Panorama. Vol. VIII, No.3 March 1956

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Part of Panorama

Title: Panorama. Vol. VIII, No.3 March 1956
Issue Date: Vol. VIII (No. 3) March 1956
Year: 1956
Language: English
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extracted text: · MARCH 1 9 5 6 Why a College Degt By GREGORIO HERNANDEZ, Secretary of EducatiOn That Man Quirino An ex-president dies Philippines: Atom Center for the Orient Neutralism in Asia The whys qnd where/ors CONTEr~TS Articles That Man Quirino . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ben Revilla 1 What Is a University Fducation For? ........ . Gregorio Hernandez, Jr. 7 Peaceful Aton-:s for the Philippines . Reyno Oloroso 13 This Is CarnlJodia . . . ... Norodom Sihanouk 16 Neutralism in Asia ............ F. C. Sta. Maria 21 Einstein's Dilemma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sixto D' Asis 27 Why America's Spies Fail ........ Paulo Makil 31 How Our Fishermen Live . . . L. Crisologo-Santos 34 Accent on Agriculture . . . . . . . . Salvador Araneta 37 MRR: Back on the Tracks? . Roque M. Diamante 52 Vicente M. Hilario: Non-Conformist . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Roads for the Promised Land ...... Free World 7r Are We Training Good Lawyers? ............ . Enrique M. Fernando 72 1 The House that Plato Built ..... ; Willy Kremp 75 New Men From Old . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86 Fiction Two Brothers ................. Rony V. Diaz 41. Poetry Song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Christina G. Rossetti 30 Regular Features Are You Word Wise? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Panorama Peek ........................ _ . . . . 5 ,· Literary Personality - XV: Oliver La Farge . . . 56 Book Review - You Lovely People .......... . Leonard Casper 60 Panorama Quiz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 In the Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Philippine Panorama - XVI: Diliman ... ·. . . . . . . 82 Fun-Orama by Elmer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 PANORAMA is published monthly by the Community Publishers, Inc., 1986 Herran, Manila, Philippines Editor: JAIME LUCAS Business Manager: MRS. C. A. MARAMAG Subscription rates: In the Philippines, one year PS.00; two yean en nn Foreign subscription: one year $4.00 U.S.; two yean Single copy 50 centavos. Entered as second class mail matter at the Manila Post Office on Dec. 7, 1956 MARCH 1 9 5 6 VIII MANILA, PHILIPPINES No. 3 II:> l:;.:,o·e the tragedy well By BEN REVILLA ?7z OST HEARD, said a news report!!r, from the people talking in low tones, outside the ceremonial hall of Malacaiiang where the remains of a former Palace occupant w e r e brought from his windswept Novaliches home, was: "He was a good man." In life, however, the m a n , Elpidio Quirino as president, was probably the most villified chief executive the Philippines ever had. A number of newspapers, assuming the role of opposition in what they decided was a corrupt administration, pursued such a consistent and ruthless line of attack to a point where the man refused to have anything to do with the press. Consequently he somehow earned the reputation of being a callous president "unresponsive to the people's needs." In the 1953 elections, the minority party (revitalized by former Quirino men) maintained just that line, and with press support and the built-up popularity of the man's erstwhile defense secretary now running for president, won overwhelmingly at the polls. Even when the man was down, at least one newspaper, for some dark reason, kept kicking at the fallen man. The virulence of the press attacks which spared no part of this man was effective insofar as it nurtured the antagonism of the electorate toward his administration. The caricatures and cartoons, making unchristian fun about the man's personal aspects and afflictions, succeeded probably among the perverse type of readers. In honesty and integrity, which the more responsible press groups recognized, the man was unassailable. His administration might have been swallowed up in corruption, but no one could 2 well pinpoint where this man himself could have been dis·· honest. ft REAPPRAISAL of the man, as of anyone who dies has been done since his death on February 29, a date that occurs only once every four years. The papers have become more circumspect about him One said, "ex-President Quiri· no's regime conceived a good many of the policies and programs that survive in fairly recognizable form to this d9.y," citing the economic controls, the method of attack on c0rnmunist subversion, the regiona.{ idea preceding the SEA TO. The paper identified him with that group - Quezon, Osmefia, Roxas, Laurel, Recto, and Pa. redes - who "fought the major political battles that culminated in the inauguration of the Commonwealth and the proclamation after the war, Philippine independence." Gratuitously, the paper also said: "His passing need not mean that his faults should be glossed over. A man of integrity and political sophistication, Quirino was nevertheless surrounded by unscrupulous and highly placed influence-peddlers and even more unscrupu· lous politicians who mistook power for license to raid the public treasury. In the last days of his administration, Quirino displayed a complar:ency PANORA!.L which proved politically fatal and which unwittingly demonstrated his failure to grasp the public temper on issues which his regime tried to play down." The newspaper that was most vehement against the man when he was alive left the judgment of the dead to the verdict of historical truth; it credited him at least with knowing how not to be subservient to foreigners, particularly the Americans. The man's former defense aecretary, now the country's president, said: ''We ask that we be judged by what he did for his country and by what he wanted further to do bqt was MARcH 1956 prevented from doing by circumstances . and forces outside of his own body and spirit. If he were thus judged, then. his people could have only one unanimous judgment of him: that Elpidio Quirino loved his ~ountrymen and did his best to serve them well." A senator, one of the man's older political colleagues, talked, in his eulogy, of the man's "deeprooted patriotism" which was put to a severe test on three occasions: First, when Quirino as head of the. department - of foreign affairs, conducted the negotiations with the U.S. ambassador on the matter of U.S. naval and military reservations, as a result of the proclamation of the independence of the Philippines. Second, when Republic Act 599 abolishing the block-voting was submitted to Quirino for his signature. The man knew very well that by signing the_ said Act he was "opening a breach in the citadel of his power and was renouncing to an advantageous, perhaps decisive political position." "Yet," the sen~tor said, "he was great a pat"." riot enough to sign it, and he did not sign it, restoring thus, to the people a powerful instrument, for the free exercise of Democratic privileges." Third, when Quirino faced defeat in 1953. The senator pointed out: "As commander-in-chief of the army and navy and all 3 the police agencies he could have resorted to force and violence to frustrate the people's will. And yet he submitted himself to the popular verdict and nobly and gallantly accepted defeat, retiring afterwards to his last abode, in a sublime effort to forget and forgive." The senator also talked of the man as a private person: "He was an excellent, thoughtful and loving father. The love and devotion of his beloved children fully substantiate this assertion. He was a loyal and grateful friend. Perhaps he knew that it is the law of life, that you can no more depend upon others than others can depend upon you." :A FORMER subordinate of the man in the foreign office and now a congressman said he had occasion to know about the man's "immaculate sense of honesty." He recalled that when he was being drafted by others into the notorious Surplus Property Commission, then foreign secretary Quirino summoned him to his office and with paternal solicitude told him: "You are a promising man. Do not make the mistake of working in that commission for the stench of corruption there will hurt you." In an extemporaneous speech delivered on the floor of the House, another young and pro4 mising congressman rose to say: "It is the tragedy of the living that they must spurn the loyalty of men to earn the loyalty of a principle and an ideal. This man bore this tragedy very well. For the animosities that were stirred by the ideals and the principles of this man worked to heap odium and malediction upon his head. He suffered this burden in heroic silence." All these eulogies were said after that fateful Wednesday. Death had come unexpectedly. The man was in high spirits, planning to attend the party of a former cabinet member that evening. As early as 1952 the man had been personally afflicted to the extent that on the eve of the 1953 elections he had to go abroad for an operation. The health issue, exploited by the opposition, worked heavily against his reelection. Writing an obituary immediately after his death, a harried deskman said that the man "deserves praise if only because of his rise from the obscurity of humble beginnings to nationwide prominence.'' The records say that the man was born on November 16, 1890, the third child of Mariano Quirino and Gregoria Rivera de Mendoza. He had spent forty years in the public service. His last years were spent building a nation from the ravages of war - on the foundations laid PANORAMA down by Manuel Roxas, first president of the Philippine Republic. 0 N MARCH 5, 1956, a flagdraped casket bearing the remains of the man was shoved in a massive crypt of concrete and marble, built on a grassy knoll in the center of the Manila South Cemetery, where lie his beloved wife and three children. The state funeral was the third held after the war for a chief executive. The first was for Commonwealth President Quezon who died in Saranac Lake in August, 1944 and whose remains were brought home in 1946. Then it was late Roxas, who was honored with a militaiy funeral after his death on April 15, 1948. As one paper noted about this third funeral: "The sorrowladen funeral route stretched * * out from the sprawling grounds of the Capitol ot San Marcelino church, through the length of Taft Avenue southward to Buendia in Pasay City. All through the 12-mile route thousands stood by in silent reverence to watch the cortege go by, undaunted by dark nimbus clouds hanging low, which threatened to fall into rain." Two regiments from various services of the armed forces served as escort. Behind the caisson walked in solemn tread the senators and congressmen who acted as pall bearers. Behind the pall bearers, the man's only daughter and her husband rode in a car with the President and the First Lady. In the next car were the man's son and brothers. The procession started at 10 in the morning. At one o'clock, in early afternoon, the man was at rest. * EQ's Pre-war Record A product of the public schools, Quirino finished law at the state university and passed the bar in 1915. He held positions in the police department, Philippine Commission, Philippine Senate, before he entered politic~ in 1919 when he was elected a representative of the first di~trict of !locos Sur. In 1925 he was elected to the Senate; in 1934, he was delegate to the constitutional convention and was appointed to the cabinet as secretary of finance and later as secretary of interior. He was reelected to the Senate in 1941 but was not able to occupy that position until after the end of the Pacific War and the restoration of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1945. * MARCH 1956 5 FACADE OF THE College of Liberal Arts of the University of the Philippines, at Quezon City, where most of the nation's leaders get their training. What Is A University Education For? We must learn to value not a diploma but a real education that contributes to the good of the nation and the development of its economy By. GREGORIO HERNANDEZ, JR. Secretar11 of Education · A MONG THE accomplishments of the Board of National Education - is the definition of what should be the objectives of Higher Education in the Philippines. "Higher education shall be concern~d with the conservation, transmission and extension of hum&~ knowledge, with the preparation of leaders in arts, sciences and the professions, and with the preservation and enrichment of Phili11pine culture. Leadership requires the highest quality in our humc.n resources; and extension of the frontiers of knowledge demat1ds a high degree of competence in specialized lines of study. Toward this end the government should extend every measure of assistance to implement the constitutional mandate for the promotion of arts, sciences, and letters. MARCH 1956 7 "To ·be of maximum service to society, higher education should be allowed to grow and develop in an atmosphere of freedom and should always be guided by an enlightened love of country and of fellow men." The institution of higher learning in the Philippines does not operate in vacuo. It is not an ivory tower located somewhere in the seventh heaven of theory and isolated from the milieu in which it lives. It is lot:ated in a particular region, in a particular place. The college or university in the Philippines is part of the Philippine scene, part of Philippine life. It should influence, as it is surely. influenced by, what is happening about it - it should influence as it is influenced by the social and spiritual climate of its locale. This interaction between the institution of higher learning and the community in which it operates, is the prime test of the effectiveness with which any particular institution is achieving its purpose and performing its function as such. The university sends out into their environment trained individuals. Its graduates should be not only persons who have imbibed the planned instruction but also individuals who have absorbed what Plato called the dyes of the entire social milieu as sifted through the institution. And thus we say that the aim of 8 the institution of higher learning should be defined as the intellectual and moral training ofthe individual to.-ffieet the-"-problems and issues of our contemporary economy and democratic society in the light of sound and tested views and principles. Ji COLLEGE or university cannot, without betraying its function, disregard. the social environment, ignore the social climate, or escape from the social order in which it lives. To attempt to do so, would be to convert itself and its imposing plant into Biblical whited sepulchre full of de ad men's bones. The university must be a bearer of that culture, the civ. ilization of the time and place where it serves. Its social function is the tra~smission of culture through the quality of the individuals it trains. The university, therefore, is engaged in PANORAMA a living process, a process which has the purposes, the vitality, and the uncertainties of life. It is not a mere mechanism carrying the raw materials of huma:1 experience as in some fac·· tl)ry assembly line to a predestin-ed result called the Filipino; it is not a process of merely training the faculties of the body, but a process of discipumng and marshalling th~ powers and the resources of the spirit, the mind and the soul. Now, in the influences necPssarily brought to bear on the making of the Filipino are many and diverse, conflicting and contradictory, demoraliz'.ng and degrading as well as elevating and uplifting. The university must sift these conflicting values embedded in the variety and confusion of Philippine life in a world in transition, and select only those that are elevating and uplifting. This necessity for choosing among the values in contem · porary Philippine civilization • makes it necessary to remind ourselves that the changes in social life which must be effected in order to improve that civilization, must be b<1sed on changes in the individuals. Let us beware of sacrificing the individual to the social Moloch. The justification of the social process is its effect on the human personality. The philosopher Kant · ha~ said that we should so treat huMARCH 1956 manity whether in our own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, r.ever as a means only. Th<! social order and everv environraent is for the welfaie of m'ln, nut man for the social order, nor for the State, nor for the community. Man is the end, end all other things are subservient to him and to his highest dignity. For man is not animal, not beast, not chemical compounds, but a spiritual sou! made in the image and the likeness of God. Let it be clearly understood, then, that while the university cannot escape the social order in which it lives, the individuals it trains for leadership in that social order, must be imbued with the realization that it is merely an instrument placed at their disposal so that they and their fellowmen may achieve their highest dignity. This is merely to say that university education - and for that matter, all education - is a means . If, as has so often been said, it may save a nation, it is also true, as has not been said, that it may destroy a nation. Knowledge is power indeed, but power which serves indifferently good or evil men, good or evil nations. The spirit of education as well as it3 coJ;ttent is important; its philctsophy as well as its facts. The great things in education are not the facts we learn. They 9 are useful only as raw material, which remain raw material, unless there be exerted upon them imagination and vision which are the marks of capacity for mental growth and expansion. The schooling that stuffs the mind with data or mere knowledge is not education. We do not subscribe to the mechanistic view that thinks classrooms and lectures and equipment are an essential part of education. There are degrees of knowledge - from the merest nodding acquaintance to a deepening penetration to what might be called the essential varieties. The first kind of knowledge may help us pass examinations and get credits and degrees, but only the higher forms determine the quality of our human life. J T IS OFTEN said, with more truth than is readily admitted, that the things which are taught in the artificiallycontrolled conditions of the classroom and the campus, leave little mark upon the true character of the individual. And this is necessarily so, unless they are related to some object, some ideal, aspiration or hope, which the individual considers of supreme importance. These objects of our deeper life, represent the intellectual possession that have emotional power behind them, imaginative power. They are, in the ultimate analysis, the things we 10 do or want to do. They are the things of the intellect which are likely to be translated into the things to be done - the will. They are the lamps which will light up this so-called blind fa .. culty of the will. They open up living to the vision of life - tfJe fuller. higher life, which is ev;;, ery one's dream and deisre. To light these lamps, to awaken the power for action which they contain, we must develop insight, not give mere knowledge. We know only too well how to teach facts - it is a fatal facility. But insight must have the fullest cooperation of the, student, and a capacity for reflection and thought. For some time now, the realization has been current among people concerned with the highest welfare of our country that our educational efforts and programming urgent 1 y need a change of direction, a new orientation. In the early days of our struggle for political freedom, when "immediate, absolute and com-· plete political independence" from America was the national goal, it was readily accepted by one and all that it was prefer2ble to have "A government run like hell by Filipinos, to a government run like heaven by Americans." This is not to say, that the great nationalist Manuel Luis Quezon was wrong, or that his statement of preference in a moment of exploPANORAMA sive inspiration, did not then serve its purpo:;;e of emphasizing the legitimacy and the justice of our aspiratioin. I am sure, however, that none will accuse me of disloyalty to the memory of that great leader, whose passion for social justice was his greatest quality, when I say that now that we have won our political independence, it behooves us, one and all to realize that we need not run our government like hell, and that, as Filipinos, we have the ability - because it is not the monopoly of any one nation or race - to manage the affairs of our country so that the poorest and the most humble of our fellow Filipinos may, if not enjoy heaven in this fair country of ours, at least get a slight foretaste of the happiness called heaven. A keen observer of the local scene - I think it was Senator Jose P. Laurel, in his thoughtprovoking essays collectively entitied: Bread and Freedom - has stated that the greatest need \."lf the educational programming of this country today, is to translate into the disciplines of our schools, the practical implications of the truism that political independence is a myth and a delusion, unless it go hand in hand with economic stability and security. I do not think the basic philosophy of the new educational orientation I have previously MARCH 1956 referred to, could be stated in more simple terms, nor could the immediate function of education in this young republic, be more definitely and accurately fixed. Note, I say, the immediate function of education - for I do not intend to exclude thereby, the ultim~te and paramount function of all education which in the words of the Pope of Christian education, is: To prepare man for what he must do on earth, in order to achieve his final end. The function is immediate then, because it is limited to the temporal ends which society and the State as natural agencies, seek to promote - the material welfare and happiness of the individual. The function is nonetheiess of great importance - and in no period of our history is this more true than it is today. The state of our present economy today, the urgent need for stimulating and strengthening it, as a necessary condition for the stability of our political freedom, has been repeatedly pointed out by our economists and economic experts. I do not propose to dwell on it, believing as I do, that there is general agreement on the subject. I will, however, try to indicate the broad and general lines along which education in this country, could make its most effective c o n t r i b u t i o n in strengthening that economy. 