Into the wide blue harbor of Manila last week slid the U. S. destroyer Peary. Aboard her were 52 survivors of the wrecked British freighter Silverhazel which, bound out of San Francisco for Singapore and Bombay, had gone down with a loss of four lives in San Bernardino Strait, 350 mi. southwest of the Philippine capital.
A great collection of more fortunate and more distinguished travelers had been pouring into Manila for days to be on hand for an historic happening. Chief among the visitors was George Henry Dern of Salt Lake City, Utah. As Secretary of War, he was head of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, which had supervised Philippine affairs during the 37 years they had been under U. S. dominion. Now George Dern was in Manila to read a proclamation which Franklin Delano Roosevelt had just signed on the other side of the world in Washington. The proclamation briefly certified the election on Sept. 17 of officers of the new Philippine Commonwealth, announced the succession of the new regime.
Chief ceremony of the Philippines' transformation from territorial to commonwealth status was the inauguration of small, brown Manuel Luis Quezon to be the Philippine Commonwealth's first President. Most of the 15,000 official guests on hand to watch President Quezon swear his oath were influential brown-skinned fellow-countrymen in white suits and straw hats. But the guests whom President Quezon was happiest to see were the white-skinned envoys of the liberating Republic: Secretary Dern, Vice President John Nance Garner, 17 U. S. Senators, 26 U. S. Representatives, 34 U. S. newspapermen, to the last of whom Manuel Quezon declared: "We will be ever grateful for the part the free press has played in the cause of independence."
Night before the inaugural, the 400-year-old city had echoed with jubilant whistles, bells, fireworks. For sheer noise, the celebration far surpassed similar demonstrations in March 1934 when President Roosevelt signed H. R. 8573 to free the Islands; or in March 1935 when he squiggled his approval on the work of the Philippine constitutional convention. But for all the merrymaking, an air of uneasiness and tension was marked by correspondents. "Doubts and forebodings" were noted among the attending masses by the New York Times's representative. The Herald Tribune's informant caught "a grim note of realism." It became known that 2,000 official admission tickets to the inaugural had mysteriously disappeared. The Philippine constabulary strongly suspected they had been filched by Sakdalistas, proletarian radicals who staged a bloody uprising few weeks before the Filipino people went to the polls last May to approve the new Constitution. Now the Sakdalistas were plotting heaven knew what mischief in the Commonwealth's first hour. Taking no chances, the constabulary and a detachment of U. S. troops drew up in a hollow square which kept nonofficial spectators a full 60 yd. from President Quezon as he was sworn in on the steps of the neoclassic Legislative Building.
In this tense atmosphere, the George Washington of the Philippines spoke, to 250,000 of his countrymen massed around, the words which unborn generations of Filipino schoolchildren will presumably have to memorize: