man's first musical instrument: the drum. This voice that spoke to him of fearful things when touched must h ave seemed supernatural, something beyond his own making and complete control, a voice from his deities. 35 JN MACDOWELL's time, tribes of savages living in the Andaman Islands at the mouth of the Ganges; the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego in South America; and the "wild-hunting" Weddahs of Ceylon had no musical instruments and no religion (beyond vague superstitions). The same was true of tribes in the Borneo interior, the Semangs of the Malay Peninsula, and the Tasmanian aborigines (now extinct). MacDowell's conclusion, although tentative, was that there could be no religion where people had not at least discovered the drum. After the drum, primitive peoples without exception seem to discover the pipe (trumpet, horn, or flute); and later the lyre (zither, tebuni or Egyptian harp). Only the drum is ever found alone. MacDowell considered the bell a direct descendant of the drum: "for what is a bell but a metal drum with one end left open and the drum stick hung inside?" Moreover, he pointed out the miraculous potency of church bells, similar to the savage's supernatural drum. The Middle Ages .abound in bell legends, telling how tolling of a bell could clear the air of plague, calm a storm, or shed blessings on all who heard. Many bells were even cast with such mottoes as "My voice on high dispels the storm" or "I who call to thee am the Rose 36 of the World and am called Ave Maria." The Egyptian sistrum, used iri their religious worship, w:J.S shaped like a tennis racket, with four wire strings on which rattles hung. Making a sound similar to tambourines, it fright-· ened away the god of evil. For that reason, sistri were always buried with dead kings. Gongs seem to have served the same purpose, on all continents, in~ eluding those of Equatorial Africa where a witch doctor sometimes strikes a leopard-skin bell, noiselessly with a clapper of fur as he e.nters the hut of the dying. Thus a demon is driven away, but quietly, so that he will not be angered and visit some other victim! T HE ARMY death reveille, the minute gun, the tolling of bells for the dead - all seem to be remnants of the religious use of the primitive drum. The drum, therefore, apparently came so early that it was possessed by man before he lived in huts and still inhabited caves. The pipe, however, came later and perhaps was suggested by the sound of the wind whirling across a stockade of huts. Since the pith of bamboo or cane decomposes in time, it would be only natural for the wind to reproduce such sounds and be imitated. What we call Pan's pipes, MacDowell pointed out, are simply pieces of PANORAMA THE UNSEEN KEYBOARD The range of waves known as the electro-magnetic spectrum is like a long piano keyboa1·d. On a piano for each octave, frequency doubles and wavelength is halved. The electro-magnetic spectrum would be represented, then, by SO octaves. The length of waves in the spectrum, in ascending order, is as follows: cosmic rays, radioactive gamma rays, x-rays, ultra violet, the visible spectrum, infra red, radar, television, short wave, normal broadcasting, and finally, very long radio wavse. bamboo or cane of varying lengths tied together and made 'to resound by blowing across the open tops. Once having learned the trick, a curious native might attempt the same effect from other hollow objects: Amazon conch shells; African elephant tusks; the small bones of deer, made into whistles in North America. Pan's simple pipes lead directly to the Graeco-Roman double trumpet; and double pipe. Later, man learned to blow directly into the tube, instead of across its open edge. The new instruments were not forceful at first, like trumpets, but as quiet and meditative as nose flutes. Since the religious sense already had found its expression 'in the drum, the pipe historically came to associate itself with man's second strongest emotion, love. Certainly the soft flutes still maintain that tradition. Other pipes, however, were allowed to enlarge and become metallic, so that their sound would bring fear. And the first major use of trumpets was alJULY 1955 ready that of war. Assyrians and Tibetans had frightful pieces of two or three yards long, comparable to the Aztec war drum which reached ten feet in height and could be heard for miles. THE METALLIC pipe, in fact, has often been an auxiliary "spiritual" help to the drum. In MacDowell's day, the llamas of Tibet used to assemble regularly on the roofs of Lhassa and blow a hideous din from enormous trumpets. Only that way could they frighten away the demons who in earlier days had risen from a deep ravine and crept among the houses. In Africa, trumpets still blow at an eclipse of the moon. Similarly, Berlioz' Requiem overwhelms its audiences with majestic trumpets sounding from the four corners of the world, loud enough to awaken the dead. The soft pipes - flute, clarinet, oboe - never have such a function. Their service is paid to love, not to fear. Peruvians, Formosans, the Javanese, the 37 Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin - all have their "courting flutes." Leonardo da Vinci hired a flute-player to make music while he painted his Mona Lisa and her .strange, subdued smile. Rhythm, according to MacDowell, represents the intellectual side of music, melody the sensuous side. The pipe can affect animal natures - hooded cobras, lizards, fish-since these are purely sensuous and respond to melody. To rhythm, how~ver, they are indifferent. It appeals to the intellect and therefore only to man. Thus the power of modern music is clear. The four-note succession in Beethoven's Fifth * * Symphony (the "victory" call or, as Beethoven preferred, Fate knocking on man's door) is dramatic and supernaturally compelling for its rhythm. The heart beat is thrown off by any strange throb in the bass viols, any startling clang of cymbals. Wagner is one of many composers who knew how to reach man's emotions with fearsome variations of trumpets and drums. Rhythm expresses purpose, power; it is a physical act. Melody, however, is a translation of softer feeling into sound, a lowering of the unvoiced emotion to the level of tenderness or sorrow. * * EVERYBODY OUT 38 A man lost a valuable dog and advertise in a newspaper, offering five hundred pesos for it, but got no replies. He called at the office. "I want to see the advertising ,manager," he said. "He's out," said the office boy. "Well, his assistant." "He's out, too, sir." "Well, I'll see the editor." "He's out, sir." "Great Scott! Is everybody out?" "Yes - they're all hunting for your dog." * * He swore to the girl that if she didn't consent to marry him he'd get a rope and hang himself right in front of her home. "Oh, please don't,• Robert," she pleaded. "You know Father doesn't want you hanging around here." * PANORAMA WHEN SPACE BEGINS TO RIPPLE Only the human mind exceeds the speed of light ONLY A scientific imagina. tion of the first order can grasp the elusive concept of light. Now that man knows that matter is a form of energy composed of individual particles or atoms, he still has to explain those aspects of light phenomena which continue to illustrate the classical picture of light as a wave motion. The quantum theory - that light consists of bundles of particles moving in waves - is an attempt to account for both .sets of attributes described. The concept of light's behaving like a volley of bullets was spectacularly shown by the experiments of American physicist Arthur Compton in JULY 1955 Science 1923. His researches compared direct radiation with x-rays rebounding from a block of carbon. He discovered that the rebounding rays had a slightly longer wavelength than before - a fact that the wave theory alone could neither predict nor explain. However, considering the xray to be a particle rather than a wave, Compton was able to explain what had happened. Striking and rebounding from an electron in a carbon atom makes an x-ray particle lose just enough energy to account for its observed increase in wavelength. With their instruments, experimenters actually were able to observe the recoil of the electron struck by the x-ray bullet. In its ordinary traffic with gross matter - in passing obstlicles and filtering through apertures, in rebounding from mirrors and penetrating tranparent materials - light can be adequately described as a wave motion. But in more delicate ways, like the Compton effect, only the particle concept applied. GRAPPLING with the double nature of radiant energy, this time a French physicist Louis de Broglie ima39 gined that matter itself might experience this doubleness. It was impossible for him to conceive that matter, or any other form of energy (like light) might exist in isolated quantities without also having frequency and wavelength. Within a year of Compton's discovery, de Broglie had made a far-reaching analogy between light waves and "matter waves." Physicist had to think of even solid and apparently stationary masses of matter as existing only as emissions or pulsations from some inner source of energy. Proof of the Frenchman's theory came fast. Experimenters found that electrons rebound from crystals only in certain definite diretcions, in much the same way as light waves do. The observed electron wavelengths fitted perfectly the calculated formulas of de Broglie. The basic difference between light waves and "matter waves'' is that the latter pulsations may travel at any speed, while the speed of light is constant. Erwin Schrodinger, the Austrirua theorist, Born and Heisenberg in Germany, and Bohr in Denmark extended the Frenchman's findings and develop~d the body of theory now called wave mechanics. Although it has a highly c o m p 1 i c a ted mathematical framework, wave mechanics, provides the scientist with a powerful tool for solving problems involving matter and radiation which the earlier stages of the quantum theory were unable to approach. Th'e waves are interpreted as being guides to particles in their ripples through space. Thus the creative imaginations of men of distantly se-parated countries united to probe the truths of flitting light and squatting matter and found that these, too, were equally united in basic temperaments. * * * * 40 He stood on the stern of the promenade deck as his ship moved out to sea. - Soon he was watching a bird as it hovered, swooped, and dipped to recover some bits of food that had been thrown from the galley. "Oi," said Meyer, "What a pretty pigeon." "That's a gull," said a more experienced traveler with withering scorn. "I don't care," said Meyer, "Gull or l;>oy, it's a pretty pigeon. PANORAMA OHFJOUSLY SOT A TOOTHPASTE arl, this /undr _r;1·i11 is I ht' i111i111a/ husbandry 111t111's war of showing off 11 prize calf. Hidden from the view of many readers of popular literature today are some of the world's greatest writings. These masterpieces, in the face of an appalling torrent of magazine and journalese material, have been shoved into textbooks and scholars' anthologies. Panorama endeavors to publish some of these classics from time to time, in the hope of supplying this deficiency in the modern reader's diet. In this issue a seventeenth century love poem is presented. Written by one of the famous Cavalier Poets, "To Alt'hea, from Prison" is widely quoted ("Stone walls do not a prison make ... ") but seldom read entirely. In this graceful lyric poem, Richard Lovelace (a handsome gentleman of the Court who had been imprisoned. more than once) sings to an imaginary lady love. Lovelace (1618-f657) died young. • ~ff ({ f?ll h (7 (/). ~ ~ ~ CY o V°l t ea, CY ram CF rison ~ f _ : .·._ .· . ~ J5 When Love with unconfined wings ~i ·.·.~.~-:.::~ Hovers within my gates, ~f.} d3 And my divine Althea brings Q To whisper at the grates; When I lie tangled in her hair '.~ And fetter'd to her eye, <t The bfrdo that wanton in the a" sf:i ~ Know no such liberty. ~ ~~~~~~~?~~~~~ '<j~ <>!' 1 •;-;!?'::.· ·;-;R:,~· •;-;R:,~· "•!>!'.•' •;-;R:,~· •;-;R:,~· I '•:":':•• '•!>!'.•• "•!>!'.•' ·;-;R:,-:• •;-;R:,~· ··!>!'.•' /jl • >j'ij When flowing cups run swiftly round With no allayin,g Thames, Our careless heads with roses bound, Our hearts with loyal flames; When thirsty grief in wine we steep, When healths and draughts go freeFishes that tipple in the deep Know no such liberty. When, like committed linnets, I With shriller throat shall sing The sweetness, mercy, majesty, And glories of my King; When I shall voice aloud how good He is, how great should be, Enlarged winds, that curl the flood, Know no such liberty. Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage; If I have freedom in my love And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty. JllLY 1955 43 . ' The Story of 23 EFORE the Revolution of 1896, the Filipino people had no national flag. The Filipinos who rose in revolt against the Spaniards did not use any banner that could properly be caIIed national. Each recalcitrant group had an emblem of its own. When Andres Bonifacio founded the secret revolutionary Katipunan (Society) in 1892, he and his companions adopted a war standard. At first it consisted of a red rectangle piece of cloth with three white K's arranged in a row in the middle. In some cases the three K's were arranged in such a way as to form the three angles of an equilateral triangle. Some Katipunan group leaders, however, made their own flags. A common feature of these flags were the colors: red field and white K, which stood for Katipunan. However, there was no uniformity in the size and number of K's emblazoned in the standards. In 1896, several months before the outbreak of the Revolution against Spain, Andres Bonifacio had the women members of the Katipunan fashion another flag. This banner, known as Bonifacio's flag, consisted of a red rectangular field with a white sun in the middle. The sun had a number of rays. Below the sun, also in white, were the three K's. Bonifacio's flag served as the Katipunan standard until October 1896, when it was modified by the revolutionary leaders of Cavite Province led by General Emilio Aguinaldo. Aguinaldo fashioned a banner which consisted of a red rectangular field with a white sun in the middle. The sun haq eight rays representing the first eight provinces (Manila, Bulacan, Pampanga, Nueva Ecija, Tariac, Laguna, Batangas, 1 'e Filipino Flag and Cavite) to take up arms against the Spaniards. In the middle of the sun was a white K in the ancient Tagalog script ( ~ ). G ENERAL EMILIO Aguinaldo referred to this flag when he said in his Proclamation of October 31, 1896: "Filipino people! The hour has come to shed blood for the conquest of our liberty. Flock and follow the flag of the Revolution. It stands for Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity." At the Naic Assembly of March 17, 1897, the revolutionary leaders again modified the Katipunan Jlag. At the center of the red rectangular cloth they placed a white mythological sun with eyes, nose, and mouth. Radiating from the sun were eight groups of rays, each group consisting of three rays. This was the flag of the revolutionists at the time of the Truce of Biak-na-Bato. During his exile in Hongkong, Aguinaldo thought of making new changes in the flag. He a.~ked Mrs. Marcela Agoncillo, assisted by her eldest daughter, Lorenza, and Miss Delfina Herbosa, Rizal's niece, sewed a banner that has since become the Filipino national flag. The flag consists of a white equilateral triangle at the left. At the center of the triangle is a sun with eight rays. At each angle of the triangle is a fivepointed star. The upper stripe is blue while the lower stripe is red. The sun 1;ymbolizes Liberty and its eight rays the first provinces that rose up in arms against Spain. The three stars represent the three geographic groups that cqmpose the Philippines: Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao. I , j~ ,\'fl.~ 1\\~"~'~. ~).\~1/f! .• ~· .... ,t~\'<:·{1g~ . ~.i\~ 'tJ.\U~~~)~Wt1\~1;Ji1~~~.: -·~~fl· ~ General Aguinaldo brought this flag with him when he returned to the Philippines from Hongkong on May 19, 1898. On May 28, he unfurled the flag in public for the fi.rst time to commemorate the victory of the Filipinos against the Spaniards in the Battle of Alapan. The huge crowd "greeted it with tremendous applause and loud, spontaneous and prolonged cheers for the Independent Philippines." The official hoisting of the flag, however, occurred when the independence of the Philippines was proclaimed at Kawit, Cavite Province, on June 12, 1898. * * * WHY WE EAT LESS IN THE TROPICS WHAT IS the mysterious device in the body which tells animals and men when they have had enough to eat or when they are hungry? The urge to eat, two Yale University scientists now suggest, is an urge to keep warm. When the thermometer goes up, consumption of food tends to decrease and body activity slows down. And when it falls, both food intake and activity are increased. The two savants have demonstrated that when an animal is in a hot environment he. wilI eat less food which, in turn, might raise his body temperature. Rats were placed in rooms at varying temperatures ranging from 65 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit. As the temperatures went up, the rats ate less and less until at 94 degrees they consumed little or no food. The food intake differed up to 400 percent between rats in a temperature of 72 degrees and those in 94 degrees. They said that the theory may apply possibly to all cells capable of digesting food stuffs and it suggests that the behavior of man may also fzt into this general pattern. * * 6 PANORAMA By AURORA ROXAS E NTENG sprawled his lanky body over the wooden planks of the banca, his fingers interlaced his head. The rays of the sun slanted over the wide brim of his hat throwing a wide shadow on his face. The wind kept flapping his shirt collar, sometimes the collar touched his lips and he JULY 1955 would rub them against his arm. His long legs dangled from the last plank which supported his knees, his bare feet reached down to the floor of the banca. All of the five meter length of the rope was stretched out from where it was tied around the post on the wharf so that the banca drifted with the waves 47 as they swept towards the shore and receded back to the sea. The banca, carved out of three fourteen-by-five apitong :·;gs, was long and wide. The rr ddie log, longer than the otL10rs, had both ends pointed so that the banca could reverse its pos1t10n without turning. Two pairs of outriggers projected from the sides. These were formed by spars to which bamboo poles were tied parallel to the banca. E nteng pulled out his hands from under his head, stretched up his arms and let them fall ·heavily on the gunwale. He ran his palm on the edge, it was damp and coarse, there were tiny crystals of salt that glistened. Enteng brought his palm to his mouth and licked it, it was salty. His nostrils quivered as he took a deep breath. He loved the smell of spoiled fish for it was F.lso of the sea. He remembered one day when his father took him fishing with the other fishermen in Pinuluan, they had a big haul of tulingan and banak, all the bancas were full of fish, the women had to work till late in the evening cleaning and s~lting the . fish. The next day, they had to bring some to the mainla~d to sell. His father was the best fisherman in Pinuluan. There always had been plenty of fish stored away. 48 E NTENG could hear the waves lapping the sides of the banca. This was what he l~ked best lying half asleep in a floating banca. All things seemed non-existent beyond the narrow gunwales of the boat. He had always laoked forward to afternoons like this, when tired from working in the field~ he would go out to the sea to. fish or jnst sleep. His mother worried over his . going out to the 'Sea alone. And usually, much to Enteng's disgust, she would make him take Pule, the bankero. She would even prevent him from going at times when the weather was not too good. She was afraid of what might happen to him. His father died in the sea. He was alone then. Enteng laughed silently to himself. Why - should the same thing happen to him? Nothing exciting ever happened in Pinuluan since his father was lost. The storms did PANORAMA not even hit Pinuluan hard enough to make life a little different. Even the people were so simple they could not see .Why Enteng spent his time all by himself or why he went to 'school at the mainland when all he had to do was to fish and work in the copra mills and then get married. The only people Enteng thought to be different from the rest of them besides his father 111nd mother were Mang Gusting and Aling Idang, the couple who lived near his home. He would listen to their quarrels, which were very frequent and violent. At the onstart of the fights, Enteng would pretend to be intent on weeding out his vegetaple patch. It was the nearest spot to the couple's house. It was fun to anticipate who of the two would win. Enteng usually laid bets with Pule and together they would eagerly wait for the winner of the fight. He lost eighty centavos to Pule on the latest qu,arrel. Mang Gusting came home late in the morning from the 'mainland while Aling Idang was cooking their lunch. Enteng and Pule watched through the kakawati fence where the thick foliage shielded them from Aling Indang's house. The couple's house was a one room shack with a roofless batalan. The roof was made of nipa and anahaw, the walls JULY 1955 were of bamboo and nipa. Bamboo poles were used for the flooring of the batalan and the steps of the ladder; bamboo splits for the floor of the main house. The yard was bare of plants except for the tall coconut trees around it. Aling ldang's chickens were fenced in at the back of the house; they were continuously crowing and clacking. M ANG GUSTING had been a fishermen before ·his marriage to Aling Idang. Mang Gusting and Enteng's father built the best banca in Pinuluan. As a boy, Enteng used to watch the two men at work Mang Gusting did the shaping and smoothing of the prows better than Enteng's father; Mang Gusting would work all by himself as Enteng's father stood by to hand him the tools. Mang Gusting was two heads shorter than Enteng's father but almost as wide. His slit eyes were set far apart, his dark eyebrows almost met and his lips were thick and blackened by too much nicotine. Pule and Enteng watched Mang Gusting as he made his way to the house, he was on top of the stairs with three strides. "Is that you Gusting?" they heard Aling Idang shout from the kitchen. "Yes, it is I." 49 "Where did you bring my red rooster?" "Your red rooster?" ''Yes, my red rooster." "I didn't know you had one. You should have told me that a long time ago." ''Where did you take it? How much did you get?" "Now, now don't you shout." "I'm not shouting!" "Quiet, the neighbors might hear you." "I don't care! Where did you bring my rooster?" There was a long pause. Enteng and Pule · could hear nothing except the clacking of the chickens in the yard. "I sold it. Don't ask me where the money is." Mang Gusting said. "And that was the best rooster I ever hatl." "Never mind, you can always raise another one. Here.take this money and buy your: self another rooster." "Is it part of the money you go't from the rooster?" "No, from your pi.g." "Naku po!'