11 f IRST; I would say, that our educators and educational institutions should clear one of the greatest roadblocks to our economic development, and that is, the pathetically extravagant idea which large numbers of our people have about the college diploma. I use the word "pathetic" advisedly. More Filipinos are in college today, pursuing some course that promises to reward the student at the end with the much-desired diploma or degree, than any other country in the world in relation to population excepting the United States. But while tl)e per caoita income of the United St~tes is $1,100 a year, in the Philippines it is less than P350. As Alfredo Montelibano, chairman of the National Economic Council puts it: "The combined production of goods and services of the whole nation, if expressed in terms of money and distributed equally among all, would mean less than a peso a day for every man, woman and child." And yet the Philippines is supposed to be a very rich country. Its natural resources are fabulous. Its potential for development is such that we could be the most prosperous nation in Asia. On the other hand, it is a curious fact that despite the thousands of our young people who pursue a college education, we produce so few scholars, so few real scientists, so few 12 philosophers, so f e w genuine teachers. Does it not appear from thes,e facts that our educational programming has become isolated from the life of the nation? That perhaps our imposing university buildings and well-equipped plants are becoming ivory towers where so many of the youth who should be drawing forth the riches of our soil and forests and seas, may seek temporary seclusion and escape from the realities of life? And when we consider the further fact that so many of our college graduates find no employ-· ment in the professions and areas for which they are trained, does it not appear that we are giving a value! to the diploma and the degree that is deleterious to our economy? Is the idolatry of the sheepskin or parchment paper worth the price of such waste of human resources? We must learn to value not a diploma but an education - an education that will make i .. 1 possible for the man to contribute to the enhancement of the values and the achievement of the goals estabiished for the good of the nation and the economy. In this task, the universities and colleges can and should play the major role, by removing from, the diploma its stigma as a badge of frustration, by restoring it to its pristine value (Continued inside back cover) PANORAMA PEACEFUL ATOMS for the PHILIPPINES T HAT A TO MIC-BOMB tests have occurred in Siberia has been provea most dramatically by dangerous radioactive "fallouts" in nearby Japan. It is possible, therefore, that the USSR has nuclear piles built in northeast Asia. However, in the Free World the Philippines will be the first Southeast Asian country to build such a pile for pe£"ce. \Vhen that announcement was made, early ia 1956, no one expressed surprise. In ail Asia, the Philippines was the first country to sign an agreement with the United States for cooperative research into the peaceful uses of atomic energy. Their signatures were placed, on July 27, 1955, on a document born of America's historical good will to other naM.ARcH 1956 Ifs the first m Asia By REYNO OLOROSO tions and given substance by President Eisenhower's proposal of an "atoms for peace" program in December of 1954. (The previous month, America had contributed 100 kilograms of enriched uranium for use in other countries' peaceful research reactors.) According to the USIS, the amount of reactor fuel is so controlled that the Philippines, or any other nation receiving an allocation, will not be able to make an atomic weapon. Nor can such materials be transferred to another country without the consent of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. The agreement will last until 1960, at least. So that each nation will have 13 competent technicians to construct and manage these reactors, a special School of Nuclear Science and Engineering has been developed at the Argonne National Laboratory, near Chicago. The first class, opened in March 1955, consisted of 31 students from 19 nations. The second of these seven-month courses, with new personnel, is already under way. Another course is given at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in techniques of using radioactive isotopes. It is identical to the training given U.S. scientists and technicians six times each year since 1948. Two hospitals and a laboratory have been opened to foreign observers, for a course in the use of atomic energy in medicine and biology. Two Filipino physicians - Drs. Carlos Marquez and Elpidio Valericia - have completed a 3 7-day tour of American hospitals where isotopes are used for the treatment of cancer. Radioactive iodine, injected in the patient's blood stream, concentrates in the cancerous area (this is true even in the case of brain tumor). A Geiger cou;iter reacts to such concentrates of gamma radiation; so that diagnosis can be made without surgery and even without discomfort to the patient. 14 W HAT FORMERLY would have been considered miracles are now everyday scientific experiences. Where nations of multiplying population are underfed or, seasonally, faced with famine, information about the contribution of radioisotopes to the improvement of crops and livestock will be as welcome as fresh blood in the heart. Radioisotopes of various elements have given laboratory demonstration to their power "to alter the cell structure of food plants and make them disease resistant." For example, radioactive tracers, mixed with fertilizer, are fed to rice plants. Geiger counters measure subsequent radioactivity in the plants and the degree of absorption of nutrients in relation to plant growth. Thus farmers can determine exactly how fertilizer is best used. "Tracer atoms" used on milk cattle and chickens are also suggesting more economical ways of feeding animals. Experimen'::s with atomictreated seeds in southeastern United States have resulted in a new strain of peanut plant which produces 30% more peanuts per &ere than is normal. In another experiment, it was discovered that irradiated potatoes do not sprout and dry up, but are preserved as fresh foods. The peaceful atom is also PANORAMA probing the process called photosynthesis, "by which green plants take energy from the sunlight, minerals and moisture from the earth, and carbon from the atmosphere to manufacture the sugars, starches, cellulose and other energy-containing carbon compounds that are used by man." In the same way, science is interested in metabolism, by which plant carbon compounds, when eaten, transfer the sun's energy to living human cells. BETTER HEALTH is the aim of atomic rays, beamed from radioactive cobalt to attack specific cancers. Internal cancer can be treated without burning the surface skin. Rays equal to many millions. of electron volts penetrate the body, yet the patie!lt feels nothing. Tracers are used in diagnosing and treating heart diseases, gall bladder trouble, thyroid malfunctions and serious blood diseases. Injected in diseasebearing insects, they also help scientists plot the travel range of these insects and therefore plan their control ·and elimination. Finally, atoms for peace mean more commercial power, especially electricity for lights and for industrial generators. Atomic fuels will supplement existing sources of power: coal, oil, water and gas: and therefore be a special boon to countries poor in resources and unable to afford long-distance transportation of oil and coal. A two-inch cube of Uranium235 can produce energy equivalent to that in 11 135,000 liters of gas; 1,180,000 kg. of coal; or 908,000 liters of oil. The same uranium could run a fully-loaded jeepney on 3,500 round trips between Aparri, Cagayan and Legaspi, Albay; or provide illumination for a Filipino home for over 1,000 years; or propel a modern interisland motorship on te:i of its regular twelve-day cruises from Manila to the southern islands. These are the remarkable aims of atoms for peace, being readied for the Philippines: to feed the hungry, heal the sick, help man everywhere stand erect with wholly human pride. * * * EMERGENCY X-RAY A portable emergency X-ray unit has been developed, which will finish a picture within ten minutes without electricity, water or a darkroom. Carried and operated by one man, the unit is powered by a capsule of radioactive thulium the size of a kernel of com. MARCH 1956 15 By Crown Prince NORODOM SIHANOUK • (The following are excerpts from the speech delivered by Prince N orodom of Cambodia before a joint sess~on of Congress of the Philippines last month. Prince Norodom was an official guest of the Republic.) ~~OUR INVITATION is the 'I' outcome of the common history of our two peoples. Ethnical trends bring us so close together, that in countries where the Philippines are much better known than the Khmers, we ere often mistaken for youand I admit that at times this confusion is easily justified. I have been myself mistaken for a Filipino at Hongkong and in Jap3.n. Quite recently in Rome a shopkeeper, full of pride at his perspicacity, asked me: "PhJippines?" 16 You must be aware that for a long time already, more particularly since the end of the sixteenth century, and then later, the end of the nineteenth century, at the time of my august ancestor, King Norodom the first, quite a number of Filipinos settled in Cambodia. In 1590, at the request of our King Sotha the first, Governor Gomez Perez Dasmariiias decided to send Philippine soldiers to Cambodia to help the King drive off his enemies from the Kingdom. Again, in the severteenth century Philippine troops under the command of Diego Belloso and Blaz Ruiz de Hernan Gonzales helped the Khmer monarchy free itself from the tutelage of its neighbors and regain independence together with the peace and order so PANORAMA dear to our people. This permitted Cambodia, in the nineteenth century, to receive from the Philippines upon the return from Manila of my great grandfather, King N orodom the first, a peaceful demographic contribution: musicians and counsellors, whom we would call today, "technicians." These Filipino immigrants married in our country and took root there, experiencing no difficulty in adapting themselves to a country which in every way is so close to their own. To these blood ties, were added cultural, commercial, and political ties. We Cambodians are very m'1ch tempted to consider the Filipinos as oversea brothers, fer in truth of fact, the sea btings people close to each other instead of separating them. Our friendly relations were interrupted by the colonization of both of our countries, and later by the second world war. ,We then experienced the same 'anguish. Your country withstood with admirable courage the most terrible destruction. Rallied around its national leaders, like the venerated President Manuel Quezon, it faced every adversity and finally triumphed as a result of its heroic sacrifices. We also, though in a lesser degree, have experienced occupation, bombardments and penury. MARCH 1956 ~ EOGRAPHICALLY, Cambodia '?' represents a compact mass of plains rendered fertile by the Mekong River and the great lakes. This outlay predisposed us to u:iity. The latter in our country is total. We have one single religion - Buddhism - the same love for our fatherland and King, the same way of reacting to events. There are no specific peculiarities for the North and the South. There is but one Cambodia united and fraternal. As a result of this unity of heart, .blood, and soil, we were the first of all Indochinese peoples to acquire total independence. It was in November, 1953, eight months before the Asian conference in Geneva, the we obtained all powers, held previously by France; which immediately withdrew its troops from Cambodia. At the Geneva conference, we were the only ones who presented ourselves as a sovereign delegation. We defended our right cause with so much perseverance and managed to prove our independence so clearly, that we obtained, on cessation of hostilities the disarmament and repatriation of all Vietminh troops installed on our territory. We signed the Geneva agreements in full freedom and haye carried out their stipulations honestly, rapidly and with good will . . . we have confirmed our 17 neutral positio:i on several occasions, namely at New Delhi and B::mdung. This neutrality is not only the result of Geneva. It is not occasional. For it likewise answers the feelings and deep convictions of all the Khmer people, who,. have learned in the course of the last 4 years to mistrust the quarrels of the great and rely mainly upon his own self. But the fact that we are neutral, does not mean that we are simple-minded to the extent of beingg lured by the amiabilities of communist governments towards us. As in the past, we will not tolerate any interference in our affairs, nor threats, nor pressure on it. Even at present, we remain very vigilant and keep our eyes wide open. The proof of it is that we have accepted American and French military aid and that we dare not reduce our army which is at present forty thousand men strong, in spite of our financial weakness. For, we do not wish that communist Powers (and also non-communist, for that matter) could threaten us impudently. e AMBODIA intends to closely cooperate with countries who have the same democratic and social ideals, the same aspiration for justice, liberty and well-being of the masses. 18 This ideal is precisely that of the Philippines. They possess the same respect for real democracy as the Cambodians. Their constitution is of the Western type. Ours was inspired by the French fourth Republic; it has been modified at the request of the Khmer social people community which represent eigty-two per cent of electors, and in accordance with the national necessities and people's aspirations. Our deputies can be revoked at any moment by the people if they betray their duties. Through the national and provincial assemblies, the people control directly the national and provincial administrations and can cause the displacement or dismissal of incapable or corrupt officials, however high their rank may be. During our national congresses, the same people meet their ministers from whom they can ask explanations (and they sure do it) and with whom they settle, once duly enlightened, the great af) fairs of the State, as was the case recently for the question of foreign aids. If politically speaking, I have ma:1,1aged to lead my people far enough in the way of democracy, I however have on the cultural, social and economic plane, the heavy task of bringing it to make up for time lost as a result of the late return PANORAMA ~ OY AL CAMBODIAN DANCERS, singers and ,.._ musicians performing amid the ruins at ancient Angkor Wat will soon be seen by movie-goers in many parts of the world. Their ornate costumes and expressive gestures were filmed by an American movie company using a revolutionary new technique known as Cinerama. To photograph the Royal dancers, it was necessary to obtain permission from the Cambodian Royal family. At the direction of Her Majesty Queen Kossman, 27 dancers, 16 singers and nine musicians were flown to Siemreap to perform in the magnificent ruins of Angkor Wat. There, the Royal dance troupe performed under extremely difficult conditions. For technical reasons, all the scenes had to be filmed during the day. lt was very hot and the dancers, in their ornate, close-fitting costumes, which must be sewed on, suffered from the sun and heat. Despite this, they cheerfully rehearsed and repeated many of their dances so that when they were finally filmed and recorded they showed Cambodian art at its best. The Cinerama movie featuring the Cambodian Royal dancers and Angkor Wat will be called "The Seven Wonders of the World" and is an attempt to picture ancient and modern marvels throughout the world. To film it, the American movie company of VD people visited more than 20 countries in Asia, Africa and Europe. They have photographed such renowned monuments as the Sphinx and Pyramids in Egypt; the Taj Mahal in India; the Acropolis in Athens and the Eiffel Tower in Paris. The movie directors felt that the Royal Cambodian dancers and the ruins of Angkor Wat should be a part of such a movie as they are unique in the world and are an outstanding example of Cambor.ian culture and traditions. MARCH 1956 19 to independence and of 8 years of insecurity, six years of territory losses, of privations and occupation due to the second world war. In the years that followed our independence, the number of schools and high schools has quintupled, that of dispensaries and hospitals has doubled and that of irrigation projects has almost quadrupled. In our attempt at recovery, the encouraging example, you, Filipinos, have set in far worse circumstances for ensuring the recovery of your country greatly encourage us and give us faith in the future. 20 * * * Musician Prince L ITTLE known, if aoy, perhaps, among Filipinos is the fact that Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk is a composer in his own right. This was brought to light in his 24-hour visit to Baguio city in the course of his observation tour of rural and cultural progress. Through one of his aides, the Prince gave a copy of his pamphlet-bound 16 Chansons de S.A.R. Norodom Sihanouk Compositions des Annees 1945 a 1950 to Miss Emma C. Pangilinan, obviously in appreciation to the dancing of Pandango Sa llaw, which she rendered in a barrio fiesta program given in honor of the Prince at the Pines Hotel. Incidentally, Miss Pangilinan was requested by city authorities to present to the Prince one of the gifts offered by the city government to the Cambodian visiting dignitary. Two other gifts were presented by Mesdames Alfonso Tabora and Bienvenido R. Y andoc. Among the 16 compositions of Prince Norodom were Amour San Espoir, Nostalgie, Regret, (Rum:ba), Sakrava (Rumba), Beaute de Kep (Rumba), Phnom-Penh, NuitFroide_. Complainte, Ironie, Fleur de Vientiane, Luang Prabang, and others. Aside from the collection of musical compositions, two copies of Carnbodge Par Image (Cambodia By Picture), which were edited by the Ministry of Information, depicting the activities of the Cambodian government, were also e;iven Miss Pangilinan. * PANORAMA They're playing a risky game Neutralism Asia A MANILA DAILY recently carried the information that Representative Miguel Cuenco of Cebu urged on the fie-or of Congress a policy of "peaceful co-existence" with communist states. Coming as it does from the chairman of the house foreign relations committee, the proposal invites more than cursory attention. For sometime now, there has been a strong, determined voice in Asia which champions the cause of neutralism in the present cold war. In the Philippines this feeling has varied from an advocacy of trade with Red China to outspoken criticisms of American intervention in government. Elsewhere, particularly in countries such as India, Indonesia, Ceylon and Burma where people do not cherish traditional ties with America, neutralism has taken far more virulent forms. Representative Cuenco's arguments for co-existence run MARCH 1956 along the usual neutralist line, vigorously e~poused in this country by Senator Claro M. Recto. "It is a folly for Filipinos to drag the Philippines into a war with China as this would be a stupid and costly venture," he said. He went on to point out that our foreign policy makers are prone to take this cue always from the United State~. It is perhaps the fear of involvement in a war that breeds neutralism in many Asian countries, more than it is the indifference to an ideological conflict which has plagued the world since the end of the second world war. Asia's "neutrals" are playing a risky game and they know it. They make no enemies; but neither do they make friends. In the practical sense no neutrality is possible. 