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Moore v. City of East Cleveland/Dissent White

Mr.Justice White, dissenting.

The Fourteenth Amendment forbids any State to "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law," or to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Both provisions are invoked in this case in an attempt to invalidate a city zoning ordinance.

I
The emphasis of the Due Process Clause is on "process." As Mr. Justice Harlan once observed, it has been "ably and insistently argued in response to what were felt to be abuses by this Court of its reviewing power," that the Due Process Clause should be limited "to a guarantee of procedural fairness." Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 540 (1961) (dissenting opinion). These arguments had seemed "persuasive" to Justice Brandeis and Holmes, Whitney v. California, 274 U.S. 357, 373 (1927), but they recognized that the Due Process Clause, by virtue of case-to-case "judicial inclusion and exclusion," Davidson v. New Orleans, 96 U.S. 97, 104 (1878), had been construed to proscribe matters of substance, as well as inadequate procedures, and to protect from invasion by the States "all fundamental rights comprised within the term liberty." Whitney v. California, supra, at 373.

Mr. Justice Black also recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment had substantive as well as procedural content. But believing that its reach should not extend beyond the specific provisions of the Bill of Rights, see Adamson v. California, 332 U.S. 46, 68 (1947) (dissenting opinion), he never embraced the idea that the Due Process Clause empowered the courts to strike down merely unreasonable or arbitrary legislation, nor did he accept Mr. Justice Harlan's consistent view. See Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 507 (1965) (Black, J., dissenting), and id., at 499 (Harlan, J., concurring in judgment). Writing at length in dissent in Poe v. Ullman, supra, at 543, Mr. Justice Harlan stated the essence of his position as follows:

"This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints, see Allgeyer v. Louisiana, 165 U.S. 578; Holden v. Hardy, 169 U.S. 366; Booth v. Illinois, 184 U.S. 425; Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502; Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535, 544 (concurring opinion); Schware v. Board of Bar Examiners, 353 U.S. 232, and which also recognizes, what a reasonable and sensitive judgment must, that certain interests require particularly careful scrutiny of the state needs asserted to justify their abridgment. Cf. Skinner v. Oklahoma, supra; Bolling v. Sharpe, [ 347 U.S. 497 (1954)]."

This construction was far too open ended for Mr. Justice Black. For him, Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S. 390 (1923), and Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510 (1925), as substantive due process cases, were as suspect as Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), Coppage v. Kansas, 236 U.S. 1 (1915), and Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923). In his view, Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U.S. 726 (1963), should have finally disposed of them all. But neither Meyer nor Pierce has been overruled, and recently there have been decisions of the same genre--Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973); Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967); Griswold v. Connecticut, supra; and Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972). Not all of these decisions purport to rest on substantive due process grounds, compare Roe v. Wade, supra, at 152-153, with Eisenstadt v. Baird, supra, at 453-454, but all represented substantial reinterpretations of the Constitution.

Although the Court regularly proceeds on the assumption that the Due Process Clause has more than a procedural dimension, we must always bear in mind that the substantive content of the Clause is suggested neither by its language nor by preconstitutional history; that content is nothing more than the accumulated product of judicial interpretation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. This is not to suggest, at this point, that any of these cases should be overruled, or that the process by which they were decided was illegitimate or even unacceptable, but only to underline Mr. Justice Black's constant reminder to his colleagues that the Court has no license to invalidate legislation which it thinks merely arbitrary or unreasonable. And no one was more sensitive than Mr. Justice Harlan to any suggestion that his approach to the Due Process Clause would lead to judges "roaming at large in the constitutional field." Griswold v. Connecticut, supra, at 502. No one proceeded with more caution than he did when the validity of state or federal legislation was challenged in the name of the Due Process Clause.

This is surely the preferred approach. That the Court has ample precedent for the creation of new constitutional rights should not lead it to repeat the process at will. The Judiciary, including this Court, is the most vulnerable and comes nearest to illegitimacy when it deals with judge-made constitutional law having little or no cognizable roots in the language or even the design of the Constitution. Realizing that the present construction of the Due Process Clause represents a major judicial gloss on its terms, as well as on the anticipation of the Framers, and that much of the underpinning for the broad, substantive application of the Clause disappeared in the conflict between the Executive and the Judiciary in the 1930's and 1940's, the Court should be extremely reluctant to breathe still further substantive content into the Due Process clause so as to strike down legislation adopted by a State or city to promote its welfare. Whenever the Judiciary does so, it unavoidably pre-empts for itself another part of the governance of the country without express constitutional authority.