~ Aling ldan?' screamed. J HERE WA~ a long silence. Enteng could hear the overflowing of boiling rice, and then the clatter of tin plates, pots and kettles, and much later there was Mang Gusting him·self hurrying down the stairs out of their :Ya.rd, scaring the 50 chickens on the way. "Enteng," Pule whispered "pay me your eighty centavos." A gust of wind loosened his hat. He held it down by the brim. He became aware of the gathering grey clouds. He sat' up and the orange-tinged light reflected on the smooth surface of the sea glared back at him. On the shore, the leaves of coconut trees caught some· of the light but the trunks were enveloped in darkness. From the shadows, Enteng could discera an object coming toward the wharf and as it came nearer, Enteng could distinguish a whitish figure and as it left the darkness, it was, Enteng thought, a woman. It was Aling Idang. She carried a bayong in her left han~ and a bakol in her right. They were full of canned goods which she would exchange for copra at the island. He would probably have to take her to Pinu-1 luan himself. Asiong and Pule, the . two bankeros had decided to work overtime at the copra mill and would not be able to take their passengers home till• the next morning. Aling ldang was out into the clearing on the shore. She was a woman of forty, her deep brown skin almost black at the arms and legs showed white patches, traces of lye. She was a laundress and was a practical one too. She used the soap suds with which she had washed the, PANORAMA clothes to wash her own body. She took this special bath whenever she made her weekly trip to the mainland, Saturday afternoons. She would wear her favorite dress, a college uniform which was given to her by her mistress for whom she washed clothes. The heavily starched dress was light brown with white collars and cuffs, and sleeves. It was too tight for her, her barrelshaped torso bulged at the side seams and at the waist, the short sleeves with the white cuffs accented her dark arms. Around her waist reaching down to the hemline of her dress was a red and black checkered tapis. As she reached the wharf, her wooden shoes click-clacked on the bamboo flooring. The beams creaked under her weight. Enteng was glad she came to the wharf only one day of the week, otherwise Asiong and Pule would have to make a wooden wharf. At the end of the wharf, she placed the bayong down against the bamboo post, and placed the bakol beside it. Apparently, she had -not noticed him inside the banca. She squatted on the end of the wharf, her right side towards him. She place.d her chin on both palms and her elbows on each knee, she looked like a sack full of copra. JULY 1955 E NTENG stood up slowly, yawning, arranged the planks and walked to the prow. Aling !dang still had not noticed him, she was looking straight ahead of her. He got hold of the rope which was tied to the bamboo post on the wharf, pulling with his left hand then his right until the banca was alongside the wharf. "Good afternoon, A 1 i n g !dang," Enteng called out. The woman turned her head and shifted her weight to one side, her face was expressionlesSI "Oh, Enteng," her voice was thick and muffled. "I thought you were Pule." ''How are you, Aling !dang? ArEJ you going home now?" The woman nodded. "Asiong and Pule aren't coming out to night, they are working at the copra mill." Aling !dang stood up and leaned against the bamboo post, .her head dropped heavily on her chest. "You may go with me to Pinuluan, I'm going now." Aling !dang did not look at him. Enteng wasn't sure that she heard him, he cleared his throat and almost shouted to her face. "Let's go, it's getting dark." Enteng leaped up to the wharf, picked up the -bakol and placed it against his waist, and the bayong he carried with the other hand by its handles. As 51 he leaped back into the banca, it jerked, tilting away from the wharf. The laundress stepped into the banca after Enteng who arranged the plank where she would sit down. Enteng placed all of the woman's things under the plank. Aling Idang sat heavily on the prepared plank. She had loosened her tapis, letting it fall from the waist to cover her legs down to her ankles. Her red plastic-strapped wooden shoes had missing tacks, which left little round spots of rust. The soles were worn out, they were thinner and formed rugged edges at the flattened heels. She fished out of the bosom of her dress a pack of "La Aurora" cigarettes and a match. From her pack, she pulled one cigarette and placed it between her lips. She struck a match stick and covered the flame as she puffed away. Without blowing out the flame, she threw the match stick and it hissed as it struck the water. She exhaled a thick cloud of smoke and continued to puff heavily. "Aren't we going yet?" she asked, her cigarette moved with each word she said. · "Y-e-s, Yes. Yes, we'll go now," he stammered. He was embarassed to be caught watching her. He loosened the rope Bnd pulled it, letting the line fall heavily into a heap at his feet. Mosquitos were buzzing 52 which alighted on his cheek. The insects did not seem to bo1her the woman, he wished he knew how to smoke · too. E NTENG PADDLED his banca out into the sea. The wind was blowing harder. Aling !dang removed her tapis from her legs and placed it around her shoulders. It was already dark, stars had appeared. They seemed like tiny fireflies scattered all over the sky. The woman sat at her end of the banca as if she were a part of the prow as it rose and receded over the waves. "I saw Mang Gusting this afternoon." Enteng felt as if he were talking into a big empty jar. Aling !dang did not seem to have heard him. He felt1 uneasy. The silence was too piercing, too subdued, he wished the woman would say something. Enteng took a deep breath and coughed. Aling !dang jerked up her head. 'What were you saying?" she asked. "I saw your husband this afternoon." Enteng wanted to sound casual, he felt much better now that the woman responded. "If he's coming home tonight perhaps it would have been better if we waited for him at the wharf. Neither Asiong nor Pule will take home any passengers for the night." "You saw him?" Aling (Continued on inside back oover) PANORAMA mtiM Book Review By LEONARD CASPER '1 n,.. . m ANILA STILL wears the air of an occupied city. The black market in Quiapo, the fortress houses with broken-bottle walls and barred windows, the monthly "amoks," the wallets buttoned against the skin - like the rubber gas masks in downtown surplus stores, all these are leftovers of war. Perhaps they are symptoms too of its causes. Is there ever conquest without some consent? Like many Filipino cities, Manila is still occupied by fear - of itself. One of the signs of maturity in Javellana's novel is that occasionally it recognizes that inhumanity can be the trait of . a man regardless of nationality. The hero )s accurately called at times a "male carabao," at other times a "demon." From the start, he is as much his own enemy as are the Japanese. The author's preliminary note, therefore, is wrong when it implies that, before the war, all Filipinos were industrious and their wives pious: "One. night disaster came to this village . . . with the coming of the Japanese." Actually, disaster l_ike death comes inch by inch for many minutes before its last arrival. The novel itself knows this, even if the author at times does not. Like his own subtitles, Javellana ,inclines to divide life too easily into Day and Night. THE BOOK'S value is best measured by its distance from National Heroes' Day platitud~s. Ricardo Suerte is no Rizal. When Carding, at the end, asks for and receives forgiveness from his wife for crimes against the living and unborn, he achieves a stature hardly forseeable in the book's earlier half but recognizable as human and deserving of (in the author's words) "respectful understanding." • Stevan Javellana, Without Seeing the Daw" (Little, Br~wn and Co.: Bos.ton, i947) JULY 1955 53 Without Seeing the Dawn does not start promisingly. Carding and Lucing consummate a marriage of mutu'.il lust. He works hard, like any other healthy animal on Panay; but when their first child is stillborn, he fails to see why his wife must weep. Her sensibility too is short-ranged. Soon she welcomes the body of their landlord's "princely" son and earns back her husband only by concealing the truth of her passion. Carding's turn to be unfaithful comes when, after the landlord repossesses their land, they are forced to live in the city. Carding makes money as a stevedore and as the bodyguard of Rosing, a cabaret entertainer. Finding her attra<;tive, he lives with her until, just as abruptly, he decides to return to his wife who has gone back to the barrio. Their wayward passion spent, they settle down, helping each other survive fever, childbirth and. flood. The last, however, destroys their crop, so that Carding thinks of migrating to Mindanao-just as orders come for all men over 18 to report to the constabulary in Tarlac. · JB OOK II finds Carding returned to Panay, having survived Bataan, the death march and imprisonment. Believing resistance useless, he• refuses to join the guerrillas, although he does help kill the Filipino bandit, Morada. Later the Japanese, in search of "Indians" (guerrillas) start a burn-rape-mutilatekill campaign. When Lucing tells that her unborn child might be a Japanese and that her father-in-law died, trying to defend her from assault, Carding ambushes and mutilates one of the enemy and joins the guerrillas. He deserts his wife. Later he murders her uncle Jaime. an anti-American serving the Co-Prosperity Sphere. His shocked barrio mates call him a demon, especially when he also slays his cousin, an armed collaborator .. Finally he assists his wife in childbirth, intending to murder the child. However, when it is stillborn, he feels reprieved and even cleansed, as if all his urges had originated somewhere beyond his personal will. But Lucing, knowing his intention, says that he should have wanted · the child to live because it was at least part hers. She sends him away. In town, Rosing, the cabaret prostitute destroys an ammunition dump for him; and though he is tortured by the Kenpei, her execution releases him. After killing their informer, he organizes a bolo battalion which makes a suicidal attack on the armed town when all surrounding inhabitants have been or54 PANORAMA dered into "a collective barrio." Along the line of march, Carding stops to ask Lucing's forgiveness. Moved, she decides not to flee but to wait for his dead body to be brought back to her. Thus as animal-Carding finally stands erect, the author too, despite two-thirds of his narra~.ve, achieves a characterization that can stand. What compelling reason can there be for Javellana's having made Carding a bull carabao? The seduction counter-seduction seems planned largely to satisfy the supposed tastes of "The Fighting Men of America," to whom the book is dedicated. From unbridled flesh, the temper's demon can emerge - but hardly the vertical human that Carding becomes, whose death is cause for lamentation because he knows sin. av HEN HIS violent instincts are left unsatisfied by the stillbirth of Lucing's third child, Carding tries to draw merit from that accident and forgives himself for his murderous intention. Neither his wife nor the author allow such unearned absolution; however: and here the novel justifies its existence. Carding has to grow through suffering and self-realization, he has to see that the severest struggle is within himself, before a clean death can be granted. Actually no visible revelation, after he is outcast, prepares Carding for his birth as a human. What motivates his final change? Is the Kempei torture the turning point? Hardly. Probably, therefore, the reader's sympathy is won by proxy- the sufferings of legless Gondoy, the abducted Alicia, the innocent old man and his son in the death cells. This is, strangely, not predominantly a novel of hatred for the invaders; the Japanese become opportunities which allow Carding's victory over his instincts. The scene of greatest combat is inside the man. The fact remains, however, that the conclusion is won largely by proxy - another sure indication that the wasted first half of the novel should have treated Carding less as an animal, to make his final rise not miraculous. Only because the reader forgets the previously established nature of Carding · and lets the realism of the "minor" presentations' rub off onto him, can he submit to the ending. S OMETIMES Javellana has been charged with being· a "slick" writer. True, his early characterizations and seduction situations (as well as the romanticized behavior of Rosing, early and late) are "slick" formulas borrowed with little conscience. But there is too little smoothness, actually, in his IanJULY 1955 .55 guage; the wntmg is surprisingly uneven. Although Javellana was a guerrilla, the clash with Morada and the ambushing of Polo are dismissed before their climaxes; and the mutilations of Flora and Lucio, which try so hard to be vivid in horror, are less realized than the later restrained descriptions of Gondoy's wound and Alicia's dilemma. Nevertheless, because the novel becomes more and more honest, less melodramatic as it proceeds; and more visibly not a story of love and hate on the tidal flats of the glands, but in fact a man's struggle to rescue his bloodstream from his less erect ancestors: for' these causes Without Seeing the Dawn is not a book easily ignored. It is only regrettable that the novel did not understand sooner and better its own nature, so that the personal struggle could have been substantiated less by dreams and superstitions and more by that sort of religious apprehension of the human predicament of which even the simplest Fili.Pino must be capable. * * * * Smugglers of .Andorra JtN ENGLISH traveller, recounting his journey through Andorra (a small republic in the East Pyrenees, between Spain and France), said: "The basic industry of Andorra - I might almost caII it the aristocratic profession up there - is still smuggling. It is the occupation of fathers and sons - yes, and mothers and daughters, too - handed down among the best, bluest-bl<;JOded Andorran families. As one ,worthy citizen I met in a little TABERNA in Andorra-la-Vieja, the capital, told me with great pride: 'My .eldest son is coming on very well. He knows aII the routes in and out of France now. He has trained two dogs of his own. In another month or two he'II know the ways into Spain as weII as I do.'" * * .56 PANOR,!