THE Philippines belong to that row of islands which runs in a semi-circle from Kamchatka to Java. These bits of dry land are remnants of the outer edge of the old continent.They were high enough to remain above sea-level when the waters of the Pacific covered the bottom of those valleys since then known as the Sea of Japan, the East China Sea and the South China Sea.

There are more than 7000 islands in the Philippine group, but only 462 of these are bigger than a square mile. The others are merely large cliffs or little bits of marshland, so insignificant that only one-quarter of them have even been given a name.All of them together are about as large as England and Scotland and they have a population of 11,000,000 natives, with a very large number of Chinese and Japanese and about 100,000 whites.This whole group at one time must have been highly volcanic although today we can only locate twenty-five real volcanoes.Even those, with two or three exceptions, seem to have stopped working at their trade.

For this we ought to be duly grateful, as the Philippines are very dangerously located from a geological point of view. The deepest hole in the ocean which we have so far been able to locate lies just east of the Philippines.That is the spot of which I told you and which is so deep that if we used it as a burial ground for the Himalayas, Mount Everest, the highest mountain of our planet, would still be 3000 feet under water.If things should ever begin to slide in that little corner of the world, there would be few left to tell the tale.

The most important of the Philippine islands is Luzon. It has the shape of a pollywog and in the center rises to a height of 7000 feet.The most important city and the capital of the whole group is situated on the east coast of Luzon, and its name is Manila.The Spaniards founded it in 1571,on the ruins of an old Mohammedan settlement, and it is called after a weed, which grew abundantly all over the place.In the year 1590 it was given those walls which were to prove more enduring than the rule of those who built them.

But even under the bad Spanish management, Manila soon developed into the most important commercial center of the whole Far East. The harbor was full of boats from China and Japan and India and even from faraway Arabia.They came to this port to exchange their merchandise for those European products which the Spaniards had brought to the Philippines by way of their Mexican possessions in Central America.For, rather than risk the voyage across the Indian Ocean and by way of the Cape, which would have exposed them to the attacks of the British and the Dutch, the Spaniards sent their vessels directly from Manila to the Gulf of Tehuantepec, then carried the goods across the American isthmus, and on the other side reloaded them into vessels that sailed for home by way of Cuba and Puerto Rico.

To the south of Luzon lie a dozen fairly large islands of which Samar and Panay(with the well-known city of Iloilo, the second largest city of the Philippines)and Negros and Cebú are the best known.To the south of these lies Mindanao, only a little smaller than Luzon, and famous for the stubborn resistance with which the natives, the Mohammedan Moros, have fought both Spaniard and American to retain their independence.The biggest city of Mindanao is Zamboanga, which faces the Sulu Sea, for, generally speaking, the Philippines have always turned their back upon the Pacific.Their real interests lay in the west, they traded with the west, and it was from the west that they got their religion and their first concepts of civilization.That they were discovered by people who approached them from the east was pure accident.

Magellan, who landed here in 1521,had merely taken this unusual route to settle a point of law that was threatening difficulties between his employer, the King of Spain, and the Pope. In the year 1494 the Pope, in order to make an end to all further strife between his beloved children of the Iberian peninsula had taken a ruler and had divided the whole world into two equal parts by drawing a line from the north to the south just west of the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands(roughly corresponding to our fiftieth degree of longitude west of Greenwich).He had given the Spaniards everything to the west of that line and the Portuguese everything to the east.That was the famous treaty of Tordesillas upon which the spaniards based their right to execute all those who dared to pass“beyond the line”and which made the first English and Dutch expeditions to the American mainland such very hazardous enterprises, for who ever was caught“beyond the line”was immediately hanged like a common pirate.

The Pope, however, who had made this venture into applied geography, the notorious Alexander VI, was himself a Spaniard;and the Portuguese claimed that the treaty had not been quite fair to their interests. Hence a century of wrangling and fighting as to who owned what.In connection with this quarrel, Magellan, although a Portuguese, had been hired by the King of Spain to proceed to the Indian Ocean by way of the eastern route and to decide whether the rich spice islands of the Moluccas lay within that part of the Indies which the Pope had given to the Portuguese or to the Spaniards.The Portuguese proved to be right.They got the Moluccas, which shortly afterwards they lost to the Dutch, but the Spaniards, who had come upon the Philippines in this accidental way, kept them for their own benefit and administered them from Mexico.This meant a wholesale exodus of friars from the New Castile to a territory that promised more profitable results than would ever be obtained among the fast dwindling races of Central America.

The friars, it must be confessed, did a thorough job among their Filipino charges. Indeed, if they had only been a little less successful, our own task in the Philippines would have been a good deal easier.For when we acquired those ancient Spanish possessions in the year 1898,we were for the first time in our political existence called upon to deal with a people who were almost 100% Catholic.

We may not be a Protestant nation in the official sense of the word, but our general philosophy of life is decidedly Protestant and very decidedly un-Catholic. We may be inspired by the best of intentions towards the Philippines, give them endless good roads, thousands of schools, three universities, hospitals, doctors, nurses, incubators, meat and fish inspection, hygiene and a thousand and one benefits of progress of which the Spaniards had never even heard.But all these generous expressions of goodwill mean comparatively little to people who from their earliest childhood have been taught to regard such worldly comforts and advantages as something very nice and very pleasant but not to be compared to the chance of gaining salvation in another world, where hygiene and hospitals and good roads and schools shall no longer be of any interest to anybody.