One of the curious things here is the multiplicity of resource which the rich classes possess.  A rich land-holder will have his rice fields, sugar mill, vino factory, and cocoanut and hemp plantations.  He will own a fish corral or two, and be one of the backers of a deep-sea fishing outfit.  He speculates a little in rice, and he may have some interest in pearl fisheries.  On a bit of land not good for much else he has the palm tree, which yields buri for making mats and sugar bags.  His wife has a little shop, keeps several weavers at work, and an embroidery woman or two.  If she goes on a visit to Manila, the day after her return her servants are abroad, hawking novelties in the way of fans, knick-knacks, bits of lace, combs, and other things which she has picked up to earn an honest penny.  If a steamer drops in with a cargo of Batangas oranges, she invests twenty or thirty pesos, and has her servants about carrying the trays of fruit for sale.  According to her lights, which are not hygienic, she is a good housekeeper and a genuine helpmeet.  She keeps every ounce of food under lock and key, and measures each crumb that is used in cooking.  She keeps the housekeeping accounts, handles the money, never pries into her husband’s affairs, bears him a child every year, and is content, in return for all this devotion, with an ample supply of pretty clothes and her jewels.  She herself does not work, busy as she is, and it speaks well for the faith and honor of the Filipino people that she can secure labor in plenty to do all these things for her, to handle moneys and give a faithful account of them.  It is pitiful to see how little the Filipino laboring class can do for itself, how dependent it is upon the head of its superiors, and how content it is to go on piling up wealth for them on a mere starvation dole.

As before said, the laboring man who attaches himself to a great family does so because it gives him security.  He is nearly always in debt to it, but if he is sick and unable to work he knows his rice will come in just the same.  Under the old Spanish system, a servant in debt could not quit his employer’s service till the debt was paid.  The object of an employer was to get a man in debt and keep him so, in which case he was actually, although not nominally, a slave.  While this law is no longer in force, probably not ten per cent of the laboring population realize it.  They know that an American cannot hold them in his employ against their will, but they do not know that this is true of Filipinos and Spaniards.  Nor is the upper class anxious to have them informed.  The poor frequently offer their children or their younger brothers and sisters to work out their debts.

Children are sold here also.  Twice in my first year at Capiz, I refused to buy small children who were offered for sale by their parents lest the worse evil of starvation should befall them; and once, on my going into a friend’s house, she showed me a child of three or four years that she had bought for five pesos.  She remarked that it was a pity to let the child starve, and that in a year or two its labor would more than pay for its keep.