690
THE GREEN BAG
THE
PROPAGANDA
OF
EVARISTO
PANGANIBAN
By J. H . Blount. AMERICANS who know nothing else about the Philippine Islands have heard of the city called Manila. As "Paris is France," so Manila is the Philippines. In other words, Manila is at once the seat of government, the commercial metropolis, and the social Mecca. There is, therefore, reasonable ground for hope that the word Luzon may be remembered, in the absence of any other aid to memory, as being the name of the island on which Manila is situated. Besides being of primary importance for this reason, Luzon is the largest and most populous island of the Archipelago. Its area is about 48,000 square miles, which is about the area of Virginia; and as the area of the whole Archipelago is only about 115,000 square miles, the island of Luzon, it will be seen, includes far more than a third of all the dry land out there, in fact nearer one half of it. Concerning the people of some of the poorer and more sparsely settled mountain counties of north Georgia, the rest of the state used to say, "Why, some of those peo ple up there don't know the war is over," and in fact, it is surprising how the physical features of a country will often bring about complete insulation of some of its inhabi tants from contact with the rest, so that instead of keeping alert and abreast o'f the times and catching the cadence of the general progress, they constitute a tiny sample of what the sociologists call "a backward people." In the heart of the mountains of central Luzon there lies an oval shaped valley, extending some twenty-five miles in length from northeast to southwest, with an aver age width of six or seven miles. This valley, together with the mountains which lock it in, constitutes the province of Nueva Viscaya. The valley itself contains some
18,000 civilized people, more or less; the sides of the mountains which hem it in roundabout are supposed to contain about 40,000 Igorrotes. These are the non-Chris tian head -hunting hill tribes, upon whom the priests of the church of Rome, with all their infinite tact and patience, and devo tion to duty, have never been able to make any impression. At certain seasons of the year, when a certain red flower blooms, these "unfaithfuls " — "infideles" is the Spanish name for the non-Christian — swoop down from their mountain fastnesses, upon an unguarded village or rancheria of the lowlands, cut off a few heads, and, pursuant to a tribal superstition that such ornaments set on a pole in their fields will improve and mascot growing crops, rush back to their jungle-bounded mountain eyres, before they can be apprehended and brought to justice. You ask how dare we leave these 18,000 civilized people of the lowlands at the mercy of the 40,000 savages in the surrounding hills. We answer that the Highlanders have no organization as a whole, in fact no unit of organization whatsoever more comprehensive than the family or neighborhood group, and therefore we fear no general concerted movement by them against the people of the lowlands. The six or eight Americans among whom the executive, financial, judicial and other responsibility for the province is partitioned move in and out day by day among the people of the valley, demonstrating certainly beyond question their faith that the hilltribes will not descend in a body. How ever, these Igorrotes manage in many cases to make themselves a very appreciable nuisance. They have a way of lying in wait for the unwary traveller as he crosses the mountain trails leading into the Province. Shortly before the episode about to be told, a sufficient number of these desultory
