Flash-lights From The Seven Seas Part 24

"Why?"

"They did not trust us, and they did not love us. They had seen too much of the selfish colonization policies of Spain. They expected the same things from America. It did not come. They have been won to us!"

This warm-hearted friends.h.i.+p is not true either of England's colonies anywhere in the Orient or of j.a.pan's in Formosa or Korea. It is true alone in the Philippines.

While I was in the Philippines, down in San Fernando, a statue was erected to a well-known rebel. He was a man who had refused to take the oath of allegiance to America when we captured the islands. He escaped and carried on a propaganda against us. But when he died and a request was made that a statue be erected to his memory, the United States granted this permission.

At the dedication of this statue the Governor of this Province said that he doubted if any nation on the face of the earth, save the United States, would have permitted the erection of such a statue to a rebel against that government. "That act will bind our hearts closer to the heart of the United States!" he said in closing his address. The thrilling thing about it all was, that his address was met with prolonged cheering on the part of the thousands of Filipinos who had gathered for the dedication.

Another evidence of this beautiful friends.h.i.+p for America is the painting which adorns the walls of one of the Government buildings in Manila. It is called "The Welcome to America." It was purchased, paid for and erected by Filipinos; erected in good will, with laughter in their souls, and joy in their hearts.

It was painted by Hidalgo in Paris in 1904.

High colors; reds, browns, yellows, golds, blues, purples; tell its story. It adorns the panel at the end of the Senate Chamber of the Filipino Government.

It has spirit in it and a great, deep sincerity.

The central figure is a beautiful woman, symbolic of America. She comes across the Pacific carrying the gifts of peace, prosperity, security and love to her colony, the Philippines.

She carries in one hand the American flag. At her side is Youth bearing a Harp, symbol of the music that America brings into the souls of the people whom she comes to serve. Singing angels hover about the scene.

Above the central figure of America, on angel wings, is a Youth carrying a lighted torch. To the left is a beautiful brown-skinned Filipino woman with eyes uplifted to this torch. She bears within her ample bosom the children of the islands. The torch is symbol of the fact that we are handing on the light of our Christian civilization to the children of our colonies.

I visited this painting many times, but I never visited it that I did not see many Filipinos, both young and old, standing before it, with reverent eyes.

I said to a high official of the Government, "Does that painting represent the way you Filipinos feel to-day?"

"Hidalgo has spoken for us. He has voiced our feelings well!" was the reply.

This friends.h.i.+p for the United States is a thrilling thing found all over the Far East. One finds it in Korea, as well as in the Philippines, like a burning light of glory. Korea says, "America is our only hope! We have always trusted and loved America!"

One finds it like a silver stream running through the life of China. Dr.

Sun Yat Sen said to me in Shanghai: "America has always been China's staunch friend! America we trust! America we love! America is our hope!

America is our model!"

Mr. Tang Shao-yi said, "America's hands and those of America alone are clean in her relations with China. This cannot be said of the other nations."

Then he told me a thrilling story of the Boxer Rebellion. He, with two thousand Chinese, who were Government officials, were barricaded in a compound behind the usual Chinese walls. The Boxers were firing on them every day. They had run out of food. In fact, they were starving.

But one morning a bright-faced American boy appeared at the gates of the wall. He was admitted because he was an American. He asked to be taken to Mr. Tang Shao-yi.

"What do you most need?" this young American asked the rich Chinese merchant.

"We most need food," was the reply.

"All right, I'll get enough for you to-day!" said the young American.

"That night," said Mr. Tang Shao-yi, "that American boy returned with five hundred hams which the Boxers had thrown away, in addition to a thousand sacks of flour which he had gotten from the English legation."

"Wonderful!" I exclaimed.

"And that boyish American was----"

"Who?" I asked with tense interest, for the old man was smiling with a suggestive Oriental smile, as if he had a climax up his commodious sleeves.

"That man was Herbert Hoover!"

And from that interview henceforth and forever no human being need tell me that the Chinese have no sense of the dramatic.

