to be imported on account of the dearth
of beef and tilth cattle due to rinderpest. Fresh meat for private
consumption (i.e., exclusive of army and navy) is imported into
Manila to the value of about $700,000 gold per annum. Reforms of more
urgent public necessity were then introduced. Existing market-places
were improved, new ones were opened in Tondo and the Walled City;
an excellent slaughter-house was established; the Bridge of Spain
was widened; a splendidly-equipped fire-engine and brigade service,
with 150 fire-alarm boxes about the city and suburbs, was organized
and is doing admirable work; roads in the distant suburbs were put in
good condition, and the reform which all Manila was looking forward
to, namely, the repair of the roads and pavements in the _Escolta_,
the _Rosario_, and other principal thoroughfares in the heart of the
business quarter of Binondo, was postponed for six years. Up to the
middle of 1904 they were in a deplorable condition. The sensation,
whilst in a gig, of rattling over the uneven stone blocks was as if
the whole vehicle might at any moment be shattered into a hundred
fragments. The improvement has come at last, and these streets are
now almost of a billiard-table smoothness. The General Post Office
has been removed from the congested thoroughfare of the _Escolta_
to a more commodious site. Electric tramcars, in supersession of
horse-traction, run through the city and suburbs since April 10,
1905. Electric lighting, initiated in Spanish times, is now in
general use, and electric fans--a poor substitute for the punkah--work
horizontally from the ceilings of many shops, offices, hotels, and
private houses. In the residential environs of the city many acres
of ground have been covered with new houses; the once respectable
quarter of Sampaloc [233] has lost its good name since it became
the favourite haunt of Asiatic and white prostitutes who were not
tolerated in Spanish times. On the other hand, the suburbs of Ermita
and Malate, which are practically a continuation of Manila along
the seashore from the Luneta Esplanade, are becoming more and more
the fashionable residential centre. About Sampaloc there is a little
colony of Japanese shopkeepers, and another group of Japanese fishermen
inhabits Tondo. The Japanese have their Consulate in Manila since the
American advent, their suburban Buddhist temple was inaugurated in
San Roque on April 22, 1905, and in the same year there was a small