II
Accepting the cases as they are and the Due Process Clause as construed by them, however, I think it evident that the threshold question in any due process attack on legislation, whether the challenge is procedural or substantive, is whether there is a deprivation of life, liberty, or property. With respect to "liberty," the statement of Mr. Justice Harlan in Poe v. Ullman, quoted supra, at 504, most accurately reflects the thrust of prior decisions--that the Due Process Clause is triggered by a variety of interests, some much more important than others. These interests have included a wide range of freedoms in the purely commercial area such as the freedom to contract and the right to set one's own prices and wages. Meyer v. Nebraska, supra, at 399, took a characteristically broad view of "liberty":

"While this Court has not attempted to define with exactness the liberty thus guaranteed, the term has received much consideration and some of the included things have been definitely stated. Without doubt, it denotes not merely freedom from bodily restraint but also the right of the individual to contract, to engage in any of the common occupations of life, to acquire useful knowledge, to marry, establish a home and bring up children, to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience, and generally to enjoy those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men."

As I have said, Meyer has not been overruled nor its definition of liberty rejected. The results reached in some of the cases cited by Meyer have been discarded or undermined by later cases, but those cases did not cut back the definition of liberty espoused by earlier decisions. They disagreed only, but sharply, as to the protection that was "due" the particular liberty interests involved. See, for example, West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parish, 300 U.S. 379 (1937), overruling Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923).

Just a few years ago, we recognized that while "the range of interests protected by procedural due process is not infinite," and while we must look to the nature of the interest rather than its weight in determining whether a protected interest is at issue, the term "liberty" has been given broad meaning in our cases. Board of Regents v. Roth, 408 U.S. 564, 570-571 (1972). "In a Constitution for a free people, there can be no doubt that the meaning of 'liberty' must be broad indeed. See, e. g., Bolling v. Sharpe, 347 U.S. 497, 499-500; Stanley v. Illinois, 405 U.S. 645. Id., at 572.

It would not be consistent with prior cases to restrict the liberties protected by the Due Process Clause to those fundamental interests "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty." Ante, at 537. Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S. 319 (1937), from which this much-quoted phrase is taken, id., at 325, is not to the contrary. Palko was a criminal case, and the issue was thus not whether a protected liberty interest was at stake but what protective process was "due" that interest. The Court used the quoted standard to determine which of the protections of the Bill of Rights was due a criminal defendant in a state court within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nor do I think the broader view of "liberty" is inconsistent with or foreclosed by the dicta in Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S., at 152, and Paul v. Davis, 424 U.S. 693, 713 (1976). These cases at most assert that only fundamental liberties will be given substantive protection; and they may be understood as merely identifying certain fundamental interests that the Court has deemed deserving of a heightened degree of protection under the Due Process Clause.

It seems to me that Mr. Justice Douglas was closest to the mark in Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S., at 517, when he said that the trouble with the holdings of the "old Court" was not in its definition of liberty but in its definition of the protections guaranteed to that liberty—"not in entertaining inquiries concerning the constitutionality of social legislation but in applying the standards that it did.

The term "liberty" is not, therefore, to be given a crabbed construction. I have no more difficulty than Mr. Justice Powell apparently does in concluding that appellant in this case properly asserts a liberty interest within the meaning of the Due Process Clause. The question is not one of liberty vel non. Rather, there being no procedural issue at stake, the issue is whether the precise interest involved--the interest in having more than one set of grandchildren live in her home--is entitled to such substantive protection under the Due Process Clause that this ordinance must be held invalid.

III
Looking at the doctrine of "substantive" due process as having to do with the possible invalidity of an official rule of conduct rather than of the procedures for enforcing that rule, I see the doctrine as taking several forms under the cases, each differing in the severity of review and the degree of protection offered to the individual. First, a court may merely assure itself that there is in fact a duly enacted law which proscribes the conduct sought to be prevented or sanctioned. In criminal cases, this approach is exemplified by the refusal of courts to enforce vague statutes that no reasonable person could understand as forbidding the challenged conduct. There is no such problem here.

