Philippine Perplexity

ORPHANS OF THE PACIFIC: THE PHILIPPINES-- Florence Horn -- Reynal & Hitchcock ($3.50).

Florence Horn is a small, sapient Connecticut Yankee quietly outraged by the U. S. citizen who places Manila in Cuba. Late in 1939 she took her journalistic acumen and a social conscience to the little-known Commonwealth of the Philippines, within three months turned the polyglot, 7,091-isle archipelago inside out gathering research for a FORTUNE article. Orphans of the Pacific is the byproduct.

"The U. S. A.," says Authoress Horn, "doesn't know what to do about the Philippines and never has, from the very beginning." She kids the pious rationalizations of McKinley, the imperialistic fanfare of Senator Beveridge (Almighty God had "marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world"). She finds equally quixotic the present-day Filipino hope for coexistent 1) independence, 2) protection by the Asiatic Fleet, 3) free trade with the U. S., 4) exit from the international scene. For President Manuel Quezon--a sort of hothouse hybrid between Jimmy Walker and Huey Long--she has little respect. And toward American colonists she is passionately irreverent. "They build for themselves a barricaded American life wherever they are. They insulate themselves as thoroughly as possible against the life of the country they are in. They are rich in a country of poor people. . . . They grouse continually about petty inconveniences, and berate the miserable natives bitterly and endlessly. Yet when they go home to the States on leave for a visit they are out of joint there too. They are only too anxious to return to the despised Manila. ..."

Miss Horn's contempt is matched by compassion for the plight of the Filipino people. To them, independence is a "bright bauble, merely a gaudy word filled with vague but glorious implications." It is foisted upon them by politicians who themselves doubt its advisability. Should the Filipinos still want independence in 1946 (when the U. S. is willing to relinquish its sovereignty), the U. S. will kill most of their exports with prohibitive tariffs. Their domestic economy demolished, the Philippines could not hope to escape Japanese control through economic (if not military) conquest.

As for the archipelago's uneasy stepmother, "We hesitated about taking them in the first place; for forty years we showed singularly little pride in possessing them; we finally demonstrated our determination to be finished with them. We don't really want them today, but also we don't want to upset the status quo in the Far East, and strengthen Japan's hand. So we may never be 'quit of them.' "

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