0 n 1 y Switzerland, with her peculiar geography, has withstood the pressures of direct involvement in two global wars. With the insurmountable Alps protecting 21 her on hostile sides, this tiny Swiss republic was once considered by power-mad Hitler as unworthy of the price he would pay to take her. Besides, Switzerland has neither oil nor natural resources which would make her a tempting war booty. But oil-rich Asia, which is also the largest producer of rubber, tin, hemp and other strategic war materials, presents a different picture. In man-power alone Asia's importance in world politics cannot be ignored. It has been said accurately that the nation which controls Asia would eventually control the world. It is inevitable in a sense that the East-West struggle for power should find its crux in Asia. With the victory of communism in China, this struggle has taken a more definite shape. But instead of simply lining up the smaller Asian nations into two distinct camps, the China tragedy has strangely forced them to take middle-of-road positions in the fray. India, Burma, Indonesia and Cambodia, whose combined populations make up more than half of Asia's, have stoutly announced their neutrality. How genuine is this "neutrality"? Events in recent years have shown that the neutralist countries, especially India and to a large extEtnt Burma, lean over heavily to the communist side. 22 India's Prime Minister Nehru has openly supported Russia and Red China in many issues. His pro-communist stand is too well known to deny or even doubt. Yet, Nehru believes - apparently w i t h sincerity - that India is completely neutral in the East-West struggle. A similar display of partiality to the Reds, despite public avowals of neutrality, has characterized Burma and Indonesia. In the recent goodwill tour of Khruschev and B u 1 g a n i n through Asia, Burma's Premier U Nu found the Soviets' offer of assistance too tempting to refuse. As for Indonesia, whose President Soekarno once announced that his people would have communism if they so desired, sympathy for the Red cause has taken less direct forms. Thus, hundreds of Indonesian youths annually go to Russia to putsue their studies. The communist party, too, has long been recognized as an important factor in Indonesian politics. It remains a fact, however, that these regions have not been sufficiently penetrated to be considered as being within the communist orbit. The term favoritely used by commentators -"uncommitted areas"-seems to be correct', in the legal sense, at least. But the more interesting question to ask now is: How PANORAMA Ion<?: will these areas remain uncommitted? Tr.e answer can at best be specu'.ative. Obviously it will depend largely on the outcome of the East-West struggle. Since a neutralist policy is not a guaranty of non-involvement in tlie next global war, these Asian nations in the event of a showdown will be forced to take sides. This much is certain. It may also be contended that these countries will, short of a global war, remain uncommitted only as long as the factors that engender neutralism remain. Some of these factors are basic. Gecgraphy is one of these. In Europe, for instance, there is no room for neutrality. Cheek by jowl with the warlike powers, the European countries have always been wide open to aggression. The only exception is Switzerland which, as previously pomted out, enjoys a unique geographical privilege. In Asia sheer physical distance and the presence of many bodies of water have given a sense of security to some countries, such as Indonesia. Detached as these countries are from the contending powers-the United States and Russia - they have found neutralism as an added defense. Strangely enough, the same factor - geography - has worked in the opposite direction in inducing a mfddle-of-the-road attitude among some Asian MARCH 1956 countries. That is, proximity to a communist power such as Red China has, for example, encouraged India, Burma and Cambodia to adopt a neutralist stand. The rule involved here is simple: if the bully next door is stronger, it is discreet not to provoke a fight. As practical neutralists like Senator Recto say, one should not make enemies where he cannot make friends. The instinct of self-preservation, tempered by discreet judgment, has therefore argued for a sound neutrality. The reluctance of Cambodia and Burma to JOm the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization can be explained by this. Another factor is the bitter colonial experience of m o st Asia peoples. The post-World War II years have seen a resurgence of nationalistic feelings not only in Asia but throughout the colonial world. In many cases severance from the mother country did not dispel the Asians' suspicion and hatreq of the West. Thus, in the ideological war, the peoples of Asia are disinclined to support the West against Soviet Russia. Some have, in fact, aligned themselves against Fram:e, the United States and Britain, especially where colonialism is the issue. Neutralism in this sense is the mildest form of opposi23 tion. Even the Philippines, with her widely known friendship with the United States, has wisely taken the side of anticolonialism against the Western powers. Asia's widespread antipathy toward tl:e VI est is a convenient springboard for communism. Add to this the prevalent economic backwardness in the region, which communists are quick to exploit. If the neutralism of Southeast Asia must be prevented from turning into active Red sympathy, the Western powers have to demonstrate greater sincerity in their proffers of aid, both economic and military. G::eat Britain cannot do it; the last war had left her in near bankruptcy. France is too discredited to be of any influence, besides being broke herself. The only logical source of effective aid is the United States. Unfortunately, she has found it extremely difficult to penetrate the hard wall of apathy and belligerence that the peoples of India, Indonesia and Burma have b u i 1 t a r o u n d themselves. Nothing shcrt of a miracle, indeed, would seem to be able to change that attitude. And that 24 miracle is not bound to happen. A final factor that engenders neutralism in Asia is whac has been correctly described as the mainspring of world diplomacyself-interest. According to this widely accepted theory, the foreign policy of a co:intry is never dictated by altruism but by expediency. From this standpoir.t the policy of neutralism that some Asian countries have adopted can be viewed in terms of its practical value. India is a good example. Wooed on both sides by Russia and the United States, she has found it prac-· tical, without loss of self-respect, to accept aid from both. As Premier Nehru has said, India's acceptance of aid from the Soviets need not commit the country to the communist camp. Presumably, the same wouid be true in case of American aid. Another practical aspect of this brand of neutralism is the tr a de between the Reds and the neutral countries. Advocates of such trading in the Philippines have argued that commercial relations w i t h Red China, for exam-. ple, need not carry an endorsement of that counrty's political ideology. They PANORAMA point to the example of Great Britain and Red China which have carried on a mutually profitable trade in the past few years. On the whole the philosophy of self-interest in foreign policy appears sound. But in the case of neutralist Asian countries, it is carried a step further: it becomes a materialistic formula for making the most out of peoples' misunderstandings. There is a widespread feeling, as a matter of fact, that some of the countries involved in this game of opportunism are sincerely pro-communist but are too smart to come out with their true colors. Why? The reason is obvious. The democracies still seem to have the upperhand in the insidious stuggle. There is no sense in betting on the losing horse. Asia's neutralists are playing a truly risky game. It would do well for them to reassess their stand.-Felixberto C. St~. Maria, from the Philippine Journal of Education. * :!; * WORLD'S GREATEST LEANER E VERYONE knows that the leaning tower of Pisa is not leaning at a constant angle and wa.s not erected that way by far-sighted medieval Italians to boost their tourist trade. It has been behaving such that engineers predict its collapse from 100 to 200 years. The tower is now fourteen feet out of plumb. It is tilting equivalent to a 180-foot building whose top leans over to the sidewalk. But it all depends on what kind of sidewalk. Built on poor foundation, the tower leans because the center of the consolidated or sub-foundation deviates slightly from the center of gravity of the tower. The two opposing forces applied at different points cause rotation. One civil engineer says that he could remove some of the material foundation on the high side of the tower and thus move the center of gravity of the remainder toward the lower side and the center of the load. Th tower has not yet collapsed in 600 years because of the settlement of twelve feet of the lower side and eight feet of the higher. That's that. MARCH 1956 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 writing. Select the proper defiuition for each, then turn to page 80 for the correct answers. Fifteen is passing. 1. fastidious--(a) tightly attached; (b) difficult to please; (c) suddenly; ( d) earnest. 2. maniiold-(a) creased; (b) sheep corral; (c) numerous; (d) newsprint machine. 3. jaunt-(a) short excursion; (b) sickness characterized by yeellow · skin; ( c) beer-hall; ( d) jack-knife. 4. iirmament-(a) rooming house; (b) office building; (c) the heavens; (d) rigid. 5. dapper-(a) trim; (b) slanted sombrero; (c) metal cup; (d) pickpocket. 6. pillage--(a) medicine box; (b) vertical frame; (c) calendar; (d) plunder. 7. summon-(a) lecture; (b) sun worshipper; (c) addition; (d) convoke. 8. whelp--(a) puppy; (b) cry of anguish; (c) whip brutally; (d) whale. 9. vanguard-(a) a line of buses; (b) rear action; (c) station agent; (d) troops in front of an army. 10. iont-(a) water basin for baptizing; (b) head shape; (c) size of type; (d) pontoon bridge. 11. elegy-(a) ministry; (b) sea bird; (c) lament for dead; (d) <iecoration. 12. checkmate--(a) hatcheck girl; (b) naval ensign; (c) to make escape impossible; (d) fellow roomer. 13. apex-(a) cage for simians; (b) bee's nest; (c) summit; (d) pocket. 14. coma-(a) punctuation; (b) jet motor; (c) heavenly phenomenon: ( d) unconsciousness. 15. larynx-(a) organ of voice; (b) jungle mammal; (c) clarinet; (d) sailor. 16. hibernate--(a) six-sided; (b) Irish; (c) to sleep through winter; ( d) picture frame. 17. pogrorn--(a) plan of events; (b) small fruit with seeds; (c) Jewish child; (d) organized massacre. 18. nub---(a) knob; (b) one-man submarine; (c) axle of car; (d) gloves. 19. divan-(a) Persian rug; (b) sofa; (c) operatic soprano; (d) slow music. 20. malice--(a) bad luck; (b) gold vestment; (c) ill will; (d) fellow countryman. 26 PANORAMA Causation of complementarity? 6instein's DILEMMA 0 UR KNOWLEDGE of atomic phenomena has forced science to a conclusion applicable even in realms beyond the still unfamiliar behavior of electrons. Classically, all physical behavior has been described in terms of cause and effect. Now, however, such description proves too narrow for many known sub-microscopic events. For these new occurrences, Niels Bohr coined the name "complementarity," that is, simultaneity. Actions coincide without one being the cause of the other and without, as far as is known, there being any tan~ible means for their apparent synchronization. The astonishing fact is that Albert Einstein, the age's most powerful and singular mind, continued to support causality MARCH 1956 By SIXTO D'ASIS and refused to accept the leading discovery of his time. What makes this attitude seemingly paradoxical, according to British scientist L. Rosenfeld, is that Einstein stressed the very aspects of quantum theory (even more than the theory's o r i g i n a t o r , Max Planck) which led to Bohr's idea of complementarity. Einstein was the first to point out the dual nature of light-that sometimes it behaves like waves, sometimes like particles. These two aspects, wave and particle, which belong to matter as well as to light, cannot be causally related, but must be regarded as complementary features of the description of light behavior. Even Bohr's method of analysis which led to such a conclusion was di27 rectly inspired by Einstein's analysis of the concept of simultaneity (all time is relative to differences in motion between observer and observed) which forms the foundation of the theory of relativity. Yet, finding a particular case of complementarity, the unpredictable behavior of electrons, repulsive to his innermost feelings, Einstein kept searching until his death for causal explanations for the phenomenon. Obviously not a mere technicality of physics was at stake: rather the philosophical and human aspect of scientific theory. What stronger conviction made Einstein set his reason aside? B OTH EINSTEIN and Bohr were guided by Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, who recognized and described the standard procedure by which scientific concepts and laws have always been elaborated. The basis has been "experiments not actually performed, but imagined in an idealized form suggested by some familiar experience," that is, by metaphor or analogy. Concepts thus are regarded as a kind of "condensed code of action": although abstract themselves, they are conceived in terms of a prescribed sequence of possible manipulations of men and apparatus. Science has as its 28 ultimate reference point, therefore, the standard sense impressions of some observer. For example: Einstein, in order to analyze the concept of simultaneity, imagined two ohservers exchanging light signals from moving platforms, or of checking the velocity of light from outside and inside a moving room. Mach's theory of knowledge reduces all mental concepts eventually to relations between sense impressions, the only source of measurement. As Rosenfeld says, "By laying emphasis on the interaction be-tween the phenomena and the observer, it rightly stresses the fact that the function of science is not to give us a contemplative picture of the world, but to provide us with rules of action, which enable us to control the forces of nature." The connection between thought and act, of course, is neither so immediate as Mach thought nor so simple. Intricate networks of logical connections, as in geometry, have been formed by men. Moreover, a problem arises when one asks such a question as whether the geometry of outer space is euclidean (plane) or non-euclidean. In cases such as these, where varying systems of concepts actually can be used to take measurements of the same object or situation, Henri Poincare suggested that PANORAMA "The choice of any particular system of concepts to account for some part of our experience is purely a matter of convention." Axioms and postulates are not based on experimental fact; but because certain physical observations coincide with these assumptions, we prefer them to others, even though their absolute value outside their initial limited frame of reference is questionable (just as in three-dimensonal geometry a straght line is not the shortest distance between two points). P OINCARE's "conventionalism" reduces the relationship between thought and act, concept and sense impression, so drastically by suggesting that the relationship is arbitrary and insignificant, that few have chosen his leadership. Certainly Ejnstein was never satisfied with the "accidental" air of Poincare's theory of knowledge. His fine intuition ¢ physical behavior could not fail to perceive that the harmony between phenomena of the external world and our abstract conceptual constructions has some, even if ill-defined, significance. Yet Mach's oversimplified "direct-bearing" relationship between concept and sensation repelled Einstein also, the more his abstract mathematical thinking moved far ahead MARCH 1956 of any immediate physical manner of testing and experiment, in nuclear laboratory or known solar systems. "Pure science,." by means of his imagination, so far preceded applied science that, secure in his symbols, he had to work by faith rather than by sensation. And that faith, for him, apparently was possible only by being founded on some unchanging, unchangeable part of classical theory such as that of causality. He stretched out to extreme "unknowns," to almost mystical spheres beyond senses or present measurements, by believing in the constancy of design in the universe. Whatever failed to fit his causal theory, he regarded as local and temporary imperfection. COMPLEMENTARITY, with all its still unexplained behavior (phenomena occur regularly and simultaneously but without any apparent causal interaction), was too ::i.rbitrary, too mysterious, too patently still an "unknown" to be useful as a tool for uncovering more knowns. Despite their respect for Einstein's intuition about the final nature of things, other atomic scientists continue to accept the new uncaused, unpredictable behavior they have observed as honest and unchal29 lengeable description, not as errors in perception. Which will prove to be more fruitful-the theory of causation or that of arbitrary complementarity-in unfolding further truths about the physical universe remains to be discovered. 30 * * * SONG When I am dead, my dearest, Sing no sad songs for me; Plant thou no roses at my head, Nor shady cyprPss-tree: Be the green grass above me With showers and dewdrops wet; And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain; I shall not hear the nightingale Sing on, as if in pain: And dreaming through the twilight That dcth not rise nor set, Haply I may remember, And haply may forget. - CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI PANORAMA Wit~ ame'tica' s ~pies 1ail {?INCE THE end of World ~ War II, which marked the decline of British power (in India, Egypt and Malaya), the United States has been made official fosterfather of small democracies. Consequently, any loophole in her defense, any lag in her foreign policy, any gap in her espionage system has disturbed the whole Free World. Diplomatically, America has always been notoriously too blunt to deceive her enemies. ·She has respected the word of other nations as she has her own. Her blunders, therefore, at Potsdam, Panmunjom, and Geneva were not unexpected. But when her intelligence system also floundered, her allies began to wonder if it would ever be as reliable as the British secret service used to be (before even atomic scientists calmly flew across the Channel and into East Berlin.) MARCH 1956 The price of bureaucracy By PAULO MAKIL Secret information would seem particularly important since the democracies have promised that they will let themselves be attacked first, before launching any active defense. Only a competent spy network can prevent that initial enemy attack from being disastrous. None of Gen. Willoughby's hero-worship of MacArthur can compensate for the fact that the North Korean invasion in 1950 caught American troops as unprepared as at Pearl Harbor. Nor can the spectacular Allied amphibious landing at Inchon make one forget that Willoughby himself, the command's intelligence officer, gave no warning of the sudden Chinese Communist crossing of the Yalu river. Despite constant aerial inspection, he denied their presence even after 31 hundreds of thousands were well into Korean territory. {?PIES WARNED America of ~ intended Communist ef· forts to take over Italy in the polls of 1948. Subsequent open encouragement of Italy's democratic elements stopped them. In 1954, early information was had about the Communist threat in Guatemala-and a dictator was exiled. However, m Germany, U.S. agents failed to anticipate (and explo~'~) the great East German upnsmgs of dissidents against Red dominion in 1953, although a West German group finally heard of it. The exile of Egypt's King Farouk from the oil-rich Middle East, Stalin's death, Malenkov's fall, the deposition of Argentina dictator Peron, the new Badger bomber of the Red air force (with the world's largest engines)-all these were reported first, not by spies, but by the press! Because of such startling failures to escape surprise, a Hoover Commission task fore~ headed by Gen. Mark Clark has been taking a long look at America's top-secret Central Intelligence Agency. First, it made a distinction: U. S. espionage is not U.S. inteliigence. Spies uncover information which is pondered and weighed with other information from n:on-Becret sources, by intelligence. High-level decisionil, 32 THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MOUfH Immediately after World War II, Russia threatened to invade Iran for its oil fields; and only U.N. action prevented that aggressive act. How· ever, the Russians will say, that was Stalin's idea; now there are the twin bearers of gifts to Asian countries, Krushchev a n d Bulganin, homely smiles all over their mouths. As late as 1954, a complete unit of Communist spies was discovered and broken in Iran, especially because one man, Jafari, grew tired of treason. Of nearly 600 arrested traitors, 26 were executed, the others jailed. Iranians have proved to be a tough match for smiles that come from the wrong side of the mouth. therefore, are not based on spy reports alone : yet these reports are important; and it is in it.9 espionage that America has shown its weakness. Why? Reporter Bob Deindorfer tells a revealing story of a typical American spy: Officials had learned that a high Communist official in a satellite state would flee to the West if he were smuggled out. Consent was requested through dim, long bureaucratic channels. By the time that approval was granted, five days had elapsed. PANORAMA No longer could a five-man escort be sent along a slow, safe route; one man had to try it alone. When he was killed in the attempt, the Iron Curtain defector was easily caught and condemned. The spy-system's bureaucracy had cost two lives, and immeasurable losses in future propaganda work by the ex-Communist. Recently, one American spy network purposely planted false information in East Germany, to confuse the Communists. But another American network, uninformed and equally confused, began to buy back precisely the same information from East German contacts! 