Second is the general principle that "liberty may not be interfered with, under the guise of protecting the public interest, by legislative action which is arbitrary or without reasonable relation to some purpose within the competency of the State to effect." Meyer v. Nebraska, 262 U.S., at 399-400. This means-end test appears to require that any statute restrictive of liberty have an ascertainable purpose and represent a rational means to achieve that purpose, whatever the nature of the liberty interest involved. This approach was part of the substantive due process doctrine prevalent earlier in the century, and it made serious inroads on the presumption of constitutionality supposedly accorded to state and federal legislation. But with Nebbia v. New York, 291 U.S. 502 (1934), and other cases of the 1930's and 1940's such as West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parish, supra, the courts came to demand far less from and to accord far more deference to legislative judgments. This was particularly true with respect to legislation seeking to control or regulate the economic life of the State or Nation. Even so, "while the legislative judgment on economic and business matters is 'well-nigh conclusive'..., it is not beyond judicial inquiry." Poe v. Ullman, supra, at 518 (Douglas, J., dissenting). No case that I know of, including Ferguson v. Skrupa, 372 U.S. 726 (1963), has announced that there is some legislation with respect to which there no longer exists a means ends test as a matter of substantive due process law. This is not surprising, for otherwise a protected liberty could be infringed by a law having no purpose or utility whatsoever. Of course, the current approach is to deal more gingerly with a state statute and to insist that the challenger bear the burden of demonstrating its unconstitutionality; and there is a broad category of cases in which substantive review is indeed mild and very similar to the original thought of Munn v. Illinois, 94 U.S. 113, 132 (1877), that "if a state of facts could exist that would justify such legislation," it passes its initial test.

There are various "liberties," however, which require that infringing legislation be given closer judicial scrutiny, not only with respect to existence of a purpose and the means employed, but also with respect to the importance of the purpose itself relative to the invaded interest. Some interests would appear almost impregnable to invasion, such as the freedoms of speech, press, and religion, and the freedom from cruel and unusual punishments. Other interests, for example, the right of association, the right to vote, and various claims sometimes referred to under the general rubric of the right to privacy, also weigh very heavily against state claims of authority to regulate. It is this category of interests which, as I understand it, Mr. Justice Stewart refers to as "'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.'" Ante, at 537. Because he would confine the reach of substantive due process protection to interests such as these and because he would not classify in this category the asserted right to share a house with the relatives involved here, he rejects the due process claim.

Given his premise, he is surely correct. Under our cases, the Due Process Clause extends substantial protection to various phases of family life, but none requires that the claim made here be sustained. I cannot believe that the interest in residing with more than one set of grandchildren is one that calls for any kind of heightened protection under the Due Process Clause. To say that one has a personal right to live with all, rather than some, of one's grandchildren and that this right is implicit in ordered liberty is, as my Brother Stewart says, "to extend the limited substantive contours of the Due Process Clause beyond recognition." Ibid. The present claim is hardly one of which it could be said that "neither liberty nor justice would exist if [it] were sacrificed." Palko v. Connecticut, 302 U.S., at 326.

Mr. Justice Powell would apparently construe the Due Process Clause to protect from all but quite important state regulatory interests any right or privilege that in his estimate is deeply rooted in the country's traditions. For me, this suggests a far too expansive charter for this Court and a far less meaningful and less confining guiding principle than Mr. Justice Stewart would use for serious substantive due process review. What the deeply rooted traditions of the country are is arguable; which of them deserve the protection of the Due Process Clause is even more debatable. The suggested view would broaden enormously the horizons of the Clause; and, if the interest involved here is any measure of what the States would be forbidden to regulate, the courts would be substantively weighing and very likely invalidating a wide range of measures that Congress and state legislatures think appropriate to respond to a changing economic and social order.

Mrs. Moore's interest in having the offspring of more than one dependent son live with her qualifies as a liberty protected by the Due Process Clause; but, because of the nature of that particular interest, the demands of the Clause are satisfied once the Court is assured that the challenged proscription is the product of a duly enacted or promulgated statute, ordinance, or regulation and that it is not wholly lacking in purpose or utility. That under this ordinance any number of unmarried children may reside with their mother and that this number might be as destructive of neighborhood values as one or more additional grandchildren is just another argument that children and grandchildren may not constitutionally be distinguished by a local zoning ordinance.