\;MA English and the Filipino Student Writer claims that much of the college student's difliculty can be eliminated by helping him to help himself • By SIXTO D' ASIS Mactan Tourist: Whose skull is that? Tired Guide: That is Lapulapu's. Tourist; Then whose is that small one beside it? Guide: That, sir, is the skull of La.pulapu when he was a boy. Even college students cannot trade in their old skulls for new, on registration day. They cannot suddenly cease to be a part of their own culture. So that the person who would relieve these young men and women of their English language problems is humbled by the knowledge that their difficulties are as deepseated as some of the most revered local traditions. Parents who want their children educated may not be willing to change themselves and their ~ociety accordingly; nevertheless, they all inhabit the same ~kull, the same way of thinking and acting. PaJULY 1955 • rents are as much a part of the educational system as any school; consequently, any improvement will be only superficial• and temporary which does not have the earnest consent of the whole way of_ living. Even the English faculties of those universities whose reputation abroad for high educational standards is well-deserved sometimes encounter classes where students who lack imagination and resent being asked to think, predominate. They want to sit and take notes; or they expect han-*1uts. Their minds refuse to sweat. They memorize and imitate. J N HAVING such habits, · the student simply reflects his country's long heritage of colonialism. For how many centuries has the Filipino been treated like a servant or a 57 child, incapable of thinking for himself? Even now that political independence has been won, the self-conviction of inferiority, however unjustified, survives: so that in some political localities bossism, a relative of gangsterism, prevails. Or take the example of popular entertainers - those who are happy to pe known as the Johnny Ray, the Marilyn Monroe of the Philippines. What hope can there be for self-discovery or self-expression in such practices? For that matter, it is not only colonialism which has bred unthinking obedience in our freshmen. Many of them come from families run, apparently, like armies, with orders rattling down upon their heads from all the older members. Loyalty, not love, keeps these families together, it seems. Respect is demanded and enforced not only by the parents and grandparents, but also by Ate, Kuya, Diko, Nanay, Ninang... Democracy does not begin at home in such families. Respect is taken from but rrot given to the young; only much later, if they are lucky, will they ever know what a community of equals is. As a result, it has been halfjokingly suggested that college freshmen need a Dean of Children as well as Deans of Men and Women, because besides 58 being, in fact, very young (sometimes only fifteen or sixteen) some of them have never been given a chance, by their elders, to grow up. Some are even in college on orders: because it has been wished on them, they have never had to wonder what education should mean. Q THERS have been trained to think of college only in terms of the degree which will be theirs in four years - the earning power that it will bring; the intellectual and social prestige. College is a time not for attachment$ but for "contacts,'' the accumulation of persons who can be "used" after graduation. Consequently, even though they are present in college, some students are unwilling to admit that they need education, that there is anything left for them to learn. Mere enrollment assures their graduation; they think. The necessity for growing mentally, by exercise and effort, and the possibility of flunking seem not to have occurred to them. Even those who eventually do realiz~ their own shortcomings sometimes plead for a passing grade because they feel they caflnot make their parents understand how unprepared they are for college work. PANORAMA At the same time, the students most affected occasionally refuse to admit in class that they need help. After an explanation has been made :md the instructor asks for questions, not a single hand will be raised. Only when the ~tu dents try to practice what supposedly has been learned will it be clear how little has been understood. But the mere fact of their having enrolle.d in college has given them a sense of prestige, so that they feel a "loss of face" in admitting weakness to anyone, presumably even to themselves. They remain silent and hope not to be called on and pray for the miracle that will let them pass four years, untouched. To some extent, of course, their silence is due also to extreme shyness and homesickness, both the effect of many years without having tried on independence. All these conditions intensify the English instructor's basic problem, which is the teaching of a foreign language to groups which seldom have a common language of their own. ,At present Tagalog is a national language in name only. There are many students who cannot speak Tagalog any better than they can Spanish; and when they try English, their impulse is to translate their own idioms directly from the JULY 1955 dialect - Visayan, Ilocano, Bicol. Although the resultant words, taken jndividually, are English, the idioms themselves definitely are not. Some freshmen simply have no ear trained for recognizing English on any level- formal, informal, or colloquial. Perhaps this is partly due to the more than full measure of languages which every child is compelled to learn - a babel of tongues; perhaps partly to half-day classes and the absence of a seventh grade, and to overtaxed teachers from grade one, up. But the responsibility also lies with the student who makes English more foreign than it need be, by not using it outside the classroom. The effect 9£ American movies on Filipino tongues has been surprisingly small. Why .. do so many people attend local theaters? Do they go to enjoy the air conditioning? to hold hands? to watch technicolor? Are these silent movies, as far as Filipinos are concerned? What happens when they hear English ·over the radio and there are no pictures to concentrate on? Or are the sounds so much static between mambos? And what do they see when they look at a newspaper? The fact is that these media, which should be crucial, have 59 hardly bruised college freshmen. Th=y ask their teachers to repeat and repeat, as if they had never heard English before. And when they try to speak the language, their mouths make Spanish vowels and Filipino consonants; their ears pretend that this is Enlish! HOW CAN these old boys and girls who need to become young men and women be helped? Even at the few best schools there are rumors of instructors a n d professors whose occasional habits only add to the problem: those who dogmatize, instead of encouraging a wise skepticism that will provoke sensitive research; those who lecture interminably, as if student opinion does not exist; but particularly the Terrors and the Entertainers, those who grade every twitch of the eyelash, every withheld breath as if they were conducting an inquisition, and those who, considering the whole effort futile, pass time pleasantly by recounting their plane travels to Iloilo or their Leyte landing, with or without bombardment. That mapy of our college students, whatever their ultimate interests, have an integrity beyond challenge is shown by the fact that such eccentries are liked only by exceptional students. The average student at the state univ~rsity, for example, usually learns - before he graduates - to appreciate the fact that the University of the Philippines, as a public institution, is and ought to be experimental. With the help of advice from FOA, UNESCO, and Fulbright fellows, its faculty is educating itself constantly. A year ago the English department discovered the audiovisual aids available in its neighboring College of Education. But for several years, through seminars, it has been rebuilding its freshman curriculum to the stage where such aids can aid. A "pilot program'' for even further changes, conducted last year under Dr. William Schwab, is being modified this year to meet local conditions. Students who at first notice such growth from curiosity only, by commencement may find that they themselves have grown and that the experimentalism which is essential to education can be applied as well to the improvement of the family and society. Such young people reward the hopes that accompany so much care and effort expended. * "' "' 60 PANORAMA Literarv Personality-VI/ HENRY GREEN: g:>fioto9'iajih <Without a 9-aC!E People should be heard, not seen A LL DAY long, H. Yorke is the soberly dressed managing director of H. Pontifex and Sons Ltd., for 200 years manufacturers of plant equipment for the food-and-drink trade.' The Yorke family has managed the business for over half a century (since the director's birth, in fact) from a conservative, respectable 4-storey building with a cage-like elevator and cubbyhole offices. The desks are immens~ and impressive, the armchairs shoulder-deep; the walls are covered with royal charters from the 18th century. After Eton and Oxford (where H. Yorke played for the university billiards championship), he entered the family foundries at Birmingham as an apprentice. His fellow workers, unable to believe that he had started at the bottom by choice, were convinced that his father had sentenced him to hard labor as punishment for some college crime. Each morning Henry Yorke still inhabits the world of distillation: of heat balances, second-and-third-effect evaporators, stripping columns and reflux condensers. His life, measured by the Wheatstone bridge and barkometer, is the paunchy, stuffy habitual round of English commerce. Yet, as the ~unch hour strikes, Yorke produces heavy paper and a steel-nibbled pen, wound with surgical tape to make it easier to grip (he suffer's from writer's cramp), and becomes Henry Green - a novelist whose daily quota is 1,000 words. Fortunately, Yorke dislikes eating lunch, so that Green can1 write uninterruptedly until afternoon• business summons JULY 1955 61 him again. Only after he has reached home and has finished dinner can he become Green once more. T HIS DOUBLE rol.e began while Henry was still an ~ppren tice in the foundry. Only to the collector of internal revenue does it seem that the Yorke-Green personalities speak the same language. Conservative in business, Greeh has written nine novels which constitute "an advanced attempt to break up the old-fashioned type of novel." "Initially, his contribution was to use a scissors on quotation marks, "a's" ··and "the's," in order not to distract the reader from the essential subject. He developed the custom too of using one-word titles for his books: Blindness, Living, Party-going, Caught, Loving, Back, Concluding, Nothing, etc. And the development of situations is handled now almost en.tirely through conversations, with their implications. Green supplies stage directions or interpretations only when an object has no voice of its own - like a frosted window, a bird, a man sleeping, a white fog. Otherwise, he merely makes piain who is speaking and forces the reader's imagination to fill in life's ·blanks - to pick up the clues, as in a detective story, and draw his own conclusions. Although Green refuses to describe his characters, he has made pioneer explorations of the many ways in which they can describe themselves, by their own words and gestures. In this way, the author manages to be as inconspicuous as possible. This desire for invisibility carries over into Green's personal life. Unlike the artist as usually conceived, dying boldly in an attic with his reckless love guiding his pencil and a ragged manuscript trembling under his hand, Green tries to detach himself from his art whenever he is not actually composing. He is not ashamed that, as a successful business man, he does not starve and his eyes are not feverish. The poet in Green's novel Doting moves ghostlike from room to room, never speaking to anyone - because he no longer has anything to say! Although many of Green's friends are writers (W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood), he