7 HE SPRAWLING bigness of American information services, and the lack of central control, are astonishing. Besides Central Intelligence, Army G-2 has its own agents, as have also the Army Counter Intelligence Corps, Air Force, Navy and others. At the same time, America gives financial support to a West German group operating out of Munich, and two Nationalist Chinese groups behind the Bamboo Curtain. The worst part of such bigness is the inevitable sense of rivalry b e t w e e n networks (since, in any bureaucracy, promotion is based on success). One group may even hire away the expert spy of another, for MARCH 1956 better pay. Again, Bob Deindorfer reports that "In :M:unich, people in a small hotel lobby were startled by an edge of this rivalry when two agents from different U.S. espionage groups got to arguing loudly and publicly one morning. Their topic: who had first call on a German informant named Mueller!" Another flaw in the espionage system is its irresponsible waste of life. After one young Chinese businessman had been settled securely as an American agent in Communist China, he was suddenly ordered to count the jet planes at a nearby airport-a comparatively unimportant task, not worth the risk of life. He was caught and killed. The Soviets, on the other hand, nurse their agents long and carefully: British diplomats, Burgess and Maclean presumably were Soviet agents twenty years before they fled behind the Iron Curtain. Other spies lack imagination - never try an untried formula - talk tc-o openly and often, or are simply incompetent for heroic work. American intelligence service, overexpanded in World War II, recruited many who now prove corruptible. These are problems still facing the Clark committee, and a jittery world anxious to stay free. 33 A sociological survey: By LOURDES CRISOLOGO-SANTOS 7 HE SOIL of Mabilo, in the \.klan valley of Capiz, is sandy and clayish, not suitable for farming. Barrio inhabitants, therefore, live largely off the Sibuyan Sea, although they also have bangus fishponds in the marsh fringes, coconut trees and rice paddies, and nipa swamps for roofing thatch. Its people have been studied in the Philippine Sociological Review by Cecilia L. CanteroPastrano, to discover the shape of life among Filipino fishermen. Although their income is supplemented by vegetable gardens and home industriesthe making of abaca slippers, the weaving of piiia (birang) and abaca (pinukpok) cloththe sea is their livelihood. Tiendas are left in charge of women. Mabilo fishing is largely done with fish corrals, laboriously constructed by shifts of 35 men over a period of a month. Because the poles and 34 other materials come from the upstream mountains, these fish corrals are expensive. An initial capital of 4-5 thousand pesos and another two thousand for maintenance is required. The five corrals allowed in the Mabilo zone are leased annually to the highest bidders. Three families control the whole corral business. Ordinary fishermen a r t hired from February to November, at which time the corral is dismantled because of the northwest monsoons. Th e monthly net profit, after expenses, is split equally hetweer owner and maestro (the fisherthen divides the shares with men's leader). The maestro his assistant, divers, net drawers and helpers. St·ikes are unheard of because of blood relationship between themselves and the owner. According to Mrs. Pastrano, seines and trawlers are also used during April, May and PANORAMA June, worked largely by women and children, with a great show of festive pleasure when the ibis (small fish) are apportioned. The taking of food from the Mabileno fishponds is less exciting but dependable all year around. l!JZJ ECAUSE everyone is the O relative of everyone else in the barrio, parties (paka-ons) are like family reunions, although barrio-wide. The cost of lechon, tuba and sumsuman (broiled fish) taxes the purse heavily. The fact that the houses cluster along the barrio's only road fosters intimacy also. (Except for fishing magnates and merchants, the typical house has kitchen, dining room, bath and toilet all under one roof, and living and sleeping room under another) . For every six houses a well (bubon) is dug communally-typical of the abundant Mabileno group activities. Every afternoon the tiendas are huddled with men and women, setting the barrio mores through their gossip. Sometimes moralistic songs are even sung by some self-appointed manugcomposo to publicize indiscretions. Thus, the barrio's closeness is an extension of the tightly regulated family structure which puts several generations under one roof. PaMARCH 1956 rents, as a rule, have supreme authority over household and children. However, such repression when abused has its effect: slowly, as education has improved, the first restless signs of independence show themselves. Large numbers of men especially have left Mabilo, to remake their lives and identities in Manila. Womenfolk, being more conservative, are the ones least likely to leave home and most resigned, for religious reasons, to whatever occurs. The barrio t h e r e f o r e occasionally seems threatened with becoming overwhelmingly female and passive and strident. Consequently, there is almost no true consciousness of democratic processes in the barrio: the teniente makes most of the decisions, although actually the real power behind such decisions, in times of election and otherwise, is lodged in the fish magnate3 whose word, for financial reasons, is law. The forces moving towards recognition of in dividual rights to balance social demanQ.s are few and gradual, but in time may prove the more effective. According to Mrs. Pastrano, "Conflicts often arise between parents and children who are trying to cast off the yokes of the old ways, but some form of adjustment eventually for35 mulates itself through the initiative of the more tolerant and understanding parents. Thus, austere parental authority is now on the wane; youths are more assertive and independent." 1 HE FISHING industry itself has undergone slow c h a n g e ; mechanization will bring more. One ovmer has introduced motor boats and electric lights into his business. As such greater efficiency through machines reduces somewhat the need for personnel, fishermen will move elsewhere or even change their occupation. A.s transportation facilities improve, rural isolation breaks down. Parents who have preached sociability and "other-directedness" (to promote family solidarity) have found those same principles encouraging their grown children * * to broaden their lives by visiting at least Calivo, a poblacion seven kilometers away, and perhaps eventually going there or farther to live, afterwards. Even the community-centered school has prodded the people from their lethargy and indifference and awakened some of them to a new sense of freedom and themselves: "While it is true that some superstrt10ns are still kept alive, it is because the people know that they have nothing to lose if they 'place a bamboo star at the north and south ends of the fish corral to serve as beacon lights to the fishes so that they will enter the punot without fail.' ... The evil connected with the non-following of these superstitions has lost its hold." The pace of progress is slow, but the movement is forward. * Escalator Sidewalks 36 New York City will soon boast of the world's first moving sidewalk. It will be installed in one of its tunnels end will be capable cf transporting 10,400 people per hour. Goodyear and Stephens-Adamson Manufacturing are installing "Speedwalk"' which is 227 feet long and travels at a ~peed of 1 V2 miles per hour. This speed, about half normal walking speed, will be in the direction of a sax-ply rubber and fabric conveyor beit 51/2 feet wide and 5/8 inch thick. Handrails will move with the belt, both driven by a 20-hp, 220-volt motor. * PANORAMA Accent on Agriculture By SALVADOR ARANETA Former SecretaT11 of Agriculture and Natural R esources T 0 THE FORGOTTEN Filipino farmer-the man who produces wealth and thrives in poverty," runs the dedication of a yearbook published by the Philippine Association of Agriculturists. This is a most arresting statement, although I would substitute the word lives for MARcH 1956 Only 33 per cent of our agricultural area is being used. the word thrives in it. The paradox rings sharply and we are inclined to disbelieve it. But it is the truth. 37 The Philippines has a total land area of about 30 million hectares. Of this about 58 per cent or 17,200,000 hectares, can be put under cultivation. At present 5.8 million hectares are planted to crops. So only 33 per cent of our agricultural area is being used. Our population, on the othel' hand, is estimated at 20,340,000 in 1953, with 14,500,000 living in the rural areas. Around 3,000,000 rural families are almost dependent directly on the produce of the soil for their livelihood. In fact, 71.3 per cent of the labor force in the country is employed in agriculture. But only 38.9 of the national income is contributed by agricultural enterprises which amounts to a very low per capita income of Pl98 in the rural areas. It is therefore not surprising that the people who produce the wealth of the country are poor. T HERE are a number of reasons: Inefficient p r o d u c t i o n : Yields of most crops are very low compared with those ob· tained in other countries. For example, rice averages only 27 cavans per hectare; corn 12 r,avans and abaca 6.5 piculs or 414 kilograms per hectare. Partial employment: The available labor force in the ru· ral areas is gainfully employed only half of the time, in many 38 instances even less. This is the result of inefficient utilization of the land. In many places only one crop is grown every year. This should not be the case. Irrigation assures two crops a year. Even without ir· rigation, the fields can be planted throughout the year by seasonal crops. The farmer can rotate his main crop with legumes, such as beans, batao, cowpeas, peanuts, patani, and mongo, a source of additional mcome. Tenancy: Until very recently most tenants did not get a just share of their produce. With a small yield to start with and with only half or even less of it given to him as his share he cannot possibly prosper. Usury: For years, lack of credit facilities at reasonable rates of interest has engendered usury in the rural areas. Very often crops are sold at very low prices even before they are planted, leaving the tenant very little, if any is left at all, after harvest time. No wonder the tenant is always in debt. Inadequate and inefficient aovernment services: Until very recently government services which were maintained to help the farmers improve their lot were both inadequately staffed and inefficiently administered. Personnel did not penetrate the barrios effectively with the latest improved cultaral methods. PANORAMA Low level of education: A man who does not know any better will not strive hard enough to change his l.Ot. This results at times in rural folks resisting new methods and techniques even when we are so certain there will be good for them. Very small landholdin~s: This situation restricts the use of modern methods and equipment. A family depending on the produce of a hectare or so can not go very far. Undernourishment and malnutrition: Because rural people are poor they do not eat eno.igh food, nor do they take the right kind of food that their bodies need. They can hardly meet the bare necessities of life. Hence, their bodies are weak, and sickness comes very often. MARCH 1956 THESE AND a number of other factors keep the barrio people poor. And what are we doing about it? Here are some of the measures now underway: More efficent methods are being adopted in crop production. On rice the Margate system has been recommended; a modification of it is known as the masagana system. Irrigation systems are being built to make possible two crops where only one grew before. Other means: fertilization, better plant varieties, diversified farming, especially mixed farming involving crop, livestock, and orchard. Better conditions for t('nant~ are now assured under the law It may take a few years to attain _the desired goal but we are definitely on the right road. To improve land tenure and· the size of landholdings, big landed estates are being acquired by the government for subdivision and resale to tenant occupants. The relations between tenants and landholders are also being improved through legislation, the most recent of which is Republic Act No. 1199, known as the Agricultural Tenan.:y Act of the Philippines. Under this new law a farmer is entitled to a house-lot of not less than 1,000 square meters where he can erect his house. What he raises on this homelot is all his; none has to be given to the 39 land-holder. With respect to crop share, the tenant is entitled to 70 percent of the harvest if he defrays the expenses of production. However, if the landholder bears the production expenses the farmer gets only 55 per cent. Expansion of the area under cultivation and providing land for the landless is being ac;complished. Parcels of land are being released from the forest zone and declared arable and subdivided into farm lots to accommodate settlers. More and better credit facilities are being made available to farmers. The Agricultural Credit and Cooperative Financing Administration, the Rehabilitation Finance Corporation, the Philippine National Bank and rural banks have instituted better credit facilities (facility loans) especially in warehouses. M a s s education is gaining headway. The Bureau of Public Schools through its Community Center Schools and Adult Education program is making rapid strides in raising the level of education in the rural areas. More and more rural people are taking advantage of this adult education program. Improvement of diet is done through schools, health agencies and agricultural extension workers who inform the people 40 of the need for and advantages of better foods. Assistance in prcducing the needed food in being given. A nationwide rice enrichment program has been underway. Research work is given attention. A long range program of community development must provide well for the training community development workers and research institutions from which· must flow continually the knowledge and technique needed by the people. T HE POSITIVE steps ' being taken by the government along the lines stated can make short cuts possible only if there is proper direction and systematic followup under an integrated rural community development program with a.griculture as the focus of improvement. Leadership in the implementation of the program must be supplied by the government in the beginning. As civic organizations and the barrio groups increase their participation in the program, the government will recede to the background to give way to indigenous leadership. With local leaders closing the gap between the government and the farmer, the latter is quickly reached by the program. And immediate results are possible in this way. PANORAMA AT DAWN, the two brothers left the town. Carrying spearguns and open-mesh rattan baskets, they walked barefooted along the edge of the sliding sea toward the dock. The sea, still weighted by the wind, slid in long unbroken swells toward the shore where MARCH 1956 it broke and dragged away the footprints and the delicate whorls left by t:1e crabs on the black sand of th€ beach. The boys walked rapidly, the older brother one or two steps ahead, tugging, it seemed, in his momentµm his smaller and lighter companion whose quick, awk41 .vard strides resembled those of a fleeing, wingless bird. The whirling whips of the sun advanced and mangled darkness crouched behind the mountains, staining them into solidity with coagulated shadows. The two brothers had reached the elbow of the beach, jawed rocks spray-cowled at this time of tide, from where the bay curved away from ·the town to follow a tall, harsh cliff of clay at whose rocky base· the dissolving world of the sea abruptly ended. They walked on a rocky stretch of beach. With the thrust of the sun, the wind that had settled, gray and heavy, on the surface of the sea, soared and released its herd of white-maned waves, and yellow light stroked the black beach. The rocks ended in front of a small turtle-shaped cave and once more they were on sighing, salt-dashed sand. Without . stopping, the older brother ha:nded fo his companion his speargun and basket. He unbuttoned his shirt, stripped it off and wore it slung in a knot about his hips. The wind was heavy and cold. The smaller boy looked at his brother as he gave him back his gun and basket. His body was dark and tightly muscled. He was looking at the sea. The 42 tide was coming in and the waves slid on in rhythmic rolls. The boy could tell that his brother was satisfied. "Give me your antipara, Simo," his brother said. Simo reached into a pocket of his short pants and pulled out a pair of goggles. He gave them to his brother. His brother stopped and began to examine the goggles closely. He ran the nail of his forefinger along the caulking that held the oval-cut glass to the wooden frame. "The caulking has dried," he said softly. "I think it will hold. But I'll try them out for you first before you use them." They had gone spearfishing at the mouth of the river last week and the caulking of Simo's goggles had come loose in a strand. The glass fell off and saltwater dashed into his eyes. Simo swam to the bank of the river, his eyes smarting. His brother pulled him up and gave him his pair. "Enjoy yourself,:' he had said "I'll keep watch over you." Simo caught two samarals, which made his brother chuckle gleefully. Going home, the fish stringed through with black .nito, his brother promised to ·make a new pair for him. That evening his brother started to whittle the goggles from a seasoned block of santol wood. PANORAMA W HEN they reached the breakwater, his brother stopped. Simo stepped close to him and waited. His brother dropped his spear and basket on the sand, unbuttoned his pants, unknotted the shirt and stepped into the sea in a pair of faded woolen trunks. He stopped at waist deep, snapped on the goggles over his eyes and plunged into the sea. He broke for air near the middle of the breakwater. He clung loosely to the rocks for several moments and then vaulted up, shaking off drops of water that spangled his dark body. He straightened abruptly and in that moment he seemed to stand on the horizon, his head touching the sky. Like a lighthouse, the image MARCH 1956 reared in Simo's mind. He pulled off the goggles and walked toward Simo. From the way he walked and dangled the goggles, Simo knew that everything was all right. The goggles had satisfied his brother. "It'll do," his brother confirmed, handing back the goggles to Simo. He hitched up his pants, picked up his shirt, speargun and basket-and they strode on toward the wharf. Riding his brother's shadow, Simo felt a blood-measured thrust of pride and elation pulse through his body. He felt safe, wrapped in his brother's shadow as in an imminent cocoon. This was the first time he would fish the piers. He was happy and he wanted to talk. 43 He groped about in his mind for something to say to his brother. Then he remembered the kaltang. He knew everything about that fish. He and his friends had talked interminably about it, its habits, shape, and augury. It was one of the town's recent legends of peril and mystery. Suddenly, burdened by a necessity still unclear to him, he wanted to hear his brother talk about it, probably to hear his voice deliver the exorcium that would dispel the mystery and danger of this unknown fish. "Do you think we'll see the kaltang?" Simo asked, timorously. His brother looked at him and smiled. "I don't know. Probably we won't. Nobody has seen it since it appeared once in these waters and that was years ago." .