Page:The National Geographic Magazine Vol 16 1905.djvu/219

gaged in gainful occupations. A much smaller proportion are engaged in manufacturing and mechanical pursuits, while the number in professional service is exceedingly small, forming less than one per cent of the entire number gainfully employed.

Among the Filipinos themselves there are 1,326 physicians, 676 priests, and 727 lawyers. Nearly one-half of the Chinese wage-earners are merchants or salesmen. Of the foreign or white population a small proportion is engaged in agriculture, but most of them are found in the trades and professions.

The following table shows the proportion of the wage-earners in each age group to the total population, and with it, for comparison, corresponding figures from the census of 1899 for Cuba and Porto Rico.

Age period. Philippine Islands. Cuba. Porto Rico.

10 to 14 years 16.8 24.6 22.4

15 to 24 years 66.9 52.5 51.8

25 to 34 years 72.4 58.5 54.3

35 to 44 years 74.3 60.4 56.9

45 to 54 years 72.5 60.3 55.4

55 to 64 years 65.8 59.5 53.2

65 years and over 42.7 52.0 44.5

The average excess of births over deaths in the Philippine Islands for the last 25 years is 8.8 per thousand, but excluding the cholera years (1879, 1889, and 1890), when the death rate exceeded the birth rate, it was 17 per thousand per year. This is higher than that of the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Japan, Italy, and Germany, but slightly less than that of the United States. It is many times that of France and Ireland and double that of Switzerland. Yet with this great excess of births over deaths, the population has not increased rapidly. It has taken nearly sixty years to double in number, and is now only four times as great as at the beginning of the century, while in that time the population of the United States has multiplied fifteen times. The cause for this is the epidemics, such as cholera, plague, and smallpox, especially the first, which periodically sweep over the islands and in a single year wipe out the gains of the preceding two or three years. So the population has grown by a series of regular and rather rapid accretions, succeeded by sudden and great losses. Thus the cholera epidemic of 1879 must have destroyed 400,000 lives, equivalent, approximately, to the normal increase in three years. The cholera epidemic of 1889 and 1890 was not so severe, its victims numbering in the two years about 260,000, while that of the year 1902 must have destroyed over 200,000 people.

The death rate for the year 1902, 63.3 per thousand, was just about double the normal, and was in large part due to the prevalence of cholera. Other things, such as the loss of crops through locusts, the loss of carabao, and the aftereffects of the insurrection, by which the constitutions of those affected by it were undermined, through hardship, exposure, and want of food, probably contributed.

The smallest proportion of deaths occurred in the cool season (November to February). In the warm season (March to June) there occurred 28.4 per cent, and in the wet season (July to October) not less than 47.1 per cent.

Of all the deaths that occurred in the Philippine Islands in the year 1902, 311 out of every thousand, or nearly one-third, were caused by Asiatic cholera. The large death rate from this source may be regarded as extraordinary. It was not so, however, with the fatality from malarial fevers, which are always prevalent in the islands, and probably