avoids literary circles, which he calls "a classic form of dying." He feels it his duty to "meet as many pedestrian people as. pos62 PANORAMA sible and to listen to the most pedestrian conversation." He has always admired factory workers because they talk of everycne except themselves. G REEN HAS said that one learns art best from people who are not artists: "conversation is the principal way of learning anything about life, and so it is absurd to waste good talk on topics, such as art, that come after life, not before it. It is ridiculous for people who talk mainly about the arts to call themselves 'intellectuals.' How can they be, when they haven't the smallest interest in the principal material of intellect - people? No, the real intellectual is the workingman." However, the workers in Green's own factory do not think much of his books! Nevertheless, Living is a brilliant proletarian novel; and Loving captures "life downstairs" among the servants. Some of his experience with the less fortunate classes came to Green during World War II when he was a full-time fireman, despite the fact that through intermarriage he is related to everything from Dutch tin mines to railroads. And there were those early years as an iron and brass molder, and coppersmith in the family foundries. Wherever he has gone, Green has listened well to people. Although he was elected chairman of the British Chemical Plant Manufacturers' Association (producers of atomic energy and bacteriological warfare equipment), he seldom entertains at home but prefers the company and conversation of commoners in local pubs. "I only became a member of a club once," he says, "and then I resigned after three days. They had the imp_ertinence to put a small boy behind a pillar, to watch me. They thought I wouldn't behave with the proper obsequiousness of a new member. And then they made me pay 15 pounds for the privilege of resigning! It's been pub, not club, for me, since that." W HEN he is through being Green, Henry Yorke becomes himself again: a hard-working man wQo likes jazz but never listens to the radio or goes to a movie. Letters are piled unopened on the bathroom floor until they obstruct traffic; then they are destroyed. He is friendly and frank about all topics except those related to his Green self. Just as he likes JULY 1955 to keep even his Green personality out of his novels, not to mix it with his characters', so too he refuses to let Green appear in Henry Yorke's private life. Consequently, a photograph of Green-Yorke's face is very rare. Usually he lets pictures be taken only of ethe back of his head, with or without a hat. He prefers anonymity because, he says, the artist should exist only to record personalities other than his own. Yorke, as a person, feels more important than Green, the writer, and never lets the latter interfere with serious (and certainly never with relaxed) ways of living. 64 * * An employer called his men together to place before them pla~s for" bettering working conditions. "Now whenever I enter the shop,'' he said, "I want to see every man cheerfully performing his task, and therefore I invite you to place in this box any suggestions as to how that can be brought about." A few days later he opened the box and took out a slip of paper containing this message: "Take the rubber heels off your shoes!" * * Silence is one great art of conversation. He is not a fool who knows to hold his tongue; and a person may gain credit for sense, eloquence, wit, who merely says nothing to lessen the opinion which others have of these qualities in themselves. -William Hazlitt * * If we would seek for one word which describes society better than any other. that word is cooperation. -Ashley M ontagu PANORAMA "We're happy here." QJJ)orld I I £ VERY SUNDAY I catch a (0 bus out to the s~a~e insane asylum to visit my parents. It seems little enough to do for them and they get a great kick out of seeing me. Father always . gallops over to me as soon as they guide him into the visiting room. Last Sunday Mother pulled him to a sliding halt, dismounted and saluted me, while Father nibbied contentedly at my shoestrings. "Son? I've bad news for you. The other day I was out looking for some strays and I wandered into the warden's office. Right there on the desk was the darned.est thing-a newspaper." Mother spun around, kicked Father in the slats and bellowed, "Hang it all Silver, that's loco weed!" She prodded him out in the center of the carpet and retied my shoe laces. "Father isn't quite right, you know," she informed me, with a broad wink. • A bachelor of arts graduate from the University of ·the Philippines, RAY F,:z::zRN has written a number ot articles and stories for the Litera."1! Apprentice and the Collegian. JULY. 1955 By RAY EKERN* t'Where was I? Oh, yeah . . . the newspaper. Well, right there on the front page was a picture of some desperado, Bernard Baruch I think it was. Son, did you read what he said? She whipped out a sack of tobacco and rolled a cigarette quick as I could follow. Then, glancing around carefully, she slipped a newspaper clipping in ·my palm. "Here. Read that while I stand guard." I looked at the item: Elder statesman Bernard Baru,ch warned that "merely to outlaw the atomic bomb is no insurance against atomic destruction." On the contrary, he said the U.S. must make more and more atom bombs to maintain an overwhelming lead. And a standby mobilization program must be enacted. All, he concluded, was "for the sake of peace." It was nothing exceptional. I'd been reading similar stuff 65 in the daily press for years. Mother w a s usually pretty sharp on visiting days, and I hoped she wasn't taking a turn for the worse. When I'd finished she retrieved the clipping, studying my face closely. "Son, are you happy there on the outside?" Her voice carried a note of anxiety, and suddenly grasping me by the necktie, she jered my head forward and whispered, "Do people really talk like that without laughing?" f? STAMMERED, trying to think CY of some· defensive retort whereby I could explain to her the modern trend of thought. Mother is a little old-fashioned in her thinking, having been there fifteen years - ever since she and Father boasted openly of voting the straight Republican ticket. "Now, Mother . . . ," I began haltingly; then seized the commonly accepted theme and added brightly, "All this is only to strengthen the peace of the world." Mother leaped lightly over a chair and peered at me through the rungs. Somehow, I felt that my point hadn't reached her. ~dging closer, I said, "Don't you see Mom, the only way we can insure peace is by preparing for war. I mean . . . er . . . that is . . . Everybody thinks so these days," I finished lamely. 66 Mom saw that I meant her no harm and came out, tears in her eyes. "Oh Son, try to ask permission to come live with us. We're so happy here." An elderly gentleman ap· proached us, doffing a red felt bonnet. Bowing elaborately to Mother, he nodded to me. "Sorry I can't give you my name - for security reasons." He shook my hand. "I was head of the political science department at Yale recently. How are things outside? With this last question, he gave me a knowing look and rolled his eyes heavenward. In a lower voice he said, "Please forgive me for what I'm about to do, but the attendant is watching m.e and if I don't do something funny occasionally, they try to send me out as cured." He dropped quickly to his hands and knees and bit my ankle savagely. Mother shook her head as he retreated. "Poor man. They keep trying to send him away. And he had such a time getting in. He had to lecture on the street corner in favor of disarmament before they would accept him here." Looking at my watch, I perceived that the visiting hour was about over. Mother thrust two fingers in her mouth and whistled an ear-splitting blast. Neigh- ing spiritedly, Father paced over and stood geptly until she was seated astride his back. "So long, Son," she shouted. "I'll see PANORAMA you next trip!" Father, however, suddenly assumed a we a r y stance, legs widespread, and ,head drooping. Mother seemed perplexed when she dug her heels into his flanks and he failed to move. ~HEN SHE smiled a_nd tipped me an informative wink. Producing her newspaper C'l.ipping, she leaned forward and held it in front of Father's face . . As his eyes flitted over the text, I saw him quiver; then he reared high in the air, snorted loudly, and disappeared down * JUS,T LUCK * the corridor in a cloud of floor wax, Mother whooping in delight. The attendant must have seen the longing expression on my face. He came over and firmly led me to the door. "Don't get any ideas, my friend. We deal with hundreds of you every day. Now, get out!" Sadly I walked out into the world of newscasts and extras. I'd show him! At the corner I bought an armload of newspapers, knowing full well I could read my way into that Utopia within the week. * Waiter: "How did you find your steak, sir?" Diner: "Believe me, it was just luck. I happened to move that piece of parsley, and there it was. * * BEG YOUR PARDON! Chemistry Professor: "I may be mistaken, but I thought I heard you talking during my lecture." Student: "You must be mistaken, I never talk in my sleep." * JULY 1955 67 1ltis 1s the ?1ew BELL TRADE ACT By Senator JOSE P. LAUREL • (Conclusion) 4 Article 11 of the revised • text embodies a new provision. It provides that the quota limitation on sugar shall be without prejudice to any increase which the Congress of the United States might allo, cate to the Philippines in the future. The quantity of sugar which the Philippines may export to the United States in 'the future is not frozen within the present quota. 5. Paragraphs 3 and 4 of Article II of the Trade Agreement of 1946 dictate to the Philippines the manner of allocating among local producers and manufacturers the quotas on Philippine products subject to quotas in the United States. The "historical pattern" is being deleted in the proposed revision and the manner of allocating these quotas is left entirely to the judgment of the Philippine government. 68 6. Under Article III of the Trade Agreement of 1946, only the United States may establish quotas on non-quota Philippine articles which may come into competition with like United States articles. As amended, Article III provides that the authority to impose new quantitative restrictions shall be reciprocal and that such restrictions may also be imposed for balance of payment reasons. 7. Article IV, paragraph 3, of the Trade Agreement of 1946 prohibits the Philippines from imposing an export tax on articles exported to the United States. This prohibition is eliminated. Actually, it is only the Philippines that gains additional power by the elimination of the prohibition, because the United States is prohibited by her own Constitution from imposing export taxes. 8. Article V of the Trade Agreement of 1946 which prohibits the Philippines fr om PANORAMA changing the val~ of its currency in relation to the United States· dollar, suspending the ·convertibility of pesos into dollars, or restricting ·the transfer of funds from the Philippines to the United States without the approval of the President of the United States is ·eliminated. The power over currency is one of the essential attributes of sovereignty. Under the proposed ·revision, the Philippines will be free to adopt any foreign exchange control measure to protect its balance of payments position without having to secure the permission of the President of the United States. Should the Philippine government decide to change the par value of , tl;ie peso in the national interest, it could do so, subject only to its obligations to .the International '.Monetary Fund. 9. The proposed Article VI will replace Article VII of the Trade Agreement of 1946. The proposed Article provides for the mutualization of rights between Philippine and United States citizens in the exploitation of natural resources and operation of public utilities in their respective countries. If a state of the United States denies these rights to Filipino citizens, 'the Philippines may, likewise, deny such rights to citizens of that State. Under the Trade Agreement of 1946 there is par- , ity on one side; under the proJULY 1955 posed revision there would be parity on both sides. 