oduce a living for the tao, or peasant, and he has not cultivated
more--a fact due in part to laziness and in part to poor means of
transportation. What need to produce what cannot be taken to market?
This fact, in my opinion, goes far to account for Filipino
unaggressiveness.

According to the latest figures, the average size of the farms in the
Philippines, including the large plantations, is less than eight
acres, and the principal products are hemp, sugarcane, tobacco,
cocoanuts, and rice. The Manila hemp plant looks for all the world
like the banana plant (both belong to the same family), and the
newcomer cannot tell them apart. The fibre is in the trunk or bark.
Sisal hemp, which I found much like our yucca or "bear grass," is but
little grown. Sugarcane is usually cultivated in large plantations, as
in Louisiana, these plantations themselves called _haciendas_, and
their owners _hacienderos_. The tobacco industry is an important one,
and would be even if the export averaging half a million cigars for
every day in the year were stopped, for the Filipinos themselves are
inveterate smokers. The men smoke, the women smoke, the children
smoke--usually cigarettes, but sometimes cigars of enormous
proportions. "When I first came here," Prof. C. M. Conner said to me,
"it amused me to ask a Filipino how far it was to a certain place, and
have him answer, 'Oh, two or three cigarettes,' meaning the distance a
man should walk in smoking two or three cigarettes!" Cocoanut-raising
is a very profitable industry--all along the Pasig River in Manila you
can see the native boats high-packed with the green, unhusked product,
and two towns in Batanzas shipped 1500 carloads last year. It is also
believed that {166} the rubber industry would pay handsomely. The
rubber-producing trees I saw about Manila were very promising.

Coffee plantations brought their owners handsome incomes until about
twenty years ago, when the blight, more devastating than the cotton
boll weevil, came with destruction as swift as that which befell
Sennacherib. I heard the story of an old plantation near Lipa, whose
high-bred Castilian owner once lived in splendor, his imported horses
gay in harness made of the finest silver, but the blight which ruined
his coffee plants was equally a blight to his fortunes and his home
and it is now given over to weeds and melancholy ruins. In some
sections, however, coffee is still grown successfully, and I was much
interes