In Sight of Freedom

No bells rang.

In Manila a saleswoman in a white-faced department store said: "I think it is most foolish. The leaders should be spanked."

"We've spent so much money getting it," said a practical chauffeur, "we ought to accept."

"It is unwise," pontifically observed a hotel proprietor. "We Filipinos are not fit for it yet, having enough trouble as it is."

"I can't see that it affects me one way or another," shrugged a waitress.

Newshawks found Manuel Quezon, President of the Philippine Senate, sick abed with a hot compress about his small brown neck. The peppery little man hunched up out of his sheets to bark: "It is not an independence bill at all. It is a tariff bill directed against our products. It is an immigration bill directed against our labor."

Someone asked him what the Philippine reaction would be. "How can I tell?" complained the islands' chief politico. "I have not been out of bed. But I know the reaction of the Legislature. If it were put up to them today the bill would be overwhelmingly rejected. Nevertheless I am unwilling to do this. I want them to consult their constituencies and take the issues directly to the people. But if sympathizers continue making speeches and campaigning for acceptance of the act members of the Legislature . . . may force a final decision."

Later in the morning the sole indication of national elation was a demonstration by the students of the University of the Philippines, indulging the Latin scholastic tradition to whoop one way or another at any political occurrence.

Half way round the world in Washington, Senator Harry Bartow Hawes, prime promoter of Philippine independence, sat at his flower-banked desk in the Senate Office Building and grinned victoriously. The Senate, following House action week before (TIME, Jan. 23), had overridden (66-to-26) a thumping Presidential veto on H. R. 7233, to free the Philippine Islands.

To gain the independence now definitely in sight the Philippine Legislature must, within the next year, call a convention to frame a republican constitution. If this document is satisfactory to the U. S. President, Filipinos will vote it up or down. If they accept, a ten-year probationary period under an intermediate government follows, during which U. S. tariff and immigration walls gradually rise against Philippine products and people. On the tenth July 4, the Stars-&-Stripes come down all over the islands except over U. S. naval stations and military reservations. Meantime, the U. S.--which freely admitted after the London Naval Conference that the islands would be difficult to defend against invasion--will theoretically have induced other Powers to join in guaranteeing Philippine neutrality.

The Senate's action was a shock to Manuel Quezon and many of his Nacionalista (majority) party. When Woodrow Wilson was his good friend, "The Patrick Henry of the Philippines" had his best chance of wrenching his land unconditionally free. In '99 and after, he had shed blood for independence. Now, smoking cigarets by the chain system, he found independence under the terms set by Congress "unjust and absurd." But with racial shrewdness (he is quarter-Spanish) he decided to hold his fire until the independence commission returns to present its arguments to the Legislature. The coming regular legislative elections, which may violently split the majority party, will be in effect a plebiscite on H. R. 7233 by the islands' 13,000,000 inhabitants. Meanwhile, Senor Quezon, whom many Filipinos already hail as the islands' "Presidente," planned to sail for the U. S. and Washington in the spring to demand "immediate independence" from the Roosevelt administration. El Presidents Quezon is 54. Under H. R. 7233 he would not become the unborn Commonwealth's chief executive until he is 64.

Members of Manila's "American Colony" whose livelihoods and fortunes are wrapped in doomed hemp, sugar cane and copra looked forward to nothing save economic chaos under the intermediate government and after. They dolefully recalled the words often repeated more in earnest than in jest to U. S. military folk by rich Filipinos: "Amiga, when the last boatload of your soldiers is about to leave, tell me. I want to be on the boat before it."

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