• "It is dangerous, isn't it?" Simo pursued. It . hasn't h a r m e d anyone yet, as far as I can remember. You see, it appeared when :this wharf was being built." Simo knew that; and still, striding with his brother, he searched his lips and eyes for the cabalistic image, the twitch or the gesture that would make the unfamiliar predictable. "One of the engineers," his brother continued, voice uninflected, "was standing on the piles when a low swinging derrick knocked him off into the sea. His head 44 · was crushed. Several laborers dived in to get him and almost all of them saw this fish, which they call a kaltang, dark, widemouthed and horned, swimming about the dead man, weaving in and out of the bloodstained water. That was all and the kaltang remains to this day a pretty mysterious fish. Nobody has seen it again." All that Simo knew, and still he waited; but it did not come, and his brother's voice floated before them like smoke which the wind shook and snatched away. They had reached tl).e dock now. From where they stood, the causeway, built of cairned stones held together by poured concrete and corraled by glinting, low copper rails, looked like a white, crutched appendage that had been grafted to the harsh torso of the cliff. The squat, concrete piers that supported the wharf were clobbered with dark extrusions of oyster spats. Two motor launches were berthed along the pierhead. An old steamboat was moored along the left side of the wharf. Sailboats were anchored several yards away from the pier, their masts nsmg and falling with the wheeling horizon like bouy poles. T HEY CLIMBED up to the causeway and walked toward the pierhead, Several PANORAMA mangy - looking, sleep - logged stevedores were loafing in front of a canteen, away from the wind. They were smoking and drinking coffee out of dark metal cups. They all looked at the two brothers save one who sat watching his cigarette unwind its skein of blue smoke. "Hoy Litoy," one of them shouted in greeting when they saw his brother. "Going fishing? It's too early. The tide is just starting to flow in." "Yes," his brother said disinterestedly. Then the smoke watcher suddenly rose and approached them. He put his arm on his brother's shoulder. He walked with them. "Litoy, I've a favor to ask from you." He flicked away his cigarette. ''Let's hear it," his brother said, annoyed, Simo could tell, by the arm on his shoulder. Simo knew at once that whatever that stevedore would ask for, his brother would deny. He was annoyed and he would say no, Simo told himself; he felt embarrassed for the man. "I heard,'' the stevedore said slowly, "that your uncle got the contract for that bridge in Alag." "Yes?" his brother said almost angrily. "You are going to oversee it, aren't you?" "Of course. What about it?" "I just thought you might MARc:H 1956 . have a job for me," the stevedore said. "We've filled up all the positions," Litoy said. "You should have talked to me earlier. But I'll send for you when we need more men." "Thank you, Litoy. But no job now?" "None at the moment. I said I'll send for you when we need more men," his brother growled. By now Simo was uncomfortable. "Thank you. Thank you.?' He disengaged his arm and he began to ·talk effusively. He started to tell them about likely spots where there would be fish and he even offered to help them look for fish. "I know this place. You do not have to tell me where to fish." His brother quickened his pace and the stevedore dropped off. Simo looked back and he saw him walk back slowly to the canteen, his s ho u 1 d e r s hunched and his hands in the pocket of his denim jacket. A truek loaded with lumber roared past them and turned alongside one of the motor launches. T h r e e stevedores mounted the open truck and began to push off the lumber. The two brothers stopped near the old steamboat. A pile of split mangrove trunks was neatly stacked near the gangplank. G r a y s m o k e blew through a blunt smokestack. It 45 was an old boat, spanned from bow to stern with an old, unsealed, rachitic-looking lumber roof. The steersman's seat was above the engine room. They saw that the wheel was lashed to two cleats on the wall. Below the wheel was an open hatch which led to the engine room. From the engine room an old man emerged, picked up pieces of rajita that were strewn on the deck and returned below. Litoy stepped up close and looked in. "They are firing up this junk," he said to Simo. "I wonder why?" "Hey you!" Lit o y called down. The old man reappeared, peered at them and walked up the gangplank. "Ah, Mang Orto. Have you bought this junk?" Litoy asked. "No, Niney fixed the engine last night because the Attorney wanted a boat to carry a load of rice to Mamburao. Have you seen Ninoy?" The old man stopped, then he continued: "He saw me this morning and asked me to fire the furnace for him. I know next to nothing about steam engines and the furnace is going full blast. I wish he would come back. "Ninoy? Hah, he's probably asleep somewhere," Litoy said. "I wish he would come back. I'm hungry and this pig of a boat looks ready to come apart." "Just keep the furnace going. He'll be back in time." 46 Litoy walked off to the opposite side of the dock, Simo trailing after him. They s t r i p p e d off their clothes and prepared for the dive. Litoy tested the rubber of his speargun and then spat onto his goggles. He rubbed the spittle on the glass. He pulled the goggles around his head. "Stay close to me," he told Simo. "In case you get the cramps I can pull you out." He picked up a coil of rope, lashed it to one of the mooringheads, tied the baskets to the end of the rope and gently lowered it. A glistening net of oil floated on the water. They slid down the rope, the spearguns tucked under their armpits, into the water. PANORAMA T HEY BROKE through the net of oil, which instantly enveloped them and raised a rank, hot smell. His brother swam carefully around the concrete piles. Treading water, he turned to Simo and said, "It is light enough underwater, we can see." Then he plunged in a spume of spray. Simo inhaled deeply, jacked double and followed after him. The cold water crashed against his belly, and the air inside his chest webbed into thin \.strands that tautened with every stroke he took. Simo stayed down as long as he could, then turned, broke water, and dived in again. His brother had looked up and when he saw Simo dive again, he turned head on and swam for the floor of the sea. Simo heard the sea sigh into his ears and thereafter sealed all sound. He could feel the beating of his blood against his temples. At ten feet, he felt a wedging sense in his ears, but the softsplayed looking body of his brother ahead tugged him on and he sounded headlong, until the pressure became a cold, molten metal in his head which he discovered was relieved by hard swallowing. Each swallow he took tightened the w e b b e d strands of air in his chest. This was the first time he had gone this deep and although he wanted to break surface MARCH 1956 again he also wanted to impress his brother. At first, everything at the bottom looked green and even the bright, murrey corals were only dark horns that defied rigidly the mobility of the sea. It was light enough, as his brother had said, but gliding over the white sand and dark corals, Simo noticed that his brother cast no shadow. The pressure has made him a little giddy and this fact occurred to him without surprise, as though somehow he had expected it. The shadowless domain of the undersea slipped on for several yards and was lost in a hazy, amorphous horizon. Then the corals flamed, and yellow and green seaweeds strove upward in the moteflecked water, and banded cowries and bright, spiny shells stained the white sand. Objects were stretched into exaggerated sizes and shapes. His brother's body looked flat and enormous though not a blot on the bright scape but assimilated, blended into the scene by the encompassing sea. Simo swam carefully trying to look for fish. He saw his brother stop, only his legs undulating. He swam up to him in time to see him let loose a spear. It shot forward in a feather of bubbles. Ahead, Simo saw a small red fish trash and lay still, then it trashed again and swam for the corals where it was lost. His brother raised 47 his arms and he rose, Simo following closely. Under the wharf, where shadow shouldered the piers, his dark brother beamed at him. He gasped for breath and then said excitedly: "I got one. Did you see it?" "Yes. It hid among the corals." They dived again for the impaled fish. It was Simo who found it. Ile slowly pulled at the spear and the dead fish and then signalled his brother. · "It's a maya-maya," his brother said. Simo pushed the fish i_nto one of the rattan baskets that they had tied to the end of the rope. His brother was preparing his speargun for the next dive. They treaded water for sometime. His brother swam behind Simo and told him to dive ahead. Simo plunged in, dragged the weight of air and water after him, his lungs and heart fluttering with his strokes and his ears ticking off the pressure. He skated smoothly in the water, swaying his head from sime to side looking for fish. Ambassids swam with him. Then he saw a black lapuIapu flit briefly behind a branch of coral and stayed still. Simo raised his speargun and swam forward. He approached the Iapu-lapu as closely as he could and he saw its wide mouth half open, its fins quivering, its large, shallow eyes staring at him. He 48 aimed his ~peargun. The sea tugged at it. He steadied it, aimed at its red-studded pectoral fin, and pressed the trigger. The steel shaft drove forward trailing a flume of bubbles. Another fish gallied off at the soundless strike of bubbles. His brother slapped him on the buttocks. They swam up and smiled at him broadly. He peered closely at Simo through his water-fogged goggles and said happily: "That was a big one. This will be a day." Simo dived alone to get the fish. Swimming up he brushed against one of the piers and he felt oyster shells rasp against his skin. There was no pain but he knew he had cut himself. He gave the fish to his brother. "I cut myself," he told him. "Come up and let's have a look at it," his brother said, pushing the dead lapu-Iapu into Simo's basket. They pulled themselves up by the rope. On the concrete floor of the wharf, the sun had imbedded spikes of heat. Litoy knelt down beside Simo to look at the wound. Simo sat on one of the anvil-shaped mooringheads. The oyster shells had scraped off the skin. He began to bleed. ''That is· nothing," his brother said. "It won't hurt underwater. Seawater is as thick as blood. Let's dive." That was an old superstition but Simo was startled by the PANORAMA meaning :that flew out of Litoy's unwilling, caged intonation and he sensed its shadow hover hawk-like over the idea of his wound. They slid down tbe rope and fished continuously for an hour. Simo was starting to feel the chill of the water when an explosion racked the sea. T HE TIDE had come in completely and the water had pushed nearly four feet up to the ceiling of the wharf. Beneath, the sea was shot through with currents of cold water. Simo was stalking a striped maya-maya when the explosion f r o z e into an instantaneous block about his head. He felt a solid wall of water hit him and his body became numb. Before that moment when he completely lost musclar control, he felt a violent kick strike him on the face. He rolled in the water and he crashed against one of the oyster-pitted piers. The shells flenshed cleanly into his skin; he felt his cheek split open and blood glided before his eyes which the crespucular light of the undersea turned into a momentary purplish b 1 ob . He rolled over and he saw the fleeing feet of his brother, attacking with frightened fl.utters the moiling water. The block that encased his head melted into his brain and he gasped, salt burning his mouth and nose and he lay MARCH 1956 crushed by the remorseless wall of the stricken sea. Then his body stiffened. When his reflexes returned, he sucked in his belly and the taut webs of air in his body slackened; the sea buoyed him up. A sharp pain pierced his ears; a series of minute implosions rang in his head. He felt as though his skull had burst, but fear had cleared his brain and with great deliberation, a feeling that his mind had been wrenched from his body, he turned over and began to swim, his blood slowly thinning in his iungs, for the surface. It was then that he saw his brother. He w a s swimming toward him, headlong, looking soft and splayed in the shadowless world of the undersea, afloat above him. His fearstrengthened mind perceived his brother, saw his bubblescaled body and expressionless glass-walled eyes peering cruelly at him, his mouth pulled wide, and his hair pressed by the sea into a black, sharp horn. Blood was again cast before his eyes and his brother disappeared. He felt Litoy's body brush against his and his hands close around his waist. With his remaining strength, he jerked loose and swam swiftly, pushed by the water, to the surface of the sea. Gripping one of the oysterpitted piers, he ripped off his goggles and through shocked, 49 salt-burned eyes saw the old steamboat kneel and sink into the unctuous shadeless s~a. Pushed by the sun against the shagreen floor of the wharf, Simo lay stretched, his hands pressed on his guttered cheek. Litoy knelt beside Simo and tried to press his shirt on the wound. Simo feebly resisted his help. Their eyes met and softly Simo accused Li toy: "I saw you. I saw you swimming towards me." "I came for you," Litoy said. "I came back for you." "Back! How could you say that? Why did you have to come back?" Simo shouted. Tears of pain came to his eyes. The tangled voices of the people, who had knotted them in, ceased whirring and hung suspended, unhitched, ab o v e them waiting to absorb the next strike. Then Simo heard one of them say: ''The jeep. is ready, Litoy. Let's take him to the hospital." But Litoy seemed not to hear because he lif1:P.d his face to them and pleaded: "He's delirious." Can't you see he's delirious!" "Calm yourself, bridge-builder," the familiar voice of a stevedore mocked. "You really brought him back." "Shut up!" Litoy cried hollowly. "But you should have see~ Mang Orto," the stevedore continued. "What was left of his body was scalded beyond recognition." Simo closed his eyes at this revelation. His whole body was kindled by a pain more intense than the one that spunked on his cheek, as he felt himself merge with the hurled figure of Mang Orto, his skin peeled off. His body quivered with suppressed sobs. The pain of emergence was unbearable. Simo heard the jeep start and roar away. "They're taking his body away," the stevedore said. * * * so Record Breakers In le11 than four minutes two men cro11ed the finish line of the mile race et the British Empire Games held in Vancouver, British Columbia, in Auguat, 1954. Roger Bannister, of England, broke tape in 3 minutes, 58.8 seconds. John Landy, of Australia, finished five yards behind in 3 minutea, 59.6 seconds. In a pre· vious race in England, Bannister was time at three minutes, 59.4 seconds, the first runner in history to cover the· 3 mile in less than four minutes. World's record was set a 3 minutes, 58 seconds by John Landy in Finland in June, 1954. PANORAMA 'Panorama 'Peek Photo b11 DERRICK KNIGHT, Shell PhotoorB'f)hla Unit, LOfld09' BUILT DURING THE Spanish times, the bamboo organ in the Catholic church at Las Pinas, Rizal, is the only one nf it.~ kind in existence. Back on the Tracks? There was dynamite in the boilers WHEN, et the turn of 1956, the government announced that arrastre services would be taken from the hands of the very efficient Delgado Brothers and be turn:. ed over to the Manila Railroad, many citizens shook their heads. Skeptics felt that dockside labor contracts and the use of the Muelle's warehouses w e re undeserved presents, granted not so much as a reward for railroad officials' fine work, as a sure source of income needed to balance the losses of government lines. They remembered other assets -the Manila and Pines Hotels -which became liabilities in the same men's hands. And 52 By ROQUE M. DIAMANTE they regretted the loss of taxes formerly paid by Delgado, voted . "outstanding young businessman of 1955." The railroad's annual progress report is actually more a catalogue of projects which, like the arrastre transfer, have yet to occur and therefore are difficult to assess. The best prophet of things future is always the critic familiar with the past: the whole past, and not just its nighttime. The Manila Railroad company came into existence by royal decree, in June, 1875. Concession for laying track and PANORAMA building station facilities was transferred from Spanish hands to the Manila Railroad Ltd. of London, before service was inaugurated on the 194 kilometer line between the capital and Dagupan, in 1892. All these facts are still preserved on the official marker at Tutuban station, whose cornerstone was laid in 1887. lm,rnediately after American occupation, the London corporative stock was transferred to New Jersey. In 1917, the Philippine government bought out both the London holding company and the American operating company. Because mortgages already had been assumed and negotiations consequently had to proceed through trustees, the merger was not actually completed until 1919, under the signature of Manuel Quezon as company president. T HE INCIDENT of the foreign mortgage, if expanded, could pass as the history of this railroad whose operating expenses regularly have exceeded income. At first, the company, like the territory itself, was learning selfmanagement the hard way; then came the long lean years of depression, during the ComMARCH 1956 monwealth; and just as the MRR was expanding (to Legaspi, with the new Bicol Express, in 1938) the Japanese decided to "liberate" their Asian neighbors. The rusted remains of that war-twisted track and dismantled coaches-still discolor the railroad yards and stations, although much has been cut up for scrap or reconverted. Seventy per cent of the MRR's rolling stock and shop facilities were destroyed or badly damaged during the war. By direction of USAFFE, dynamite was exploded in the boilers of locomotives. Where time for such sabotage did not permit. engines were brought to Taytay, Rizal, on the pre-war Antipolo line and dumped into the Pasig river. Other coaches and box cars loaded with army supplies, filling the tracks twenty kilometers from Taytay to Sta: Mesa, were deliberately burned. When the U.S. Army returned the railroad to the Philippines, only 40/~ of the prewar tracks had been restored. Rolling stock and rent, however, were also donated. Al53 MRR LOSSES 1946-47 1947-48 1948-49 1949-50 1950-51 1951-52 1952-53 1953-54 1954-55 ... P2,469,754.90 1,456,949.17 2,406,287.85 3,765,285.58 2,586,601.75 4,785,509.81 4,744,743.57 2,744,792.29 1,771,185.88 though replacement costs were estimated at P90 million, only P3 million was awarded by the War Damage Commission. To this bewildering initial condition were soon added bus and truck competition, nepotism, labor trouble and political interference: naturally, financial losses were staggering. These reached a peak of nearly P9.5 million in the combined years, 1951 and 1952. Col. Salvador Villa has often been criticized for suspending even long-trusted e~ployees too hastily and for keeping army rank, on a civilian job, too long. Yet as general manager under President Magsaysay, he has managed, with the help of skilled department and division heads, to restore at least partially the good name which the MRR once had. A major achievement was the repurchase, through the RFC, of bonds held by the Bn54 tish. Then, in January of 1955, the new Bacnotan (La Union) lme was extended, in a record six months, to serve the multimillion CEFOC cement factory in barrio Dumarang. By summer of last year, five uew warehouses worth P500,000 were constructed to serve exportation of Philippine sugar. Four of these warehouses, built ol surplus butler huts anrl served by rail, stand at Pier 12, in North Harbor. More recently a new mezzanine floor was added at Tutuban station, and the Caloocan rer.reat1on and mess hall rebuilt. TWO TRAINS on the San Jose line and two more on the southern branch, discontinued at the peak of heavy losses, have been restored. Night express trains (most long-distance passengers move at night) were inaugura~ ted in the Ilocos. Late in 1955, the first pair of 40 diesel-electric locomotives from New York arrived in North Harbor (to allow them to reach maximum speeds, however, of 130 kilometers per hour, better-ballasted tracks will be necessary). For 1956, more installment buying is planned; extension of the line from San Jose to Cagayan Valley; rehabilitation of the Plaridel-Cabanatuan City track; expansion of harbor