Hurley to Manila

Agitation for Philippine independence reached such a pitch last week that President Hoover decided to send Patrick Jay Hurley, his Secretary of War, halfway round the globe to look into the islands' affairs. Obediently Secretary Hurley canceled a trip to Ireland to attend the Dublin Horseshow in August, arranged to sail with his wife and staff for Manila from Seattle July 25.

Because of the growing probability that the next Congress for financial reasons will vote to free the Philippines, Secretary Hurley's mission took on large political significance. His purpose will be to collect first-hand material on which President Hoover can act if & when Congress sends an independence bill to the White House. Almost certainly this material will be in the form of a veto ammunition. The Philippines Herald, nationalist sheet, sensed this when it declared: "We would wish that the purpose of this mission be one of inquiry into the necessary details of separation. Yet it might be that of gathering an array of facts so devastating as to make a presidential veto of Philippine independence preclude further agitation and argument."

Meanwhile in Manila, Missouri's Senator Harry Bartow Hawes, author of the Philippine independence bill in Congress, last week continued to stir the brown-skinned natives to feverish excitement. Old Army men were shocked, politicos delighted, when he proposed that the U. S. turn over its fortress and defense works at Corregidor to the Filipinos. Voicing the sentiment of U. S. residents, the Manila Herald flayed the Senator for hobnobbing exclusively with the natives, for discourteously ignoring U. S. officials. So alarmed was one large commercial house over the prospect of independence that it applied to Lloyd's for insurance rates against such an eventuality.

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