10. Article VII, as revised, is a new article. It provides for reciprocal non-discrimination by either party against the citizens or enterprises of the other with respect to engaging in business activities. If a state of the United States restricts the extent to which Filipino citizens may engage in business activities, the Philippines may, likewise, limit the extent to which citizens of such state may engage in business activities in the Philippines. · 11 Article VIII of the re• vised text is also new. It provides for security exceptions relating to fissionable materials, traffic in arms, and military secrets, in the mutual interest of the Philippines and the United States. 12. Article IX of the proposed revised agreement amends Article VIII of the Trade Agreement of 19A6 by eliminating the last clause of paragraph 1 wliich is now obsolete, by deleting th~t portion· of paragraph 2 relating to allocation in the Philippines of United States quotas on Philippine articles, retaining only the -first sentence of the paragraph; and by deleting all of paragraph 3 which is, likewise, obsolete and not germane to the general subject of . the agreement. 13. Article X (Article IV of the Trade Agreement of 1946) 69 provides for consultation between the United States and the Philippines to take place not 'later than July 1, 1971, on joint problems which may arise as a result or in anticipation of the agreement in 1974. The year 1971 will be a crucial year because beginning that year the percentage of the United States duties to be levied on Philippine products entering the Vnited States will jump from 60 %1 to 80%, and duty-free quotas, on certain Philippine goods will be reduced from 40% to 20%. The new provision makes consultation mandatory and the Philippines will be saved from embarrassment of having to ask for such consultation. 14. Article XI, as revised, preserves and emphasizes the temporary character of the Trade Agreement which "shall have no effect after July 3, 1974" and provides for the manner of termination of the agreement before that dq.te. The above cursory examination of the proposed revised trade agreement will show that the Philippine Economic Mission has secured appreciable advantages in the political and economic fields, and intangible benefits which are incapable of pecuniary estimation. FOR THE first time in the history of our more than half a century of association with the United States, the Philippines 70 will acquire complete political sovereignty: (a) we shall have complete control over our currency and may adopt any foreign exchange control measures without having to secure the approval oi the President of the United States; (b) the power to tax will extend to the impo<>ition of export taxes; ( c) the power to suspend or terminate the trade agreement for any reason will also be granted the President of the Philippines; ( d) the power to fix quotas on American articles imported into the Philippines will also be granted the President of the President of the Philippines; ( e) the "historical pattern" in the allocation of the United States import quotas on certa,in_ Philippine articles is abolished; (f) the right of Philippine and United States citizens to exploit natural resources and operate public utilities in the country of the other is mutualized; anc::. (g) reciprocal non-discrimination by either the Philippines or the United States against the citizens or enterprises of the other with respect to engaging in business activities is provided. In the economic field, through the adoption of the system of acceleration and deceleration in the liquidation of tariff preferences, (a) the Philippines is expected to benefit materially during the remaining period of our preferential trade with the PANORAMA United States. Provisions have been inserted for (b) the opening of the door for the increase of the quota allocated for sugar; ( c) the deletion of rice from articles for which quotas are fixed; ( d) the elimination of the absolute quotas on cigars, scrap tobacco, coconut oil, and J.Jearl or shell buttons which will permit the exportation to the United States of any amount in excess of the duty-free quotas, provided the full United States duties thereon are paid, and ( e) liquidation of tariff preferences in such manner as will enable the Philippines to readjust her economy. Under the proposed revised trade agreement, it is now possible for the Philippines to plan out (a) the relationship between domestic production and importation, and the industrialization program; (b) the protection of the country's balance of payments to safeguard the stability of the Philippine peso; ( c) the means of improving the fiscal position of the government through the accelerated imposition of duties and the levy of a temporary spe~ial import tax on United States goods; ( d) the eventual elimination of. certain types of trade controls to insure a freer flow of trade; and ( e) the transformation of the Philippine economy from one that is primarily agrarian to one that is partly industrialized. JULY 1955 The attainment alone of full political sovereignty will not only increase the stature of our country and its citizens, but will also develop self-confidence and self-reliance amongst the Filipinos. Such step will also enhance our prestige abroad no less than create favorable impression with respect to the policy of the United States towards the Philippines. These, and more, are the invisible and intangible assets, not measurable in pecuniary dimension. I N CONSIDERING the proposed revision to the Trade Agreement of 1946, it is well to bear in mind the following considerations: ( 1) that the Trade Agreement of 1946 is temporary in character; ( 2) that the proposed revision, being limited to the framework of the Trade Agreement of 1946, is also temporary; ( 3) that the Philippine Economic Mission to the United States has agreed only to recommend to our government for consideration the proposed revision of the Trade Agreement of 1946 (Introductory Statement, Final Act of Negotiations); ( 4) that under the terms of the agreement (original and revised), either party may terminate it for any cause whatsoever upon not less than 5 years' written notice, and upon 6 months' written notice if either party has applied or adopted measures or practices which would operate 71 to nullify or impair any rights or obligations provided in the ag:reement; ( 5) that the revised text provides for consultation between the two governments not later than July 1, 1971 on joint problems which may arise as a result or in anticipation of the termination of the agreement; ( 6) that in international negotiations of this character one party does not get everything that it wants; and ( 7) that the proposed revision of the Trade Agreement is no panacea for all our economic ills. I believe that the proposed Revised Trade Agreement is at least an improvement upon the original Trade Agreement of 1946. I express the hope that, with the approval of the revised agreement, we shall have laid· the foundation of our political and economic relationship with the United States on a sound and enduring basis and charted likewise a norm of conduct worthy of a free people. With the implementation of the Revised Trade Agreement and the satisfactory solution of other vital problems· now confronting us, we shall be able, I am confident, to march onward and forward, alongside otl,ier progressive nations of the world, towards peace, prosperity -and happiness for our people. • • • Tongue in Gheek Half-jokingly, Wilder calls the opening paragraph of The Woman of Andros "one of the most beautiful in the English language." It begins: "The earth sighed as it turned in its course; the shada,w of night crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left in darkness. The great cliff that was one day to be called Gibraltar held for a long time a gleam of red and orange, while across from it the mountains of Atlas showed deep blue pockets in their shining sides. The caves that surround the Neapolitan gulf fell into a profounder shade, each giving forth from the darkness its chiming or its booming sound. Triumph had passed from G:-eece and wisdom from Egypt, but with the coming on of r:ight they seemed to regain their lost honors, and the lard that was soon te be called Holy prepared in the dark its wonderful burden . . . " * * 72 PANO~ The ageless grandeur of Mexico's Indian forms • p OR THE conquistadores the New World, paradoxically, was also a source of wonder because of its amazing age, its enduring beauty. In their dream• of themselves, these Teules (Lords), as the Spaniards liked to be called, saw ,their entry into Mexico as the bringing of light into darkness. Each soldier thought himself a knight-errant mounted on his charger, a Knight of the Wheel or a Knight of the Cross, tilting lances with- pagan gods and customs. The conquerors were proud of their resplendent arms, their strange fast animals, and their technical skill. They were the adventurous couriers of a Renaissance whose glory was spilling over the shores of the European ~ontinent, into the North Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic. No wonder. the brilliance of their own dream dazzled them. Looking on the Mexican Indians as primitive minds, JULY 1955 in the New World By JESUS STO. DOMINGO they almost destroyed a culture which had survived centuries of disease and strife before Spain itself was fully born! Scholars who know world art and the average man whose average eyes manage to see parallels in familiar objects, both · groups can see similarities between certain pre-Columbus forms of art and those of ancient Egypt, the old Mediterranean civilizations or the Far East. Yet, as Jean Cassou the art critic has pointed out, so old is that fire in Mexico which forges, each generation, a scintillating new world of wonder, that the Spaniards found art forms that were "inalienably original and whole." The treasures unearthed from the temples of Chichen-Itza or MonteAlban are of astounding beauty, "something underived." 73 WHAT WAS the source of the vigor which made these matchless artifacts? The Spanish stumbled on a great Indian civilization which extended far beyond even Mexico and Peru into three continents. In Mexico, tl:is civilization had already_ attained such a remarkably advanced stage, that its growth had been arrested and was already beginning to decline. The last of the Aztec emperors, Cuahtemoc, made a desperate stand which, for a brief time, drove the Spaniards from Mexico City. But despite this last effort the Aztec Empire fell and, in accepting its fate as the fulfiillment of ancient prophecies, demonstrated their "sad fatalism." Their despair was assisted by the fact that enslaved Indian tribes seized the occasion to rebel against the Aztecs. However, Cassou suggests that this very fatalism humanized the frightful cruelty of the Aztecs (whose gods demanded hum§ln sacrifices). "The love of flowers and of other short-lived things which the song-poems of ,Kiag Netzachuaulcoytl evoke so movingly; the meditative sprit; a minute and infinite patience - all of these are traits of the Mexican soul. In their buildings and sculpture one feels the weight of a massive, melancholy despondency. 74 The implacable geometrical forms, the square-cut jaws, the uncompromising decorative motifs, the w h o 1 e Cyclopean weight of Mexican monuments speaks of a gravity' of mind iri~ dined towards macabre, unfathomed mysteries. There is in this spirit and style alike power primarily hermetic, coiled like that of the symbolic serpent whose expansion can onry be slow and terrible." The mixture of mineral impassivity and the wild-beast aggressiveness of the Indian genius appealed to the Spanish who, themselves, were iascinated by adventurous death. Perhaps for the first time in the history of human philosophv, two peoples of noble stock, both regarding death as a sport, encountered each other and flourished. New possibilities blossomed from this meeting of the new Old World and the old. New World. One of the results of this conj unction is Mexico's Colonial Baroque art. This overwrought fillagreed style, imported from Spain, is carried to unparalleled rich exuberance by Mexico's tropical passion. The miracles from Spanish religous beliefs have been grafted onto the terrifying and unforgettable Indian gods; and together these are the figures that carry the motifs. PANOJ.