warehouses; construction of an PANORAMA emergency railroad bridge to South Harbor, on Del Pan St. Even more projects are foreseeable, if revenue is forthcoming from Japanese reparations and arrastre services. Despite adverse years of war, the MRR managed to transform Luzon into an agricultural and commercial center, in contrast with which Mindanao, though richly endowed with natural resources, lags far behind. If the people, used to being abused by their government "servants," can suspend their disbelief another twelve months, perhaps the Manila Railroad will be back on the track, after a lengthy wartime derailment. * * * MYLAR: AFTER NYLON Soon after nylon, an intensive study was made to fmd related chemical combinations capable of giving stronger polyesters. This led to a solid, the reaction product of ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid, conveniently called mylar. It looks like cellophane and also can be formed into high flexible transparent film. The dielectric strength of mylar is greater than that of almost any other known insulator, it is sensitive to moisture, resistant to solvent and chemical attack, ranges in thickness from 1/4 mil to 7Y2 mils and operates from -60 to 150 C. And all these without loss of structural strength. It is the strongest plastic film: tensile strength, 1/3 that of machine steel. It retains its strength even after 1000 hours of exposure to a temperature of 150 C. It is not as inflammable as cellophane and acetate films. The dielectric strength of a 2-mil section is about 4500 volts per mil and for a 1/4 mil section, 7 500 volts per mil. The uses industry may put it to are for electrical insulation and industrial laminations. DuPont will soon build its first mylar plant in Ohio. * MARCH 1956 55 Literary Personality- XV Oliver La Farge: Splendor Of High Plateaus Footprints in the language I N HEMINGWAY'S short story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," the gangrenous hero feels that he has escaped the failures of his life when, dying, nevertheless he feels himself airborne, transported to the untouched snowcap of the only towering mountain in miles of African plains. For Pulitzer prize novelist, Oliver La Farge, the high plateaus of Asia have always symbolized a similar vision of skyward aspiration, a return to the life-source. La Farge used to say that he had the misfortune to be well-born. He was sent to Groton, an exclusive school near Boston where highbrow interests were discouraged. The rich were not supposed to use their hands or minds. Fortunately he had gone earlier to St. Bernard's, an unmual boy's school where even the tracing of language roots through the ages and across continents fired his imagination, giving a "vision of ancient, far-off, tremendous happenings, of the march of primitive, great bearded men out of Asia, the wagons and the cattle in motion as whole nations marched slowly, blindly to new lands, of wars and new migrataions, tide on tide." He saw those distant plateaus as if they were some Acropolis for gods who forged ?. whole chain of being which now stretched around the world. When he first read Henry Fairfield Osborn's Men of the Old Stone Age, at 15, he was ready for the bone-hard facts of evolution - process and cause and sequence -which it con• This is the fifteenth of an exclusive Panorama series on leading literary personalities the world over, written by an authority on the subject. 56 PANORAMA tained. So deeply did he become attached to the book that, although he later took several degrees in anthropology, he never had to sit in a formal course on Europe's Stone Age. From Darwin's Descent of Man, La Farge learned to wiggle his ears, using obsolete muscles which had served his ancestors. Science, to the young boy, was a thing of romance, even when he was too small to embrace it properly. As he sat, resting from an afternoon of practice high-jumping, playing with his spectacles and dreaming of being commissioned an officer in World War I, he still found time to teach himself what school could not: not facts, but respect for truth. At Harvard, his scientific interest was tested by his being sent out into the hot Arizona desert with a shovel. La Farge's answer was to become infatuated with Navajo Indian culture. His first salaried job, however, took him to Mexico and Guatemala, where he studied the Mayan Indians (Asiatic types from Central America's high plateaus); while college Italian withered, Spanish became his second tongue. I N HIS GUATEMALA fieldwork he discovered that a scientist can be hard-drinking and delightful, emotional as well as intellectual, curious and combative of difficulties. "He is an ant," La Farge wrote in Raw Material, "putting forth great efforts to lug one insignificant and apparently unimportant grain of sand to be added to a pile . . . " Why does the average scientist labor, knowing he will never be a Curie or Newton? Why did La Farge spend months "to prove that Kanhobal, spoken by certain Indians in Guatemala, is not a dialect of Jacalteca" but vice versa? Why did he let his hands turn blue at night in over-ventilated huts, while he tried in Spanish to dig out lists of Indian dialect words, constructions, and idioms? Irregular Spanish verbs wore out Indian friendship, malaria came and went, vampire bats sucked the neck of his horse, he slept on the dirt floor of schoolhouses. And all for what? -For the knowledge that if Jacalteca came from Kanhobal, then the mountain people came up from the southeastern sector of the country: and another link in the chain of ancientmodern history was forged. It is known that certain tribes in Wyoming speak languages akin to those of tribes north of Panama. And the humble MARcH 1956 57 Pah-Utes of Nevada have a tongue related to that of the subtle, sophisticated Aztec poets and philosophers of the court of Montezuma. Such knowledge of mankind's speech patterns help historians trace the passage of cultures from Asia's highlands to the valleys of the Andes. This vision of the past is prophetic of the future, La Farge has said, when man recognizing a common ancestor might stand with, not against, his brother. Certainly the brotherhood of scientists, except in unusual times of war or international suspicion, is famous. In disclosing the truth, not in proving himself right, the scientist finds his purpose. If he makes an error, he welcomes correction. A German expert, Dr. Sapper, once tried to reconstruct a lost Mayan language on the basis of six words recorded by a Spanish soldier and a list of modern words from another Indian tribe with a supposedly similar dialect. But in the late 1920's, La Farge discovered three copies of a grammar and vocabulary of this ancient tongue, made by a friar in the late seventeenth century. Although Dr. Sapper was old and famous, he welcomed the discovery, acknowledged his bad guesses, and even wrote a fan-letter when La Farge's Laughing Boy, a novel of American Indians, won the Pulitzer prize later. Such friendship compensates for the months of loneliness that attend such special interests as the one La Farge once entertained. Why, he wondered, from Quiche, to Kanhobal, to Tzeltal, to Husateca do words with the same meaning alternate their initial lettering among k, ch, and ts? Other scientists sometimes shun a linguist until he has proven some point that they can use. Q LIVER LA FARGE has managed to live what to him has been an exciting life: as president of the American Association on Indian Affairs; as historian-officer of the Air Transport Command in World War II; as the author of The Enemy Gods, All the Young Men, and Sparks Fly Upward, in addition to his autobiography. Yet he has deliberately avoided "adventure," since he feels that a scientist's job on expdition is to gather information, not to battle the natives. Once he squirmed through an "adventure" lecture on the head-shrinking Jivaro Indians of Peru, because 58 PANORAMA he knew that three young men had just returned with a col- · lection of material gathered on a summer vacation among those same friendly, kindly warriors now being slandered. Instead, with his dedicated colleagues, he has weighed fresh evidence, whether "five miles from a resort hotel or five hundred from the nearest human being," excited simply and steadily by a respect for truth, the tracking of human footprints back to the thin cold air of the high plateaus of Asia. * * * 300,000-MILE TIRE A blowout-proof tire for trucks and buses that will outlast streets comes out of US Steel. Here they developed a high-tensile, specially stranded wire for reinforcing cord. Not to be confused with bead wire, the new cord wire is built into the plies, two to four of which are formed into the tire. With a tensile strength cf 40,000 pounds per square inch, far in excess of any available fabric cord, wire makes a safer, strnger tire with a thinner cross section. This provides greater resiliency and reduces heat accumulation. The metal-core ply also eliminate casing stretch. Cord wire is made of high carbon steel and is supplied in coils to the processing line as hard-drawn wire 0.033 inch in diameter. * MARCH 1956 59 You Lovely 10eople * By LEON ARD CASPER I N EMPORIA, an American college girl-wife of a Filipino said, "Now, I know why I love my husband." In Kentucky an overgrown farm boy carrying Ben's suitcases all the way to the station at four in the morning, explained, "You said something yesterday, sir, which I shall remember always." In Illinois, an old teacher, once in the islands, brought her mother "to see how the boys we taught in the Philippines had grown up to be." What Ben Santos, who served the Commonwealth Government in exile when war caught him in America, said "with a little fervor, a little nostalgia" to these Americans about their best brothers-in-arms is not recorded in You Lovely People. But if he spoke as honestly, in uncoy conversation, about Filipinos at home as he has written about these others, like himself, the homeless ones, why his audiences were moved is clear. The wrenching power of the book lies in its und,erstate· ment, acknowledging the quiet desperation and yet almost iron gentl~ness of these expatriates who, in crisis, felt welling even in themselves the sentiments which made a Philippine nation, already independent in fact because independent at heart, inevitable. German P.O.W.s in Kansas laughingly told Santos that he was as much a prisoner as they. Yet there was the daily bread of hope (as when one P.O.W. rescued a frozen gold fish from the wintry campus fountain) and of memory. • Bienvenido Santos, You Lovely People (Benipayo Press, Manila: 1955). PANORAMA These were hurt men whom Santos knew, lonely Filipinos whose American wives suffered as much as insanity, huddling near them m their second-rate run-down neighborhoods. A few exiles were simply "blonde crazy"; but more actually found in their wives the faithfulness that they would have expected only from their own kind. (The pregnant wife of an old Filipino farmer, stricken with acute appendicitis, warmed him with her own body while they waited in the snow for the rural mailman to come, to take him to the hospital.) Others were betrayed over and over, by their wives and their in-laws; but sat out their lives with quiet courage on doorsteps or collapsed at last from t.b. behind the steering wheel of a taxi. They were hurt men (like the figures in Navarro's book jacket: confined as if in crypts). The war, the isolation they endured far from the land of their morning, the mutilation of people to whom they had never expected to return but whom, in a sense, they had never left - somehow these men wore their wounds with a kind of honor. The Filipino Dream only survived more passionately tn them, for its frustration. It is of this Filipino Dream, not of himself, that Santos has written: the character of the narrator is deliberately left incomplete; sometimes the story-telling function passes over to men like poker-faced Ambo, of the trembling hands, or to others more anonymous, until a few sections of the book are even told from the omniscient point of view, that is, tell themselves. Withdrawal of the narrator actually permits the reader, suddenly naked and abandoned in a crowd, unmediated experience : the discovery of himself in the ghost and flesh, the dream and reality of others. JN HIS INTRODUCTION, N.V.M. Gonzalez has contented himself with calling You Lovely People a book. At least half of its divisions are not self-contained, not short stories - although others are some of the country's best stories: "The Prisoners," "The Door," ''Brown Coterie," "Scent of Apples," "Accept the Homage." It might, however, be considered a novel, in the sense that Robert Penn Warren's four-quartered The Hamlet is a novel. Only a small part of You Lovely People has absolute continuity; unique rhythms, in pace and perspective, arranged through mobility of setting and the quick-change MARCH 1956 61 artistry of narrators, make a puzzling motion (fit for the wounded, the wondering); but the reverberating theme, which perhaps finds its finest symbol in Ambo - the trembling hand~ of need which idealizes memory, the poker-face of realistic perception of the present- makes this a book with a singleness of voice, though a variety of echoes. More than any other character, more than Ben himself, · Ambo emerges monumental and memorable - but not separable from the rest. He embodies the Filipino Dream. He hovers over Ben, like an elder guardian angel, trying to keep the younger innocence uncorrupted. He collects money for forgotten N anoy's funeral. His dream is muddled only in the Philippines, by his wife who has tired of wanting him and by his friend Doc whom easy money is corroding; and ironically, Ambo wants to return to the U.S. where the dream still makes sense. Just as he makes understatement discipline his sentiment, in the end Santos cannot be false, cannot help showing what the Philippines was like to the returned prodigals, the expatriates who had loved well from a distance. Father Ocampo had warned, prophetically, of ruins in the spirits of those touched by war. A migration in reverse has already begun by the end of the book - cream of the jest: the horizon, after all, was only a mirage. TI UT THERE is an unwritten epilogue. Despite the clear, rare value of this book, Ben Santos needed ten post-war years to find his publisher and his audience; ten years to be welcomed home. Yet he stayed, looked around, did not retreat back up the gangway; because he must have believed whatever it was that he had told Americans in Kentucky and Kansas; he must have had faith that the Philippines he pictured would, gradually, return. Despite the book's ironic conclusion, its very publication, at this hour, is an exciting act of love. You Lovely People was introduced (with Dominador Ilio's book of poems) at a U.P. Writers Club banquet, where copies were included in the cost of the meal. Food for thought 62 PANORAMA may never replace fine art for the stomach; but that fiestas might make even this much room for the soul's waistline perhaps will prove that the Filipino Dream of Bienvenido Santos and others was more prophecy than fantasy. * * * KWTV TOWER: WORLD'S TALLEST STRUCTURE The Okies can now boast of one more first in their list at the expense of the Yankees: they have the tallest structure man has ever made. This is the recently raised antenna tower for KWTV near Oklahoma City. From a distance, it resembles most others but it would take 1572 twelve-inch rulers to the top, 100 more than needed for the Empire State Building. It cost $650,000 and is expected to produce good reception beyond the 100-mile radius. Of course this was the objective of its planners, not to build the world's tallest structure. The steel section is insulated from the base by 21 porcelain tubes, each 4 inches in diameter, designed to withstand a maximum load of 11 million pounds. * * Many of the effects in modern Western music are really the result of rediscovered primitive techniques, newly acquired by conscious or unconscious effort. The rhythm of the lgorot balognimas, for ex;ample--an irregular 5/8-4/ beat-is ancient. but has modern echoes. The daen/l, also in its use of the minor third is porto-m'<>dern. * MARCH 1956 63 AT FIFTY-NINE Vicente M. Hilario - teacher, individualist and thinker - was dead. He was a victim of arteriosclerosis. The morning papers, reporting his death, mentioned that he had spent more than 30 years of his life in the government service. He was a classroom teacher. In the noblest traditions of the profession, he gave his most creative years to educating the youth. A man is not old at fiftynine. At that age many are still strong and sprightly in step. But arteriosclerosis is a mean thing. It attacks the nervous system. It hardens the arteries until the flow of blood is lessened, and the victim, badly paralyzed, dies. Doctors say that arteriosclerosis is an occupational disease of a sort - a disease among those who work their minds feverishly and long. Professor Hilario could not have escaped the malady, if he wanted to. His occupation was thinking, and his remarkable mind was the frantic laboratory of his ideas. In subsequent issues, two or three Manila dailies paid the man editorial tribute: Professor Hilario labored hard and quietly. He had a militant integrity; he never compromised for personal gain. His passing would be mourned by the thousands who had come under his liberal tutelage. And so on. 64 \>icente 1n. Hilario: The Man Who Wouldn't Conform Almost three years ago a principled, ruggedly individualistic professor of the University of the Philippines passed away. Here a former student pays tribute. By Felixberto C. Sta Maria It was fine tribute, and the man deserv~d all of it. But it was a great American, living half a world away and writing a century ago, who really wrote Vicente Hilario's obituary. The man was Ralph Waldo Emerson. , In his SelfReliance, he said: PANORAMA Whose would be a man must be a non-conformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Professor Hilario had explored and found goodness. But he also found evil, and with uncompromising fury he fought it. He died a young man. I first met Professor Hilario before the war when I was a student in one of his crowded literature courses. Even then, I remember, his classes were something of a legend on the campus. Dressed in a prim white suit and vest, he shuffled briskly into the classroom, a deck of class cards in hand. Almost before the students noticed and hushed into silence, he was shooting them with a withering barrage of questions. And the remarkable thing about his questions was that they touched on every conceivable subject. His mind simply refused to be imprisoned in the textbook or the classroom: its broad but intense ray searched deeply, often abjectly, into the affairs and morals of men. That was a sure way to make enemies, and he certainly made many. Before that course was over, I realized why students had dubbed him "Walking Encyclopedia." The epithet, I thought, was exaggerated. But it came very close to describing his insatiable intellectual curiosity. MARCH 1956 Vicente M. Hilario, like Emerson's man, was a non-conformist. But there was a difference. Where the latter groped in spiritual skepticism, Hilario was unequivoc2l in his faith. He knew God and therefore knew goodness. Writing in the liberation tabloid Manila New Day (March, 1945 ), he defined this faith: From our own past history and recent experience and from those of our partners and enemies in liberty and liberalism, the first great quality we discern is Faith-in man's divine nature and destiny, in the freedom of the spirit as the basis of individual liberty, in the hardiness of free institutions, in the tested workability and sanity of free governments. No conscious, progressive life is possible without the firm possession of the "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." In a large sense he was a misfit. His moral precepts were too uncomfortably austere for the society he lived in. He never compromised. With inflexible honesty he explored the world about him, and did not like much of what he saw. There was too much opportunism, too little integrity. There were too many of those whom he called "the invertebrate neutral." This "unpopular creature," according to him, "is always in unholy terror of making enemies, and eventually can find no friendly face, look, or 65 gesture to beckon, welcome, or shield him." The few genuinely good things he saw, however, he did like. These he praised and fought for, as readily as he condemned the bad. His judgment, naturally, was not infallible. He made mistakes. In the demanding exactness of his moral norms, he sometimes became unreasonable. Yet, when he spoke there was always conviction in his voice. And even colleagues who disagreed with him openly admired his courage. T HE NEXT time I saw Professor Hilario was after the war. He had changed greatly in appearance. There was a slight stoop now, although his face did not seem to age very much. In place of the speckless white suit and vest, he wore khaki trousers and shirt, with the collar carelessly tucked inward. His