A provincial Filipino can support quite an establishment, and keep
a carriage on an income of forty dollars gold a month where to an
American it would cost sixty or eighty dollars. This is due partly to
our own consumption of high-priced tinned foods, partly to the better
price paid for labor, but chiefly to our desire to feed our servants
into good healthy condition. We not only see that they have more food,
but we look more closely to its variety and nutritious qualities. We
employ adults and demand more labor, because our housekeeping is more
complex than Filipino housekeeping, and we expect to employ fewer
servants than Filipinos do.
The Filipinos, the Spanish, and even the English who are settled
here cling to mediaeval European ideas in the matter of service. If
they have any snobbish weakness for display, it is in the number of
retainers they can muster. Just as in our country rural prosperity is
evinced by the upkeep of fences and buildings, the spic and span new
paint, and the garish furnishings, here it is written in the number of
servants and hangers-on. The great foreign trading firms like to boast
of the tremendous length of their pay rolls. They would rather employ
four hundred underworked mediocrities at twenty pesos a month than
half a hundred abilities at four times that amount. The land-holders
like to think of the mouths they are responsible for feeding so very
poorly, and the busy housewife jingles her keys from weaving-room to
embroidery frame, from the little _tienda_ on the ground floor, where
she sells _vino_, cigars, and betel-nut, to the extemporized bakery
in the kitchen, where they are making rice cakes and taffy candy,
which an old woman will presently hawk about the streets for her.
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