<AMA JUST AS Mexican gemus surpassed Spanish baroque in the visual arts, · so Conceptism (baroque poetry) finds its best .author since Spain's Gongora in l/lexico's J auna Ines de la Cruz. The latter's First Dream is a complicated lyrical pilgrimage into the mind. Most of the old colonies of Spain in America have a picturfsque provincialism. Yet there is always a vigorous native element that distinguishes Chile and Argentina and Bolivia . . . and Mexico. An understanding of Mexican civilization, whether under Aztec emperors or Castilian viceroys or the sovereign Mexican nation, can be had only Jpy turning to the native popufation. All modern Mexican art 1s naive and primitive because the artists have not forgotten the history of their fullblooded desires. Its crudeness is the strength of l'v'Iexican art, suggestive always of the basic structures and coloring of uneroding mountains. It was this same strength which expressed itself in the Revolution of 1910, in the Mexican people's struggle for independence. Because the inherent power of such expressions, in art or in more violent actions, derives from the Zapotec, Mayan or other Indian civilizations, it is useless to try to learn about Mexican art by comparing it with modern European art. The manner is always massive and deceptively simple; its colors unmixed; its figures in motion with a n8tural, easy 7HE LEADING character in Willa Cather"s novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, was askeq to carve a diocese out of desert land in 19th century southwest America, an area larger than Europe. He succeeded because he came to appreciate Indian attitudes and customs so quickly. What helped him, for example, understand the Mexican response to the Virgin of Guadaloupe (who appeared to a peasant) was his own miraculous encounter with a cactus shaped like a cross when he was lost in the desert on his arrival. The cross reminded him that others had suffered more than he ever could and that their suffering, by becoming sacrificial, had been meaningful: and so he ignored his own thirst and pain. JULY 1955 75 contortion. Government funds helped produce the large frescoes of Jose Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivero and Alfaro Siqueiros, but the people - not an aristocratic court nor an official comm.ission - suggested the images and themes hardened in those frescoes. It is the story of their own past, their struggles, their hopes, their work and their wars which color those murals. The . poetic savagery of Rufino Tamayo's painting is the people's also. T h i s unchanging new-old world - the world of art, of a ' people's most deeply felt reverence:> and fears - is so absorbent and unconquerable and undiminishing that it is visibll!i alike in ancient gods and Chris-. tian images, murals of the collective spirit. and paintings of personal sensibilities, masterpieces and cheap mass-craft products. It persists and, uncontaminated, earns the just name ol Mexican art for all that has been accomplished. 76 * * * THERE ARE NO SUPERIOR RACES U NSCIENTIFIC people have tried to explain differences among groups (they say "races") by claiming that one race strain is closer to the ape than another. There is no such thing as a "primitive race," that is, one that hasn't evolved quite as far as another. Yet these race fossils stoutly claim that Negroids and Mongoloids are closer to the ape than 'are "whites." An anthropologist has prepared the following "ape like" characteristics which should dismay the race fossil. Apes have: White have; Mongoloids have: Negroes have; round heads round and long heads round heads long heads brow ridges brow ridges smooth brows smooth brows broad noses narrow noses medium noses broad noses brown · hair brown hair black hair black hair wavy hair wavy hair straight hair kinky hair hairy bodies hairy bodies unhairy bodies unhairy bodies brown skins brown to white skins brown skins black to brown straight eyes straight eyes mongoloid folds straight eyes thin lips thin lips medium lips thick lips Total score: Negros have a total of unapelike traits; Mongoloids, 4 or S; the whites or "Nordics," 3. Of course this does not mean that white people are closer to the apes than Negroes. When the differences among groups began to develop, man was a diffeient species from the ape. No race or group has evolved any further in a physical sense than another. PANORAMA The Royal Journey Jtl'LY 1955 JN THE rather unexpected surroundings of a railway station in Battersea, there are four royal carriages, built during the past 100 years or so for the journeys of British Sovereigns, once the most luxurious coaches of their kind. They are part of British Transport's exhibition, "Royal Journey." In them have stayed and slept at least nine kings and queens. As well as having this distinction, they are also a part_ of railway history: they show, in detail, how the idea of what is luxurious in travel has changed over the pasi: century and more. The oldest of the carriages, or coaches, was built for the Dowager Queen Adelaide in 1842. The historians of the British Transport Commission say it is the first known sleeping care ever made. lt looks like two-and-a-half magnificent stage coaches compressed into one. It has all the gleaming, varnished panelling, the gilt lining, and ornate crests of some nineteenth century flyer. The seats are rather like those of some older first class carriages still in use, and the ladies in waiting had to walk along a footboard out~ide the carriage to reach the royal compartment. There is no evidence that they ever did this when the train was moving. The carriage used by Queen Victoria dates from 1869. Then it was in fact, two carriages, joined by the first bellows gang-way ever devised. The bedroom is still furnished as it was in the great Queen's day. Its walls are quilted in red chintz, and the ceiling is in white silk. There are two beds, apparently done in brass. At the foot of each bed is a little basket for holding knick-knacks. The day saloon's walls are lined with royal-blue, watered silk, and its curtains are ornamented with bobble fringe&, tassles, and sashes. There seems to be filt carving everywhere, and the vast elaborate lamp· 'tands have shades of silk and lace that look for all the 77 world like crinolines. This compartment, in fact, is every inch a period piece. The remaining two carriages look much more modern. They were built first for King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra; altered for George V and Queen Mary, and finally used by the late King George VI and the Queen Mother early in the last war. Their decoration, at the suggestion of Edward VII, is very like that of a Royal Yacht. In what was his carriage there is a smoke-room with masculine-l_ooking chairs in green leather. There are silver-plated b~s, sofas so deeply upholstered that it takes seconds finally to sink into them. * * * DEATH OF THE TOOTH BETWEEN the enamel of the tooth and the pulp (often called the nerve) is the major tooth structure, caIIed the dentine. The dentine consists of millions of tiny tubes which under the microscope look like a bundle of pencils with their leads removed. Running up each tube is a hair-like process bathed in tissue fluid which becomes irritated when the enamel is removed by decay. Sometimes one feels a sudden twinge of pain when eating ice-cream or drinking hot SALABAT. That pain indicates that in one's mouth is an exposed piece of dentine which .. is being bothered by the extremes of temperature or by sweets. As a result, the protective ceII retreats further into the pulp, laying down fresh deposits of calcium. In this way the ceIIs try to well ofl the aflected tubes and protect the vital pulp. But dental decay is faster and soon strips aside even the fresh layer and infects the pulp. * * 78 PANORAMA One mark of an educated man ~s the possession of a reasonable fund cf general information. The highly speciaHze<l individual, often dubbed an "expert," frequently knows little or ri.oth:ng outside his uwn line. Try yourself <,n the following questions, then turn to the next page for the correct answers. 1. The famous sequoia trees that grow to sixteen feet or more in diameter are found in abundance in: A. Canada; ~> Siberia; C. California; D. Denmark. 2. It might interest you to know that the largest volcano in the world is: A. Kilimanjaro (Africa); B. Fujiyama (Japan); C. Mauna Loa (Hawaii); D. Krakatau (Sumatra). 3. To determine whether a liquid is acid or alkaline, a chemist uses: A. starch; B. phenol; C. sugar; D. litmus' paper. 4. What is a dromedary? It is: A. a one-humped camel; B. a hive of bees; C. a two-headed monster; D. a refuge for early Christians. 5. The tailor measures in inches and the gun maker in caliber. The printer, on the othet hand, measures m: A. carat; B. em; C. knot; D. millimeter. 6. The founder of the Philippine revolutionary society La Liga Filipina was: A. Bonifacio; B. Aguinaldo; C. del Pilar; D. Rizal. 7. It may not save your life in case of a nuclear war, but it's interesting to know that the atom bomb works on the principle of fission, whereas the· hydrogen bomb on the principle of: A. fusion; B. gravitation; C. centrifugal force; D. radiation. 8. If you had a persistent skin disease, you would of course consult: A. a pediatrician; B. a dermatologist; C. an osteologist; D. an obstetrician. 9. The youngest among the English Romantic poets when he died, h~ succumbed to tuberculosis: A. William Wordsworth; B. Percy B. Shellen C. Walter Savage Landor; D. John Keats. 10. The freedom of South Vietnam may ultimately depend on the success of its anti~communist premier: A. U Nu; B. Wa Nam; C. Ngo Dinh Diem; D. Mao Tse Tung. JULY 1955 79 ARE YOU WORD WISE? Answers 1. ( d ) herd to please 2. (a) cannot be satisfied 3. ( c) nourishing 4. (d) determined, by more chance 5. ( d) fine underclothes for women 6. (b) to eat up 7. (a) habitual or confirmed 8. (a) to give up a throne 9. ( d) a fortified place 10. ( d) pertaining to birth 11. ( c) tending to float on a fluid 12. (b) a beg or sack 13. (b) a question 14. J:a) juicy 15. (d) marking the completion ol 100 years 16. ( d) to behave as if one steps down from a superior position 17. (a) undue dis:glay of learning 18. (c) a humorus imitation of a * * ANSWERS TO PANORAMA QUIZ 1. C. California (most of the trees are from 1,000 to 3,000 years_ old) 2. C. Maune Loa ( 13,680 feet above the ocean, plus 30,000 feet above the deep bed of the Pacific Ocean)' 3. D. litmus paper (turns reddish for acid, blue for alkaline) 4. A. a one-humped camel 5. B. em (abbut one sixth of an inch) 6. D. Jose Rizal 7. A. fusion 8. B. dermatologist 9. D. John Keats (1795-1821) 10. C. Ngo Dinh Diem serious piece of writing 19. (b) to give way 20. (b) to ward off * A TTEN fl ON: HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS 80 The PANORAMA will give a prize of PIO for the best and PS for the next best essay on any problem of national or international significance. The best essay will be published in this magazine. The essays, which should not be less than 300 words, should not exceed 500 words. Entries must be typewritten, double-spaced on 8 x 11 bond paper and must be accompanied by a statement from the principal that the contestant is enrolled in the school he is representing. The decision of the editors will be final. PANORAMA In the Beginning . .. KINDERGARTEN (a school f'j young children) From the German word which literally means "garden of children" comes this term. Not a "school' in the strict sense, the kindergarten off P.rs games and occupations de14igned to make use of the child's natural tendency to express himself. JULY 1955 PAPER (a thin sheet of material for writing on, printing, wrapping, etc.) A tall aquatic plant, Cyperus Papyrus, found in Ethiopia, Palestine and Egypt, was the source of . the first material for writing. It was prepared from thin strips of the pith laid together, soaked, pressed end dried, end used extensively by the ancient Egyptians. p ED D LE R (one who carries wares around to sell) 1In Middle English (11th to 15th centuries). pedle meant "basket." Apparently the term "peddler" was derived from the itinerant selesmaro's habit of carrying a basket container for his wares. 