shoes were rubber. Undoubtedly the war had been harsh on him. One could see that readily. With his home he lost a huge private library which was the collection of a lifetime. Like the many victims of the battle for the liberation of Manila, he emerged destitute and greatly embittered. Otherwise, it was thoroughly Hilario, the unmitigated individualist, who faced his postwar English classes at the Uni66 versity of the Philippines. His appetite for controversy was as keen as ever. And now he censured where he used to demur, lashed instead of patted. With the end of war, there was more skulduggery and selfishness to fight. It was no time for complaisance. Yet he was still a believer in the "essential goodness of man," and he pleaded for tolerance: Faith and peace cannot exist without tolerance. We suffer a person to hold on to his beliefs, not because we concede that he is right, but because we are animated by the faith and are reconciled to tne assurance that, sooner or later, he will perceive the gleam and come to our lighted path. But toleration, he warned, should not be confused with a "vacillating compromise with fundamental error." Right is right and wrong is wrong. The expedient need not be, and often is not, right. It must have been this intense aversion to insincerity and political opportunism that got him actively embroiled in the political controversies of the post-liberation days. The U.P. had not yet reopened. In the first free elections after the war, the then President Sergio Osmeiia was running for reelection against the decidedly popular Manuel A. Roxas. As a commentator for the Manila New Day, Hilario vigorously PANORAMA supported Osmefia. He assailed with characteristic sarcasm the "invertebrate counsellors and disgruntled spongers," who would support leaders "without backbones." Osmeiia lost that election. The people wanted a change, and they would have it if only for the novelty. But Hilario never wavered in his stand. He knew he was supporting an unpopular cause, but he believed in it. That was what mattered. Neither did he retract a single statement he had made. THIS WAS Vicente M. Hilario - before or after the war. It made no difference. The stooped shoulders and fast del;ivering bod.y were deceiving. He had not in the least lost his militancy of mind or his strong sense of right. He might have been embittered, yes. But it was a bitterness that was impersonal, one that bore no hatred. The war had dislocated people and values. The good professor tcould not seem to accept that fact. An episode his family often recount is about the war damage claims after the war. Professor H;Jario did not want to file a claim; he never, in fact, collected a centavo. He said ,that the claims officials would •never believe that he owned such a fantastically large collection of books, much less pay for it. He didn't give them a MARCH 1956 chance to taunt his integrity! But once he did amaze the secretary of finance with his meticulous honesty. Not able to pay his P.50 residence certificate because of illness, he wrote to the secretary requesting that he be exempted from having to appear personally, as was the rule. He asked to be allowed to send someone else to pay the tax for him. Upon receiving the letter, the secretary promptly dispatched a clerk to his house. In so doing the government spent P12.50 to collect a P.50 tax, but it had satisfied a conscientious citizen. As the liberation years went by, Professor Hilario's health deteriorated rapidly. It seemed as if the accumulated strains of the war years suddenly caught up with him. Then came the decision in 1948 to transfer the University to Diliman. With this decision the professor took immediate issue. He would not budge from Padre Faura. The University belonged to the people, and Manila was the most convenient location for them. "Why move?" he asked. "Why spend millions erecting a university in the wastelands of Diliman? We have a fine campus right here that only needs rebuilding." The University moved anyway. But Professor Hilario 67 was never reconciled to the idea. I suppose it was partly because of the daily long bus trips, which his frail health could now hardly take. At any rate, he stood adamantly on his grounds - even after the transfer, by common admission, had proved singularly fortunate for the state university. His deep-rooted individualism, at times myopic, would not be tempered even by a failing health. He kept fighting. Once he said that the only superman endurable in this workaday world is the free man. Perhaps he was not thinking of physical endurance at all. He forgot that the human body, unfortunately, cannot be sustained by the mind alone, no matter how super-human that mind might be. Sometime it must succumb. The last time I saw Professor Hilario, he was propped by two white pillows in a hospital bed. He lay critically ill. The year before, in June, he had applied for retirement from the service. In a touching letter to President Vidal A Tan he said: 68 I have been hopefully looking forward to spending the rest of my teaching days in this institution during your incumbency. But my present illness has made my working routine of the last year and a half very much more strenuous than it ever was before, so that I have no other recourse to follow than to give up prematurely and and reluctantly the type of work to which I have devoted the best years of my life . . . The retirement was granted, and for almost a year thereafter he waited painfully for those best years to end. In the meantime his mind had not been idle. He continued to read with effort and managed, with the. h~lp of his family, to keep a hm1ted correspondence with his friends. J REMEMBER when I v1s1ted him at home a few ~eeks before he was taken very ill. He was already bedridden at that time, although he could still carry a halting conversation. He wanted to know all about the University. He asked about friends in the faculty, and about students he knew. He expressed deep concern over the fact that the credit requirements in English for a master's degree in that field had been considerably reduced. "Isn't _that terrible?" he asked indignantly. In the hospital bed where he lay, he was awake but silent. His speech had deserted hi~. What remarkable thouo-hts occupied that great mind which knew no rest, I shall never know. But the simple words of prayer which he wrote to a priest acquaintance who visited him during his last days, kept coming back to me. He had written: "I pray. . . that the Most High, in His Infinite WisPANORAMA dom and Mercy. . . continue to help our Mother Church carve out an oasis of Faith, Hope, and Charity in this world's vast desert of rampant paganism and sordid materialism." That world's vast desert he left quietly in the evening of May 13, 1953. At fifty-nine he was dead. He died young. * * * Salt-Paved Roads The use of salt to stabilize gravel, clay or other untreated earthen roads is on the increase in many sections of the United States according to the Salt Institute. More and more engineers turn to this type of construction to build durable, low-maintenance, hard-surface secondary roads. In other applications, it is a basic part of the construction of stranger subgrades and all-weather shoulders for hard-surfaced roads. Economy is the principal advantage. Increased safety of vehicular traffic by eliminating dangerous loose gravel or sand and reduction of maintenance costs add to its usefulness. Salt provides the means of anchoring the gravel in a long-lasting and durable surface. The high density resulting from the bonding action of the salt often produces densities as high as concrete. MARcH 1956 * THE EGG AND BEECHER The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher Called a hen a most elegant creature. The hen, pleased with that, Laid an egg on his hat, And thus did the hen reward Beecher. - OLIVER WENDELL HOMES 69 ROADsrop A VAST ROAD BUILDING program is tapping rich, new agricultural areas on the island of Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines. The project, supported by American funds and technical knowledge, is one of the most extensive attempted m Asia since the war. Its prime purpose is to boost this nation's economy by openning land for small farmers in what the Filipinos call "the land of promise." Rugged pioneers will settle on virgin jungle soil where few persons ever have been. In some sections the roads will cut through areas still marked "unexplored" on maps. The Mindanao highway development calls for construction of 354 miles of primary 70 Mindanao caliing LAND all-weather roads, 68 miles of feeder roads and 21 bridges. The total estimated cost is $42 million. The United States, through the International Cooperation Admini:..tration (ICA) will contribute $7 million in equipment and technical aid. The Philippines will add the equivalent of 35 million U.S. dollars in pesos. Completion of the four main roadS. in expected in 1958. Homesteaders are flocking to Mindanao from all parts of the Philippines, many pushing ahead into the snarled wilderness to clear the land and wait for the highways to catch up to them. A dream of the new world that is waiting to be carved out of the jungle spurs the pioneer settler on, and fires his determination to make the PANORAMA earth yield its riches. This dream is carried by all those who pack thei1 few belongings, trek where few men ever have been, and hack new farms out of · the jungle with primitive tools. S OME OF the newest and finest road buildmg equipment in the world has been brought in to build these highways. H u g e diesel crawler tractors pull out tree trunks centuries old, and level the jungle with their powerful blades. Pythons s 1 i t h e r into the forests as graders and shovels push forward. Monkeys and tropical birds scatter through the vine-choked trees when dumptrucks rumble by. There are no doubts about the fertility of the land which wi« be opened up by this network of modern roads. Fence posts, put into the ground ar()und construction camps, have sprouted leaves. The roads wi11 provide transportation for the lush corn, rice, abaca and coffee crops. There are huge grazing areas in the small valleys within the area to be reached by the highways. The Mindanao road development is an example of Western and Asian coperation. American technicians provide the mosf modern road-building knowledge and direction. Filipino workers, under the supervision of their own engineers, have made an impressive record against the impenetrable jungle. President Ramon lVlagsaysay has given the road development program top priority in his plans to provide land for his countrymen. * * * Conformity of Growth Sometimes older people insist on conformity because, having stopped growing themselves, they feel insecure when they notice that things and people still want to change, still want to become their own selves, not stand in proxy. But isn't it true that even love grows? It has continuity without rigidity; it is not a brittle thing. A parent's love can grow into wisdom, with the growing years of his child. -Henry Hazlitt * l\4ARc:H 1$156 71 Stress on leadership fire We 7raining £Jood Lawyers? By ENRIQUE M. FERNANDO G DUCATION FOR the law is education for leadership in a democratic socity, education in the implementation of civil liberties. I use the term civil liberties not simply in the sense of constitutional rights protecting individuals against state action. Civil liberties mean much more. They embrace political, civil, as well as social and economic rights. Political rights imply the right to participate in the Government, and under democratic theory, the right to oppose the Government in power. Civil rights emphasize the liberty which the citizens enjoy to protect themselves against the politically organized community. Social and economic rights on the other hand emphasize the protection that the welfare and well-being of the citizens receive from the Government. 72 Democracy presupposes not only majority rule but likewise the participation in the power, respect, wealth, skill, welfare, and enlightenment processes. This is so because at the core of all democratic theories is the emphasis on the dignity and the worth of the individual. Its central theme is the importance of the individual person. He is not to be denied the opportunity to develop and mature his individual talents. He is not to be reduced to an automaton. He is to be immune from brutalization. He must have an environment in which the emergence of an integrated personality is possible. Legal education is thus concerned with training for leadership in a democracy. Law can not be regarded solely as a peculiar set of technical symbols useful in predicting judicial behavior, but rather as the whole PANORAMA of a community's institution of government, the sum of all the power decisions of the community. It has more than the elemental function of maintaining order. It is a positive instrument for promoting and securing all the other basic values of the community such as welfare, respect, wealth, skill, enlightenment. The court is not therefore the only principal and proper instrument of legal control. <[ HIS EMPHASIS on law in terms of a legal order or the regime of adjusting relations and ordering conduct by the systematic and orderly application of force by a politically organized society, and not merely in terms of doctrines or decisions or in terms of the juristic process as the field of the study of the law, calls for the clarification of the task of lawyers in a democratic society. Can it still be said then that a lawyer's chief concern is to orcmote the interest of his cli..knt without thought or regard to the interest of the community at large? In the United States, where the aristocracy of the legal profession is the corporation lawyers, with their long and faithful service to vested interests, there is a tendency to emphasize the responsibility of lawyers to the public as a whole. Since the New Deal days of President Roosevelt, promising graduates from Yale, Harvard, MARCH 1956 Chicago and other law schools have preferred community service to private practice in one of the so-called law factories of Wall Street. In the Philippines, the tradition for public service has been much more developed. At the state university, the law college, in addition to aiming at a sound and thorough acquisition of all the skills needed for competence in practice, has emphasized the function cf leadership in a democratic community. In the training of lawyers for policy-making and policy advising in the public service, a lawyer needs certain skills in addition to his mastery of legal doctrines and principles. Such skills may be divided into skills of thought, skills of observation and skills of management. The skills of thought in addition to efficiency in legal technicality must include goal thinking, trend thinking, and scientific thinking. Skills of observation whether through intensive procedure whereby the observer devotes himself for a long time to a particular person or situation and uses complex method, or through extensive procedurn whereby the obo:erver devotes himself briefly to a particular person or situation and uses a simple method are likewise essential. And under present conditions skills d management whether in primary relations dealing with individuals or of 73 groups are indispensable to a lawyer in his role as a policymaker or a policy adviser. T HE MORE skillful a law student is in the languages, the better he is prepared for the study of the law. And the more thornughly grounded he is in the social sciences, the easier it would be for him to understand legal rules and principles. Nor would exposure to elementary principles of physical and biological sciences be a handicap. Equipped with such knowledge his task in promoting civil liberties for all, in translating democracy from theory to fact, has greater chances of being carried out swxessfully. A lawyer of course cannot become within a lifetime a specialist in all the other branches of knowledge. But to remain ignorant of the other branches of knowledge, especially the social sciences is to run the risk of failure, however technically proficient he might be in his grasp and mastery of the legal syntax. There must therefore be an increased effort to broaden the cultural and legal background of l:;iw students, to increase their awareness of their role as policymakers or policy-advisers in a democratic community and to impart some of the added skill.s useful for implementing civil liberties. * * * 74 ON LEGAL EDUCATION "It is not surprising that in some of the leading Ame1ican law schools, the most notable of which is Yale, specialists in other lines serve full time in the law school. Thus La_w, Science and Policy is taught both by a professor of law who has distinguished himself in the field of property and a professor whose training has been in the political and social sciences. A noted econom.ist taught, and remarkably well, Constitutional Law. The course in Legal Psychiatry is a joint venture by men eminent in the field as well as by a professor of criminology."-E. M. Fernando "If legal education in the contemporary world is adequately to serve the needs of a free and productive _ commonwealth it must be conscious, efficient, and systematic training for policy-making. The proper function of our law schools is, in short, to contribute to the training of policy-makers for the ever more complete achievement of the democratic vfalues that constitute the professed ends of American policy."-McDougal and Lasswell * PANORAMA The story of the Academy The HOUSE that PLATO Built By WILLY KREMP A BOUT A MILE northwest of ancient Athens was a grove and a sport ground known to be sacred to the Greek hero, Akademos. Here Piato, about 385, bought an estate and had some buildings erected for his residence and for housing his pupils. The place was soon named the Academic scl:.ool w he r e learning was to be had in the best Greek tradition. Later the school was transferred to the city. More than 900 years after its foundation, in the year 529 AD. the Academy was closed by Emperor Justinian. It was a time when the last adherents of the declining heathen antiquity were desperately trying to save whatever could be saved of the old spirit. The year 529 AD. thus marks the end of the spiritual world of antiquity in that part of the world: by a symbolic coincidence in history, MARCH 1956 in the same year, in Italy, Benedict of N ursia was laying the cornerstone of his monastery on Monte Cassino, which not only helped spread the new spirit over great parts of Europe but also, by amalgamating the old and the new in a unique way, helped to humanize the new eastern spirit destined to mould European mentality for c;.enturies to come. The Platonic school became the prototype of all later philosophical schools and consequently of the many institutions of higher learning in antiquity. One of the most outstanding was the institute of research founded about 280 B.C. by Ptolemy I in Alexandria, the f a m o us "Mouseion', a spiritual branch of the Peripatos, the school of Plato's pupil, Aristotle. What relation has the modern academies and universities to these ancient schools? Do they have only the name in common, 75 as we have adopted other ancient words like Gymnasium, Lyceum or Athenaeum, the latter from Emoeror Hadrian's institute for l~ctures and recitations by literary men? Or are these names of our higher seats of learning linked by a living tradition to the work cf Plato? Does the academician of today still stand in the Platonic tradition? Between the schools of antiquity and those of today we have, historically, the universities of the Middle Ages. We have but to remember the highly conservative old universities of England. Unfortunately, the information about medieval universities do not consider whether they represent an unbroken tradition from the days of antiquity. Denifle, a great historian of medieval schools and learning, regards the medieval university as a spontaneous creation of the Christian-medieval mind and thinks that the begir.nings of learned instruction of later epochs were to be found in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. W E DO NOT yet possess an exhaustive documentary description of the Byzantine educational s y s t e m and, no doubt, much must remain obscure without a suffiicent knowledge of the great East-Roman center, which preserved and passed so much of the ancient 76 tradition to European medieval and Renaissance culture. Above all the medieval university is a corporate body, universitas studii. The unity of magistri and scholares is what at that time was called corpus, collegium, societas, communio, consortium. The ancient equivalent to a universitas studii had the same basic organization. It was also a corporate body, though such a corporative structure is obviously not necessitated by the nature of the institutions. The Greeks had no general term for such institutions: they had individu;µ. names like the Academy of Plato, the Lyceum of Aristotle, the Stoa, meaning the colonnade, of the Stoics, and the Garden of Epikuros. In name and legal