Nothing would be more beneficial to the interests of Manila than the establishment of an efficient board of works, with provincial ramifications, to whose attention the facilitating communications should be specially recommended. The cost and difficulty of transport are among the principal impediments to the development of the resources of the islands, and the tardy progress of the few works which are undertaken is discouraging to those who suggest, and disappointing to those who expect to benefit by them. In many of the provinces the bridges are in miserable condition, and the roads frequently impassable. Even in the populous island of Panay delays the most costly and annoying interfere with the transport of produce to the capital and naturally impede the development of commerce. There is, no doubt, a great want of directing talent and of that special knowledge which modern science is able to furnish. The construction of bridges being generally left to the rude artists who are employed by the Spanish functionaries, or to the direction of the friars, with whom the stare super antiquas vias is the generally received maxim, it is not wonderful that there should be so many examples of rude, unsafe and unsightly constructions. Moreover, estimates have to be sent to the capital of all the proposed outlay, and it is hardly to be expected but that sad evidence should be found--as elsewhere--of short-sighted and very costly economy. The expense, too, almost invariably exceeds the estimates--a pretty general scandal; then the work is arrested, and sometimes wholly abandoned. Funds there are none, and neither policy nor patriotism will provide them. Even when strongly impelled, the Indian moves slowly; self-action for the promotion of the public good he has none. There is no pressure from without to force improvements upon the authorities, and hence little is to be hoped for as to improvement except from direct administrative action.
I can hardly pass over unnoticed M. de la Gironière's romantic book, [9] as it was the subject of frequent conversations in the Philippines. No doubt he has dwelt there twenty years; but in the experience of those who have lived there more than twice twenty I found little confirmation of the strange stories which are crowded into his strange volume. He was a resident of the Philippines at the time of my visit, and I believe still lives on the property of which he was formerly--but I was told is no longer--the possessor. [10] I did not visit his "Paradise," but had some agreeable intercourse with a French gentleman who is now in charge. I did not find any of that extraordinary savagery with which M. de la Gironière represents himself to be surrounded; and the answer to the inquiries I made of the neighbouring authorities as to the correctness of his pictures of Indian character was generally a shrug and a smile and a reference to my own experience. But M. de la Gironière may have aspired to the honour of a Bernardin de St. Pierre or a Defoe, and have thought a few fanciful and tragic decorations would add to the interest of his personal drama. "All the world's a stage," and as a player thereon M. de la Gironière perhaps felt himself authorized in the indulgence of some latitude of description, especially when his chosen "stage" was one meant to exhibit the wonders of travel.