The Philippines.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXIII, Issue 7366, 14 November 1898, Page 4

The Philippines.

Mr Joseph Earle Stevens for a couple of years constituted in his own person 25 per cent, of the American population of Manila. Since he left a fellow-countryman, Admiral Dewey to wit, has visited the place, and the archipelago of which Manila is the capital has become the property of the United States. The temporary property only, so far; but, as readers are aware, there has been a proposal before the Peace Commissioners for the purchase of the Philippines by the Stateß and the inauguration thereby of the American colonial policy. The American mind being, agitated about this colonial policy Mr Stevens was minded to tell his countrymen something about the group, and this he has done in " Yesterdays in the Philippines.'" In his preface he frankly declares against annexation. "Do we want a group of 1400 islands, nearly 8000 miles from our western shore, sweltering in the tropics, swept with typhoons and shaken with earthquakes." Do we waut to undertake the responsibility of protecting those islands from the Powers in Ifurope or the East, and of standing sponsor for the nearly 8,000,001> native inhabitants that speak a score of different tongues and live on anything from ric9 to stewed grasshoppers ? Do we want the task of civilising this race, of opening up the jangle, of setting up officiils in frontier out-of-the-way towns, who won't have been there a month before they will wiah to return? Do we want them? Wo. Americans have enough rocm in their own country. They should leave colonising to Englishmen or Germans, who are cramped for space. The Philippines,for instance, should be left, in Me Stavens's opinion, to England, who should buy the group from Spain, leaving America a coaling port, " and opening up the country to such as choose to go there." In this fashion—characteristic of the American trader alike in its commercialism and in. its common sense.:—does Mr Stevens dismiss the new-born aspirations of. his jingoistic countrymen tor a colonial empire. ' •