Historical Research

HISTORICAL RESEARCH

Plan For Collecting Records of the Philippines.

MISSION OF SCHOLARLY FILIPINO

Professor C. J. Zulueta, Appointed to the Office by the American Government, Will Work Principally In the Archives of Seville and Other Spanish Cities––Inducements For Scientific Investigation.

Thus early in its history the American government in the Philippines has started to do something for the world's scholars, says the New York Post. The historical records of the islands and their people, in large part still buried in the archives, are to be collected at government expense and made available for reference in more convenient form.

For the work of collection a well equipped Filipino has recently been named to an office specially created for the purpose and is now about to begin the work in Spain. He will spend a year at least there, working principally in the archives of Seville, which are much the richest in Philippine, and also in those of Madrid, Barcelona and Simancas. Then he will visit France and perhaps other countries on the continent in search of material yet unpublished from which to make copies, and, of course, the British museum. He will then come to the United States by way of Mexico, where there are now reputed to be buried in various archives, both in the City of Mexico and in several outside towns, many more data bearing on Philippine history than it had formerly been supposed Mexico contained.

This work of collecting copies of documentary sources will occupy the Filipino in question, Professor C. J. Zulueta, at least three years. He receives $3,500 in gold per year and, of course, necessary expenses in traveling and procuring the copies desired. It is understood that the library of congress at Washington is also to receive one copy of each document, the other being sent to Manila for the new Philippine government library. Librarian Puttnam, who was recently on a tour of the orient gathering material and making arrangements for reciprocal exchanges, etc., was in Manila in search of material for the Congressional library, and is said to have made an arrangement whereby the latter library shares in this work with the Philippine government.

Philippine history has been left mainly to the friars, who have published a number of chronicles, beginning with the earlier years of Spanish occupation. Recently several Spanish laymen have worked in this line. But the impress of controversy left on almost everything previously written in Philippine history, due to the fact that the friar chronicler of one order not willfully, but inevitably, magnified the deeds of his own brethren at the expense of the other orders, has not been removed by these lay writers. The more, therefore, that a man reads in Philippine history as written to date the more puzzled he will become unless he covers practically the whole field and can balance the statements of one writer against another and glean the truth by a thoroughgoing comparison. The reader needs, too, some knowledge of the Filipinos as they are today and some actual contact with the "friar question" as it stands at this moment.

In other words, Philippine history has never been written, in the modern sense of that word. Considering the sources of what has been published hitherto, the careful reader will be constantly on his guard as to accepting commonly published estimates of the state of culture of the Filipinos when they were discovered by the Spaniards, the share of the friars in the work of internal improvement as compared with the share of Spanish civilians, the educational question and the teaching of Spanish, the merits of the continual controversies between the friars and the civil authorities, the causes of the various uprisings and the character of the participants, the composition and size of the anti friar party on the islands and the capacity of the natives in general. Professor Zulueta, named for the mission above described, is one of the little handful of Filipinos who have really made an honest story of their people's past. Like Jose Rizal, he is to a certain extent a partisan. He is, however, a scholar in touch with modern methods and the modern spirit of research. He has been professor of history in the Manila lyceum, a secondary school for boyd inaugurated by Filipinos in 1900.

The Philippine government will try to build up in connection with the historical library a scientific library of research and reference. This library will be connected with the Philippine museum, which was started in a modest way two years ago, under the bureau of non-Christian tribes. The securing of ethnological, botanical, mineralogical and other collections for the St. Louis exposition is being made to coincide with the needs of this establishment, and where duplicate collections cannot be made they will be returned to Manila for this museum. Similarly the bureau of government laboratories, which consolidates in one institution all the scientific laboratory work of the government and which is under the management of Dr. P. C. Freer, the well known chemist of the University of Michigan, is seeking to stimulate research by offering their expenses and opportunities for exploration and laboratory investigation to all scientists in the United States who wish to spend a period in the Philippines, furthering their own and the general knowledge.