Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/181

Rh the Philippines, and when its products are systematically harvested it is a  source of unfailing revenue and profit,  supplying several by-products of commercial value.

The demand for rice throughout the archipelago far exceeds the domestic supply, and it will probably be necessary to continue to import it indefinitely, as the cultivation of hemp and other products is much more profitable. It is probable that the cultivation of cacao, from which the chocolate is derived, is likely to greatly increase and become one of the principal producing products of the islands, as the cacao of the Philippine Islands is superior to that grown anywhere else in the world.

The total population of the Philippine archipelago on March 2, 1903, was 7,635,426. Of this number 6,987,686 enjoyed a considerable degree of civilization, while the remainder, 647,740, consisted of wild people. There were 14,271 white, 8,135 being Americans and 42,097 yellow, of whom 921 were Japanese and 41,035 Chinese.

Of the eight civilized tribes the largest is that of the Visayans, who occupy most of the Islands lying between Luzon and Mindanao, and form nearly one-half of the entire civilized population. Tagalogs occupy the provinces in the vicinity of Manila. They rank second, with a little more than one-fifth of the civilized people, and the Ilocanos rank third, with approximately one-eighth.

The civilized people, with the exception of those of foreign birth, were practically all adherents of the Catholic church, while of the peoples here classified as wild a large proportion, probably more than two-fifths, were Mohammedans in religion and were well known in the islands as Moros. The remaining three-fifths belonged to various tribes, differing from one another in degrees of barbarism. With the exception of the Negritos and the people of foreign birth, all the inhabitants of these islands are believed to be Malays.

The people of the Malay race constitute most of the inhabitants of the Malay peninsula, Java, Sumatra, Borneo, Celebes, and other associated islands, together with the Philippines. The total number of Malays is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40,000,000, of which over 28,000,000, or three-fourths, are found in Java, most of the remainder being in the Philippine Islands.

At the beginning of the century Java had a little more than double the population of the Philippine archipelago. At the end of the century it had four times as many people.

The cause of this is not easy to determine So far as known, the people of Java have been quite as subject to epidemics and diseases as the people of the Philippines, and there is no apparent reason for the more rapid growth.

The average annual rate of increase of the Philippines in the last half century has exceeded that of all the countries of the world, with the exception of the United States, Russia, and Japan, and has equaled that of Denmark. It was nearly three times as large as that of British India and Spain, nearly six times as large as that of France, and yet it was less than half as great as that of the United States.

Literacy among the people of the Philippines means the ability to read and write in any language — English, Spanish, or a Malay tongue. Since, in all probability, less than 10 per cent of the people of the islands can speak Spanish or English, the fact is unquestionable that the majority of the people reported as literate can read and write only the native tongues. This is a result of the