The city of Manila, with a population larger than any city between Baltimore and New Orleans, has many wholesale stores, factories making things for local use, and coconut oil mills and cigar factories making products for export.
709. Philippine agriculture.—Most of the people are farmers who cultivate small tracts of land near their houses, which are often of grass. A small plot with sweet potatoes, ba nanas, beans, and vegetables furnishes nearly all the food a family needs. Many of these farmers have groves of abaca plants. This is a cousin of the banana, and has in its pithy stems the very long, strong fibers called Manila hemp, much used for rope and for binding up the sheaves of wheat. Abaca grows well in rainy, damp, hot places, with well-drained soil, of which the mountain ous Philippines have many, because they have the monsoon rains in summer and the trade wind rains in winter. Abaca is a fine money crop for the Philippine farmer, and so is the coconut. Thismost useful tree lives fora hun dred years without cultivation, and yields good crops of oil-giving nuts that will keep for weeks after they have fallen from the tree.
The farmer's wife often makes money weaving by hand, from native fibers, hats much like panama hats.
710. Foreign trade—Exports.—The Philip pine exports have increased severalfold since America took possession. The chief exports are Manila hemp, or abaca, coconut prod ucts, sugar, tobacco, and hats.
711. Imports.—In this region, as in India, the chief import is cotton cloth, needed by all for clothing. Next come machinery and hardware necessary for their simple agri culture, and oil to light up the long evenings, where the night is nearly as long as the day.
While rice grows throughout this region, some parts do not grow enough for their own use, and the Philippines regularly pay for rice from Indo-China with money that comes from hemp, copra, sugar, and tobacco sold in the United States. (For trade, Fig. 522.) 712. Future.—The teeming millions living comfortably in Java show that this little used East Indies, a land of heavy rain and dark forests, is one of the places where many resources may be developed and where many, many more people may live. Even in Java, with its heavy population, the land is by no means all used. It still has forest areas so large that the wild elephant and the wild rhinoceros roam in them. Some authorities think Java might support a hundred million people as comfortably as it now keeps thirty million.
The rapid increase of people and of trade in Java, in the Malay peninsula, and in the Philippines shows what may be done in this region if someone keeps order and provides government that is more just and more help ful than the natives have provided for themselves.
The trade of the settled parts of this region shows that if population in creases, the things that we may buy will increase, such as rubber, hemp, sugar, spices, coconut oil, and many other tropic prod ucts which the fruitful soil and climate will help men to grow if they will work two-thirds of full time.
If these people have things to sell to us they also will buy things from us. One of the surest ways to make life easier in our own country is to have other countries pros perous, so that they will have things to sell to us, and thus get money with which to buy things from us.