81 Philippine '.Panorama-'VIII lil EBU, the oldest city in the v Philippines, is in an island province (of the same name) shaped like a tppering sweet potato lying between Bohol to the east and N egros to the west. Named earlier by Magellan "La Cuidad del Santissimo Nombre del Santo Niiio Jesus'' this city was founded by Legaspi in 1565. It was a permanent settlement long before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in the New World. It has the oldest street in the islands, Calle Colon. And the oldest fort, Fort San Pedro, 82 supposed to be the site of Magellan's fortifications. It is said that the discover• er of 'the Philippines, the Por-· tuguese navigator, lost a Statue of the Holy Infant in this city. Legaspi later recovered the statute, now claimed to be that for whom the biggest fiesta of the City is held. In 1627 a fire gutted the first churches of San Nicolas and of the Holy Child, but the statue was spared. Thus is pre= served to this day the most ancient European image in the Philippines. PANORAMA In this city is also pl'eserved Li a kiosk structure the original cross SU.Pposedly planted by Magellan in the island in 15~1. It is alleged that the cross is still growing. In any case tourists usu ally never fail to visit this structure housing the cross, and devotees find it proper to throw in coins and loose paper bills which a sacristan dutifully sweeps on m(st days. lT HE CITY of Cebu is some three hundred and fifty miles from the Manila International Airport. Fro m the air, the City is like a fat child bursting out at the seams. The streets are choked into twisted ribbons; the hc1uses encroach on the kaingin- scarred hills. It's like Manila, pocket-size. At the airfield, originally designed for pre-war planes, there <11re taxis and private cars to take passengers for a six-oddkilometE:r ride to the city. The roads are asphalted for the most part. And of course there ate hotels in the city - as many kinds as there are of people wanting to stay in them. The streets of Cebu are being paved with asphalt, alt.hough Cebu province has a cement factory which is the largest in the Far East. A few of Cebu's principal thoroughfares like Magallanes St:reet, JULY 1955 Street, have been paved, however, with cement. A curious bui not surprising note about Magallanes Street: most of its store signs are in Chinese. Cebu has probably the greatest number of Chinese residents and traders of all Philippine citieis. Incidentally, whatever congressional opposition to retail nationaliz~ tion measures comes from thlS quarter. It is said that the truly big commemrcial deals in this city are worked out with the abacus. The use of modern computing machines is confined to American and English firmsthe last stand, it is said, of Western commercial pioneering. Like Stanvac and Shell and Smith Bell. There are night-clubs, hotels, hospitals, movie houses, cemeteries and all such appurtenances as make a city in this modern age. The night-clubs are in Lahug, at the foot of Busay, and in Subang-daku. They are more or less tawdry affairs that just miss being dance halls. T HERE is a government hospital - one of the best in the island - the Southern Islands Qeneral Hospital, which claims to have the prettiest nurses and the youngest doctors in the Philippines. It is said to be more spacious than 8J the Philippine General, and gives its patients better care than any other provincial hospital. The city has a waterfront which is the envy and secret dream of what all good little southern Philippine towns hope they'll grow up to be when they get to be cities. The Cebu harbor is one of the largest in the islands, and may well be the center of inter-island shipping in the Visayas. The city has of course a Capitol Building. The building was memorably inaugurated by the Japanese and their puppets in October, 1943. Cebu guerrillas in the hills of Babag joined in the inauguration by splattering machine-gun bullets on the assemblage. Near the Capitol is the Fuente Osmefia Area - a place to go to on a Sunday. Even on weekdays, the little spread of green is crowded with chubby infants of all shades of color and with all shapes of eyes. Like any city, Cebu is made more interesting by its environs and the places easily accessible from it. Across the narrow strait is the island of Mactan, a place af which Filipinos may feel proud without getting self-conscious. Here Filipino leadership and courage showed invaders the price to pay before they could truly claim ·the islands as theirs. 84 Every school child knows that Lapu-Lapu, a stocky Mactan cthieftain and his warriors charged down on Magellan and his soldiers, killing the Spanish captain and several more and driving the r'est away the from the islands. T 0 THE North of the city is Mandawe, well noted for its winsome girls and majareal - a tasty mold of milk and sugar and peanuts. To the South is Talisay, a principal source of the city's drinking water. Crytal clearwater gushes out of six-inch pipes sunk into the sand anywhere in Talisay. From the city, there are the winding mountain roads that lead past ravines, the steep sides of which have been planted to corn by a frugal landhungry people. One looks down on row after row of corn growing in defiance of gravity P ANORA!'4A No hill side is too high nor too steep. No ravine is too precipitous for the hardy meala-day farmer of Cebu. A chronicle of the early Cebu, then known as Sugbu, was written by Pigafetta, a friar and writer in Magellan's command. Pigafetta described the Cebuanas as "very beautiful and ahnost as white as our girls and as large.'' He also gave a bird's eye view of the town and people that, outside of· costume and custom, compared favorably with people in * * the then-known world in so far as trading, hospitality, avarice and superstition were concerned. Pigafetta kept 'Yl"iting to the end of their stay in Cebu, until the end of Serrano, the last of Magellan's lieutenants who took up the leadership after the Mactan tragedy. On April 27, 1565 came a wiser Miguel Lopez de Legaspi, who, after discharging his artillery on the remaining incorrigible chiefs of Sugbu, landed without opposition with his men on the town that was to become a city. * Filipiniana: How We Speak As of 1948, the language situation in the Philippines was summarized in this manner: Number of persons able to speakEnglish .•................... Tagalog ................... . Sugbuanon ................. . lloko ...................... . Bikol ...................... . Samamon .................. . Pampango ................. . 7,156,420 or 37.2% 7,126,913 or 37.1% 4,840,7!>8 or 25.2% 2,687,861 or 14 % 1,535,411 or 12.7% 1,226,413 or 6.4% 707,291 or 3.7% (The statistics are not conclusive insofar as English is concerned. A good number of people who have gone through the elementary grades and who know only a few words in English include themselves in the list of those who speak the language.) ~Philippine Information A~ncy Handbook * JULY 1955 85 'Jeue-{)~, , , , , , , by Elmer ''There. That should make 31ou comfortabJe.'1 86 PANORAMA How to <Teach @hildren "If you are a mere pedant, you waste your time reading this'' J F CHILDREN are not to be made to do things merely for the sake of their obedience, it follows that they will learn nothing until they recognize in it a real and immediate profit or pleasure. What other motive will induce them to learn? The advantage of being able to communicate with persons at a distance, transmitting our sentiments and our desires, must be plain to persons of all ages. Why, then, are the agreeable and use· ful arts of reading and writing regarded by children as a tor· ment? Because reading and writing have been forced upon them and have been put to uses which children do not understand. A child is, hardly eager to perfect the instrument with which he is tortured; only make that instrument serve his pleasure, and he will apply himself in spite o( you . . . The one sure motivation is the hope of immediate advantage. From time to time Emile receives from his family or his friends a letter inviting him to dinner or a picnic or a boatin& party or a parade. These letters are short, neat, legibly written. But Emile must rely on someone elee to read them to him. That someone, however, is not to be found - or provea as un· obliging in the matter as was Emile himself in some affair of yesterday. When at last the letter is read to him, the occasion has passed. Ah! if only he had been able to read it for himself! He gets other notes. They are quite short, and the contents are probably very interesting. He tries to make them out and with some casual assistance deciphers a part of them: something is going on tomorrow . . . .there will be refreshments . . . but he cannot tell where or when. What an effort he will make to read the rest! I do not believe that Emile will need the assistance of alphabet blocks . . . JULY 1955 87 If you dare to disregard the conventional procedures, if, instead of stuffing the mind of your pupil with information about faraway countries and centuries, you try rather to turn his attention to what immediately concerns him, then you will find him quite able to perceive, to remember, even to reason; this is nature's plan. As the sentient being becomes active, he acquires a power of discernment corresponding to h~s physical powers. And it is through a superabundance of those very energies that are needed for self-preservation that he develops the speculative faculties whereby he directs his energies to higher ends. Thus if you wish to make your pupil intelligent, develop in him a physical vi-gor for intelligence to control. Continually exercise his body. Make him robust and healthy, so that he may become reasonable and wise. Let qim work, run, shout; let him be always on the move. Develop in him a manly vigor, and he will soon develop for himself a manly mentality. This method will, of course, merely brutalize your pupil if you always dire.ct him, if you forever order him about: "Go," "Come," "Stay," "Do this," "Don't do that." If it is your mind that governs his body, his mind will soon become useless. But let us remember our first principles. If you are a mere pedant, you waste your time reading this." -From ROSSEAU'S Emile (18th century) * * HOW Mf!CH IS ONE BILLION DOLLARS? The New York 'rimes recently pictured the staggering amount of $1 billion this way: ( 1) Laid end to end, a billion dollars in $10 bills would stretch along the main automobile route from New York to San Francisco (distance: over 3,000 miles) more than three times. ( 2) If Julius Caesar were still living, trying to spend one billion at the rate of $1,000 !I day, he would have accomplished only three-quarters of the job. (Caesar lived 100 to 44 B.C. Here's the breakdown: By 1492, he would have had $440 million still left; by 1776, $336 million; by 1955, $271 million; the last dollar would be spent by 2697!). (3) A billion in $100 bills, piled one on top of the other, would make three stacks, each of them more than double the height of the Washington Monument (Height: 550 feet). * * 88 PANORJ $ALT ..... . ( Conti11ued from page 56) ldang threw her cigarette into the water. Enteng watched the small glow of red as it sank. "He might not be able to come home to Pinuluan tonight." "He won't come home tonight," she murmured. "Pule will go to the mainland tomorrow. He told me that he will see someone very important. Mang Gusting can go home with Pule." "He won't come home tonight, tomorrow, or ever," her voice was suddenly shrill. Enteng stopped paddling. He cried to see her but it was too dark. ''Yes, he left me. For good this time. He's really gone. Maybe to Sta. Cruz to take a train for Manila. He was very angry. He sold my rooster. Sold my pig to get his fare!" Dhe was gasping. He sat bewildered, he wanted t~ comfort • her but could not think of what to say, he continued looking at her in the darkness, he could only see her outline at the other side of the banca. She was sobbing loudly, giving out loud cries between gasps and words. "Yes, he left me. It was not a threat. He won't come back, He's angry. He will stay in Manila and look for a job and -a woman too. Maybe that's the reason he left me." She sniffed. "He won't come back." She stopped short. Enteng started paddling again. The wind was very cold and he felt a chill run down his spine. He shivered and then sneezed. It seemed too loud a sneeze and for a while it deafened him. Enteng looked at Pinuluan which loomed before him darkly. He looked back at the mainland. There were lights on shore blinking faintly like fireflies. Aling ldang blew her nose vigorously into one end of her tapis and then started lightin_g another cigarette . OUR COVER depicts the first Philippine Republic president, General Emilio Aguinaldo, who ably led the revolution against Spain and the Republic's war against the American occupation forces. In the background is the Balintawak monument showing Andres Bonifacio, founder of the Katipunan which started the revolution . • Book Review by LEONARD CASPER The New Bell Trade Act By Senator JOSE P. LAUREL • ... The Story of the Fili]