The result of American occupation has been a rise in the price of agricultural labor, and in the city of Manila in all labor.  But in the provinces the needle-woman, the weaver, and the house servant work still for inconceivably small prices, while there has been a decided rise in the price of local manufactures.  Jusi, which cost three dollars gold a pattern in 1901, now costs six and nine dollars.  Exquisite embroideries on pina, which is thinner than bolting cloth, have quadrupled their prices, but the provincial women servants, who weave the jusi and do the embroidering, still work for a few cents a day and two scanty meals.

When I arrived here a seamstress worked nine hours a day for twenty cents gold and her dinner.  Now in Manila a seamstress working for Americans receives fifty cents gold and sometimes seventy-five cents and her dinner, though the Spanish, Filipinos, and Chinese pay less.  In the province of Capiz twelve and a half cents gold per day for a seamstress is the recognized price for an American to pay—­natives get one for less.  A provincial Filipino pays his coachman two and a half dollars gold a month, and a cook one dollar and a half.  An American for the same labor must pay from four to eight dollars for the cook and three to six dollars for the coachman.  As before stated, the subordinate servants in a Filipino house cost next to nothing, because of the utilization of child labor.

A provincial Filipino can support quite an establishment, and keep a carriage on an income of forty dollars gold a month where to an American it would cost sixty or eighty dollars.  This is due partly to our own consumption of high-priced tinned foods, partly to the better price paid for labor, but chiefly to our desire to feed our servants into good healthy condition.  We not only see that they have more food, but we look more closely to its variety and nutritious qualities.  We employ adults and demand more labor, because our housekeeping is more complex than Filipino housekeeping, and we expect to employ fewer servants than Filipinos do.

The Filipinos, the Spanish, and even the English who are settled here cling to mediaeval European ideas in the matter of service.  If they have any snobbish weakness for display, it is in the number of retainers they can muster.  Just as in our country rural prosperity is evinced by the upkeep of fences and buildings, the spic and span new paint, and the garish furnishings, here it is written in the number of servants and hangers-on.  The great foreign trading firms like to boast of the tremendous length of their pay rolls.  They would rather employ four hundred underworked mediocrities at twenty pesos a month than half a hundred abilities at four times that amount.  The land-holders like to think of the mouths they are responsible for feeding so very poorly, and the busy housewife jingles her keys from weaving-room to embroidery frame, from the little tienda on the ground floor, where she sells vino, cigars, and betel-nut, to the extemporized bakery in the kitchen, where they are making rice cakes and taffy candy, which an old woman will presently hawk about the streets for her.