"That's why we love and trust America," said this great Chinese statesman. "It is because America has always been our friend in time of need!"

I found this friends.h.i.+p for the United States true all over the Oriental world. It was to me a great miracle of national friends.h.i.+p. The peoples of the Orient trust us. They are not suspicious of our intentions in spite of what jingo papers say. We have won their hearts. We have claimed their friends.h.i.+p.

The name "America," which stands in the Oriental mind for the United States, is a sacred pa.s.sport and pa.s.sword. It is a magical word. It opens doors that are locked to all the rest of the world; it tears down barriers, century-old, that have been barricading certain places for ages past. That simple word opens hearts that would open with none other.

The eyes of the brown men of the Far East open wide at that word, and a new light appears in them. This is particularly true in Korea, in China, in the Malacca Straits, and in the Philippines.

It is enough to bring a flood of tears to the heart of an American, lonely for a sight of his own flag, homesick for his native sh.o.r.es, to see and feel and hear and know the pulse of this friends.h.i.+p for our country among millions of brown men.

"It is because we are like you, we Chinese," said Tang Shao-yi. "It is because we are both Democrats at heart!"

"It is because you have been our true friends!" said Dr. Sun Yat Sen.

"It is because your ideals are our ideals; your dreams our dreams and your friends our friends," said Wu Ting-fang, one of China's greatest leaders, to me.

"It is because so many of our young men have been trained in your American schools, and because so many of us feel that the United States is our second home. It is because you have sent so many good men and women to China to help us; to teach us; to live with us; to love us; to serve us! It is because your missionaries from America have shown the real heart of the United States to us!" said Mr. Walter Busch, a Chinese American student who is now editor of the Peking _Leader_.

But whatever the cause, the glorious fact is enough to:

"Send a thrill of rapture through the framework of the heart And warm the inner bein' till the tear drops want to start!"

But perhaps the highest and holiest Flash-lights of Friends.h.i.+p that one finds in the Far East is that of the friends.h.i.+p formed by the American missionaries for the people among whom they are working, and the friends.h.i.+p that these people give in return. These are holy things.

The average missionary comes home on his furlough, but before he is home three months he is homesick to go back to his people. So they come and go across the seas of the world through the years, weaving like a great Shuttle of Service the fabric of friends.h.i.+p for themselves and for the United States.

This shuttle of service is being woven night and day across the Atlantic and across the Pacific by great s.h.i.+ps bearing missionaries going and coming; furlough following furlough, after six years of service; term after term; leaving native land, children, memories; time after time until death ends that particular thread, crimson, gold, brown or white.

The great Shuttle of Love weaves the fabric of friends.h.i.+p across the seas as the s.h.i.+ps come and go, bearing outbound and homebound missionaries to foreign fields.

I am thinking particularly of the Pacific as I write this sketch sitting in a room overlooking the great harbor of Yokohama where three j.a.panese wars.h.i.+p lie anch.o.r.ed and two great Pacific liners, one on its way to San Francisco and another bound for Vancouver. They come and go, these great s.h.i.+ps. A few days ago the _Empress of Asia_ made its twenty-eighth trip across and it soon will start on its twenty-eighth trip back to Vancouver again. Some of the s.h.i.+ps out of San Francisco have made more than a hundred trips. So they weave the shuttle back and forward across this great sea. And never a s.h.i.+p sails this sea that it does not carry its pa.s.senger list of missionaries. Our list was more than half a hundred.

As Mr. Forman, in a sympathetic and appreciative article that he has written for the _Ladies' Home Journal_, says, the common phrase on a Pacific liner is, "There are two hundred and fifty pa.s.sengers and forty-five missionaries on board." Every Pacific pa.s.senger list immediately divides itself into two groups, the missionaries and the other pa.s.sengers.

Then Mr. Forman proceeds to slay those shallow, narrow-minded, often ignorant and uneducated tourists and business men who dare to speak of this traveling missionary with derision. Mr. Forman has no particular interest in missions and he has no particular interest in the Church, but he started out to investigate this derogatory phrase, "and forty-five missionaries."