status, however, an ancient university in Greek is called a "thiasos." "Thiasos" wh2tever might have been its specific purpose, denotes any kind of association, guild, fraternity, club of community worshipping a specifi..c deity. There were religious "th'.asoi" concerned with certain ritual purposes - in fact, the oldest "thiasoi" were of a religious nature only. But others were what we would call political or sports clubs or clubs of a purely social character. Some were cooperative associations for aid in case of sickness or death. Others were scientific associations or aesthetic-literary PANORAMA circles like the one founded by Sophocles whose cult deities were the Muses. In the Platonic "thiasos" the Muses were also worshipped: however, there was also erected in the Academy an altar of Eros worshipped by the Platonic congregation as one who represented the symbol of their enthusiastic aspirations for spiritual and eternal beauty, the early reflection of which, in their belief, was represented by bodily beauty. Later on there developed both in the Academy and in other schools the cult of their founders, not unlike a sort of saint-worship. THIS CULTIC bond of the "thiasoi" had some far reaching consequences: the property endowed to a "thiasos" belonged to the respective deity and could therefore not be touched. Consequently Emperor Justinian's confiscation of the Academy in 529 was carried out not without a resemblance of justification since the pagan cultic foundation of its endowment had ceased to exist in the Christian state. The cultic foundation of a "thiasos" also meant independence of all "thiasoi" from the interference of the authorities of the state or of the mu'1icipality. To the philosophers this meant freedom of science. No "thiasos" could be prosecuted from the religious side, i.e., from the cult MARCH 1956 of the state. This, in consequence, is the reason why prosecutions for whatever motives against influential school-heads used to take the form of a suit for "asebeia," for atheism or impiety. The suit against Socrates is a famous example. On the whole, the academic freedom bestowed on the philosophical "thiasoi" by nature of their ancient religious struc~ure was kept till late in the times of the Roman emperors. The famous saying handed down to us from those times: ·"Caesar non est supra grammaticos," does not mean: even the emperor has to bow to grammatical rules. Its original meaning is: the emperor is not above the professors, he cannot interfere with science. In the second half of the first century AD. academic institutions were provided with funds and privileges from municipalities or from the state and thus became pub l i c corporations, whose rights accordingly became restricted by official controls. In Hellenistic times, inscriptions, especially in Asia minor, show the existence of many state-schools, but they were of an elementary character. It is und~r the reign of Vespasian that we hear for the first time that the emperor appointed Greek and Latin professors of rhetorics to statesupported chairs. ,., The name Academy was not used in the Middle Ages for universities. Instead it was given to the learned societies which during the Renaissance were founded in Italy and from there spread all over Europe. The most famous of these organizations, the Accademia Platonica of the Medici in Florence was indeed intended to be nothing less than a revival of the old Platonic Academy dissolved by Justinian. Its chief object was to translate all the works of Plato into Latin. guage, literature and history, there appeared others devoted to the natural sciences. Thus the modern academy has lost the character of an educational institution and has instead become an exclusive society of the learned. The word academy, however, still lingers in connection with the teaching of such diverse subjects as military and naval science, art, horseback riding and dancing. What a far cry from the original Platonic school in the grove dedicated to Akademos.-Adapted from the U.P. Faculty Conference Proceedings, 1951. Besides as learned societies concerned principally with lan78 * * * Soap Bubbles The study of soap bubbles by scientists may aid in the development of metals that are stronger than those now in use and that have other improved properties. Soap bubbles resemble the crystals or grains of metal structure. The way all bubbles grow is closely similar to the growth of metallic grains. Neither enlarges by combination of two smaller units into one but both get bigger by expanding their boundaries at the expense of adjacent ones which contract and disappear. Experimental bubbles are not blown in open air but in special glass cells, five inches in diameter and half an inch thick. Each is half-filled with a specific soap solution, pumped out to form a vacuum and then shaken to form the bubbles. Many metallurgical uses, such as the steel used in electrical transformers, depend on accurate knowledge and control of metal grains. This study should lead to new production techniques. PANORAMA One mark of an educated man is the possession of a reasonable fund of general information. The highly specialized individual, often dubbed an ••expert," frequently knows little or nothing outside his own line. Try yourself on the following questions, then turn to the next page for the correct answers. 1. If Richard Strauss had been born in 1764 instead of 1864, he never would have written horn and trumpet parts for Ein Heldenleben because: A. Austria had banned nonstringed instruments; B. all such instruments had gone to war; C. the instruments did not yet exist; D. more likely he would have been a politician. 2. The Maoris of New Zealand, who met the Dutch and English explorers, had come there about the year: A. 1600; B.786; C. 221; D. 1300. 3. The kiwi, emu, kittiwake and skua are all: A. Pacific birds; B. Australian mammals related to the kinkajou; C. South American tribes; D. Moro weapons. 4. The Good Earth, The Sea Around Us, The Yearling all have this in common: A. their setting is China; B. they are about farmers; C. their authors are women; D. they have won Nobel prizes. 5. Tchaikowsky died of: A. a broken heart; B. tuberculosis; C. cholera; D. wounds received in the Crimean War. 6. When the mutineers from the Bounty went to Pitcairn Island, they took with them from Tahiti: A. six male and twelve female islanders; B. four casks of tobacco; C. a short wave radio; D. thirty slave women. 7. The Philippines is in: A. the doldrums; B. the horse latitudes; C. the westerlies; D. the northeast trade wind belt. 8. The latest socio-moral movement in India is known as: A. Bhoodan, Sampattidan, and ]eevandan; B. neo-Nehru; C. the "white-cow protectorate; D. "water the plateaus" inauguration. 9. Carmen, in the opera of that name, is a: A. chiclet vendor; B. tobacco factory laborer; C. nightclub entertainer; D. bullfighter. 10. In the Southern hemisphere, the guiding constellation is called: A. Magellan's eye; B. Sta. Maria's belt; C. Silver Thorn; D. the Southern Cross. MARCH 1956 79 ARE YOU WORD WISE? Answers 1. (b) difficult to please 2. (c) numerous 3. (a) short excursion 4. (c) the heavens 5. (a) trim 6. (d) plunder 7. (d) convoke 8. (a) puppy 9. (d) troops in front of an army 10. (a) water basin for baptizing 11. ( c) lament for dead 12. (d) to make escape impossible 13. (c) summit 14. (d) unconsciousness 15. (a) organ of voice 16. (c) to sleep through winter 17. ( c) organized massacre 18. (a) knob 19. (b)sofa 20. (c) ill will ANSWERS TO PANORAMA QUIZ 1. C. the instruments did not yet exist. 2. D. 1300. 3. A. Pacific birds. 4. C. their authors are women. 5. C. cholera. 6. A six male and twelve female islanders. 7. D. the northeast trade wind belt. 8. A. Bhoodan, Sampattidan and JeevandaIL 9. B. tobacco factory worker. 10. D. The Southern Cross. * * * 80 When Mark Twain Was Outwitted Mark Twain and Chauncey M. Depew once went abroad on the same ship. When the ship was a few days out they were both invited to a dinner, and when speech-making time came, Mark Twain had the first chance. He spoke twenty minutes and made a greC)t hit. Then it was Mr. Depew's turn. "Mr. Toastmaster and Ladies and Gentlemen," said the famous reconteur as he rose, "before this dinner Mark Twain and myself made an agreement to trade speeches. He has just delivered my speech, and I thank you for the pleasant manner in which you received it. I regret to say that I have lost the notes of his speech and cannot remember anything he was to say." Then he sat down, and there was much laughter. PANORAMA In the Beginning . .. MILE (A unit of distance) Of course it depends on how long your strides are, but the mile of present-day travellers is derived from ilie Latin term milia (passuum), meaning "a thousand paces." MARCH 1956 SOLON (A wise lawgiver) From the Athenian statesman Solon (c.638-c.558 B.C.), who carried out vast legal, administrative and social reforms, comes this term which is loosely applied today to any congressman, wise or unwise. STREET (A public way or road) Although by no stretch of the imagination may some of our streets be termed "paved," the original Latin word strata, from which the word street is derived, meant "paved." 81 D ILIMAN, as any Tagalog will say, means darkness. Ironically it seems, it has come to stand for something else but darkness, for Diliman is the seat of the only state university in the country - the forty-eight year old University of the Philippines. Because of its academic independence and self-sufficiency as a University Town, Diliman is often referred to as a "republic." The inhabitants of Diiman (professors, students, university empioyes and laborers) are quick to point this out. In 1951, students staged a rally protesting political interference in the university. 82 Diliman is actually a district of Quezon City, the burgeoning future capitol of the country. A good part of Diliman was cogon grassland and barren heaths until the University of the Philippines, in 1948, moved ou~ of its rubbled ten-hectare campus in Padre Faura, Manila, and set up shop in the sprawling 490-hectare Diliman site. The United States army who occupied the site in 1945, left an assortment of quonset huts and army barracks which the University used for classrooms. laboratories, lecture halls, living quarters, and other purposes. The buildings tµrned over by the army to U.P. also includPANORAMA ed a hangar - shaped gymnasium, an equally huge theater, a chapel, two swimming pools, streets, water and electrical fa· cilities, and a number of other improvements which made Diliman, though fourteen kilometers from the civilization of Manila, a very liveable place. Immediately after the transfer in 1948, the University Town was born. As early as 1939, the University of the Philippines had planned to transfer to Diliman. The man behind the movement was the late President Manuel L. Quezon of the Commonwealth. The man who executed the plan was the late Dr. Bienvenido M. Gonzalez, sixth U.P. president. The concrete buildings, now known as the Law and Education 'buildings, were constructed on the site. The war however disrupted further plans. When the University re-opened in 1945, work on the Diliman blueprint was immediately resumed. Th!:! mass exodus of students and faculty members to the new site followed three years after. A permanent building program, financed at the start by war damage funds, was launched. 7 ODAY, Diliman boasts of modern designed buildings, the largest of which i!' the Liberals Arts building known to have the widest floor MARCH 1956 space in the country. A Library building capable of holding books many times as large as the pre-war collection of the University, an Engineering building. A Veterinary Medicine building, an Administration Hall, dormitories, faculty bungalows, a 230-foot carillon tower with forty five Holland cast bells, and a golf course also grace the once rugged and barren landscape of Diliman. As one enters the Diliman grounds via the west road, he notes the fabulous Oblation set against the long pillars of the Administration building. The Oblation, a sculptured figure of a man in dishabille with outstretched arms, head facing the sky, done by the country's foremost sculptor, Guillermo Tolentino, used to stand between the Palma Hall and the Villamor Hall on the old U.P. campus in Manila. It has since stood as a symbol of the Filipino youth's spirit. No U.P. publication has ignored the motif possibilities of the Oblation. Lately however: the carillon tower, supposed to be the symbol of the alumni spirit, is becoming a standard motif on the covers of Diliman publications. The tower stands on the northeast side of the administration building. A little further north stands Little Quiapo, the fabricated super mar83 ket of the community, which used to stand on the site of the new Catholic chapel, (further northeast of the administration) which design recalls machines in space travel. Adjacent to the Catholic chapel is the hump of a Protestant chapeL Sundays find the Diliman campus relatively quiet but for straying excursionists who have tired of the pleasure devices of the Balara Park, east of the campus. Outsiders also come to play golf on the quadrangle greens or go bowling at the University Recreation Center at the east side of the quadrangle. Recently, well-meaning students donated granite benches which now line the sides of the parade grounds and the frc..nl gardens of the Administrntion building. Diliman sits on a plateau that overlooks Manila. The temperature in the campus goes up to 82 to 83 degrees Fahrenheit in April and May, Diliman's warmest months. From December to February, Diliman's coldest, the lowest mean temperature is 77 degrees F. The amount of rainfall varies from year to year and from month to month. In 1951, the total rainf.all for the year was 84.46 inches. August had the most rain, with June and November ranking second and third, respectively. The same may or may not be true this year. During the pronounced rainy .season - July to October - Diliman is most humid. The "dry months" are from Decembei: to r .. fay. On top of any big building in Diliman, one gets a view o~ the Manila and the bay to the west, Laguna de Bay to the south, the Marikina Valley to the east, and Mount Arayat and the Cordilleras to the north. Diliman as a University Town, is still undergoing tremendous expansion, for there is plenty of physical space for that. It is fast becoming a model campus not only in the country but in the Far East as well. * * * 84 Fast Action During a conversation between an Irishman and a Jew, the Irishman asked how it was that the Jews were so wise. "Because,'' said the Jew, "we eat a certain kind of fish"; and he offered to sell one for ten dollars. Alter paying his money, the Irishman received a small dried fish. He bit into it, then exclaimed: "Why. this is only a smoked herring." "See?" said the Jew. "You are getting wise already." PANORAMA ";"""()~, , , , , , , by Elmer "ls all of it included in?" NEW MEN FROM OLD How Bilibid rehabilitates its convicts T HE ABSORBED YOuNG MAN, intently working on a wooden figurine was. whittling not only an art obj~ct. He was also carving a useful place· for himself in free society by taking serious inter86 est in the jol>training given him and matly others at the furniture-making shop in New Bili~ bid, the Philippine state penitentiary. Famous for producing beautiful hard·.vood furniture, some of i.t now prized furnishings in many Philippine state halls and luxurious homes, this shop has also turned out nunerous highly-skilled craftsmen now working productivelY' in big Manila factories. Maintained along the modern concept that prisons should "re-educate the· erring in order to reform and rehabilitate them, not punish vindi,ctively," Bilibid offers training in making hardwood furniture with antique-style carvings 01 in modern styles, lightwood furniture and cabinets, rattan and bamboo furnishings, and in furniture repair and re-finishing. I ighter activities, like carving figurines, trays and other brica-brac, in-laying mother-ofpearl designs on furniture, canes and jewelry boxes, and weaving of bamboo and wicker bags and trays, are also taught. Instruction is given by civilian vocational educators assisted by skilled inmates. A trainee in wooden furniture-making takes approximate! y one year to become a skilled craftsman. He starts in the lumber shop where he learns how to season ·wood, cut and plane slats, design furniture part~ with a grooving machine or a lathe. Then he transfers to the designing and assembly section. He hl:).s his choice of learning to make carved antique-style or modern furniture. In the former, he spends four to six months training in carvMARCH 1956 87 ing. Then he moves on to the finishing section where hP learns to stain, varnish ana polish his products. In rattan furniture-making, a trainee takes six to twelve months to learn to cut and strip the rattan poles, fashion them into frames, weave wicker bottoms, assemble and finish varied rattan articles. T HE SHOP makes average annual sales of P250,000 which goes into a revolving fund that makes it practically selfsupporting. It pays the trainees wages, part of which they deposit in a savings account, as they learn a useful trade. A striking piece of furniture made by the skilled craftsmen of Bilibid is a massive round narra table now in the west wing executive offices of the White House, home of America's President. It was presented to former U.S. President Harry Truman, in 1952, by Ambassador Carlos P. Romulo from the then Philippine President Elpidio Quirino. Its beautifully-grained, one-piece top, seven and a half feet in diameter, rests on a base of four finely-carved carabao heads. A symbol of the friendship of two nations, this historic table replaces another Philippine table of similar construction, now in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., which was a gift to the late U.S. Presiident Franklin D. Roosevelt from General Emilio Aguinaldo, famous Filipino soldier. * * * 88 He Doesn't Know Him that Much! "Mr. Jones," began the timid-looking young man, "er - ah - that is, can - er I - will you-" "Why, yes, my boy, you may have her," smiled the girl's father. The young man gasped. "Whafs that? Have whom?" he asked. "My daughter, of course," replied Jones. "Thafs what you mean. You want to marry her, don't you?" "Why, no," said the young man. "I just wanted to know if you could lend me $10." "Certainly not," said Jones, sharply. "Why, I hardly know you." * PANORAMA ''HAT IS ... (Continued from page 12) is the symbol of real accomplishment, the reward for genuine talent and dedicate effort, the promise and the guarantee of useful service to God, and to fellow Filipinos. There might have been a time in our history when the nere possession of a degree and a diploma could assure one a position of respect and special consideration in the communty. Thus, perhaps, the "ilustrado" of the past was entitled to exemption from the common a den which those of lesser :lay had to bear. But that time S:, past. The country needs and 'J'lSt have not only the "ilus·ados," but the "peritos," the cilled and the industrious, the ipneers and the leaders to ·r· e up the giant of prosperthat has slept so long in : recesses of our forests and me depths of our seas. NOW COME to the second area in which our univer.srties and colleges can and should contribute toward the stimulation and strengthening of our economy. It is an area'n which that very same love 1f education which impels so .. : -•Y of our youth to aspire for a qiploma can be exploited to the profit of the nation. Let us direct and channel that love of education to its proper object. Let us train the appetite for education to seek the intellectual and technical food proved health of our economy which we all desire. Let us seek out those young men and young women of talent in all ranks of our society and offer to them the wealth and the abuLdance of our educational faciL:es so that that talent may be burnished and sharpened an,! become a fit instrument to cut down the lethargy and the indiference which h2s so far stopped the vigor of our economy. This. as I see it, is the meaning of the sixth guidepost proclaimed by President Magsaysay in his State of the Nation address in the common task of achieving our foremost goal which is the happiness and the security of the common m'm. President Magsaysay said. "Our sixth guidepost is the -adoption of educational reforms geared to the requirements of scientific and economic progress. "We must revitalize our educational system with emphasis on general, scientific, and vocational education." Even now the program of reform in the educational system is being initiated with the in telligent cooperation and support of private universities, colleges and other educational institutions. Inspired not only by their good-'.vill but also by their well known concern for the common welfare, the program, I am sure, will be realized. The Making of a Lawyer By ENRIQUE M. FERNANDO MRR: Back on the Tracks? How the railroad was saved • Book Review by LEONARD CASPER Fiction * Features * Cartoons How Our Fishermpn Live (See page 34