Directory_and_Chronicle_1925 — Page 1549

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PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

branch is a municipal council of from 8 to 18 councillors, depending upon the number of inhabitants of the municipality. The president, the vice-president, and the council- lors are all elected by popular vote. In the special provinces under the B.N.C.T. there are still some municipalities with appointive presidents, but the vice-presidents and councillors are elective.

The Philippine judiciary system consists of the Supreme Court, as the highest tribunal; a Court of First Instance for each judicial district, except the ninth district, which has six judges, the same covering the city of Manila; the Municipal Courts of Manila and Baguio; and a Justice of the Peace court for cach municipality. The Supreme Court is composed of one chief justice and eight associate justices, all of whom are appointed by the President of the United States with the consent of the United States Senate. The Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction over the Courts of First Instance. An appeal lies from the decision of the Supreme Court of the Philippine Islands to the Supreme Court of the United States in certain cases.

EDUCATION AND LITERACY

Public education in the Philippines is free, secular and co-educational, and the principal aim is to make the people socially efficient. As a means to this end, emphasis is placed upon the spread of literacy on the basis of a common language English. The Bureau of Education maintains a complete system of public education. Public elementary and high schools are distributed throughout the Islands. Insular schools for special education are maintained. The enrolment of students in the public schools is increasing every year and now exeeds one million. Private schools, patterned after the public schools, besides the old Spanish schools and colleges which still survive, have sprung up in the Philippines in recent years. Practically all these offer instruction in English, and even the old Spanish schools and colleges have included English in their curricula. Upon graduating from the high schools, the students are admitted to higher institutions of learning, foremost among which is the University of the Philippines, established and maintained by the Philippine Government.

According to the census of 1918, the percentage of literacy of people of the Philip- pine Islands, ten years of age or over, was 49.2 per cent.

English and Spanish are both used as official languages and are widely spoken in the Islands. The English language is becoming the dominant language. There are six established native dialects with some printed literature, namely, the Tagalog, Visayan, Ilocano, Bicol, Pangasinan and Pampangan.

AGRICULTURE

The Philippine Islands is an agricultural country. The people depend chiefly on domestic agricultural products for their livelihood, and approximately 88 per cent. of the total exports of the Islands is made up of the produce of the farms. The soil is fertile to a degree, being for the most part volcanic in origin and exceedingly rich in all varieties of sedimentary deposits. The total area of cultivated lands in the Philip- pines at the present time is estimated at 3,643,000 hectares, or 12 per cent. of the entire area of the country.

Rice is the staple food-product of the inhabitants of the Islands. It is their most widely cultivated crop. The area devoted to its cultivation in 1923 was 1,675,870 hectares. Considerable quantities of this cereal, however, are still imported, chiefly from French Indo-China. Through the efforts of the Bureau of Agriculture local farmers are realizing the advantages of scientific methods in rice farmning. Seed. selection is given due emphasis. Several irrigation systems are now completed, many more are in process of construction, and others are being projected. This is bound in the near future to do away with the ravages of droughts, which are of periodical occurrence, and at the same time make feasible the growing of two or three crops a year in the rice sections of the archipelago. The extension of cultivated areas is also receiving due attention from the Government and the local farmers.

Manila hemp, which the Philippines supplies to the world as first-class cordage material, is produced from the leaf stalks of the Abaca plant thriving in the Islands. The fibre is also used for making binder twine, and from the old disintegrated Manila ropes is made the well-known and much-used Manila paper. In the Philippines, Abaca fibre is extensively used in the manufacture of cloth. In the making of baskets,