That argument remains unpersuasive to me. Here the head of the household may house himself or herself and spouse, their parents, and any number of their unmarried children. A fourth generation may be represented by only one set of grandchildren and then only if born to a dependent child. The ordinance challenged by appellant prevents her from living with both sets of grandchildren only in East Cleveland, an area with a radius of three miles and a population of 40,000. Brief for Appellee 16 n.1. The ordinance thus denies appellant the opportunity to live with all her grandchildren in this particular suburb; she is free to do so in other parts of the Cleveland metropolitan area. If there is power to maintain the character of a single-family neighborhood, as there surely is, some limit must be placed on the reach of the "family." Had it been our task to legislate, we might have approached the problem in a different manner than did the drafters of this ordinance; but I have no trouble in concluding that the normal goals of zoning regulation are present here and that the ordinance serves these goals by limiting, in identifiable circumstances, the number of people who can occupy a single household. The ordinance does not violate the Due Process Clause.

IV
For very similar reasons, the equal protection claim must fail, since it is not to be judged by the strict scrutiny standard employed when a fundamental interest or suspect classification is involved, see, e. g., Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U.S. 330 (1972), and Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944), or by the somewhat less strict standard of Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976), Califano v. Webster, 430 U.S. 313 Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71 (1971), and Royster Guano Co. v. Virginia, 253 U.S. 412, 415 (1920). Rather, it is the generally applicable standard of McGowan v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420, 425 (1961):

"The constitutional safeguard [of the Equal Protection Clause] is offended only if the classification rests on grounds wholly irrelevant to the achievement of the State's objective. State legislatures are presumed to have acted within their constitutional power despite the fact that, in practice, their laws result in some inequality. A statutory discrimination will not be set aside if any state of facts reasonably may be conceived to justify it."

See also Dandridge v. Williams, 397 U.S. 471 (1970); ''Massachusetts Bd. of Retirement v. Murgia'', 427 U.S. 307 (1976). Under this standard, it is not fatal if the purpose of the law is not articulated on its face, and there need be only a rational relation to the ascertained purpose.

On this basis, as already indicated, I have no trouble in discerning a rational justification for an ordinance that permits the head of a household to house one, but not two, dependent sons and their children.

Respectfully, therefore, I dissent and would affirm the judgment.


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Author:Edward Provan Cathcart

Works

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license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Author:Edward Provan Cathcart


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Foulis, David


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Foulis, Henry


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Foulis, James (d.1549)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Foulis, James (d.1688)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Foulis, James (1770-1842)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Foulis, Robert


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Foulkes, Peter


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Foulkes, Robert


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fountaine, Andrew


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fountaine, John


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fourdrinier, Peter


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fournier, Daniel


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowke, Francis


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowke, John


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowke, Phineas


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowler, Abraham


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowler, Christopher


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowler, Henry


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowler, John (1537-1579)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowler, John (1826-1864)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowler, Richard


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowler, Robert


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowler, William (fl.1603)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fownes, George


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fowns, Richard


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fox, Caroline


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fox, Charles (1749-1809)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fox, Charles (1794-1849)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fox, Charles (1810-1874)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fox, Charles Richard


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fox, Ebenezer


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fox, Edward


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fox, Elizabeth Vassall


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fox, Francis


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fox, George (1624-1691)


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Fox, George (1802?-1871)


text:
Author:James Walker (1863-1935)

Works

 * Introduction to Physical Chemistry

title: Author:James Walker (1863-1935)


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Page:Earle, Does Price Fixing Destroy Liberty, 1920, 138.jpg

138 As has been pointed out, no one can tell what taxes may be levied; no one can tell what the risks of business may be; no one can tell what the replacement cost may total; every one that enters business has to guess at these and a thousand other factors—and nine men out of ten in the long run guess at them incorrectly,—to their ruin.

Of course, the learned Judge would be right had the Weed case fallen within the principle of the Nash case; but the Supreme Court has, again and again, so plainly marked the distinction between it and the Harvester, Collins and Pennsylvania Railroad Cases, which have been discussed, that it is perplexing to understand why there should be any conflict or difficulty in arriving at the one correct result. To repeat, again, where all the facts and circumstances are known, ordinarily intelligent men can reasonably and lawfully make deductions from them. With a preponderance of evidence, men can find only from their common experience whether they have exercised the care of reasonable men, or whether they have compiled with certain duties, even where they have intended the natural consequences of their acts. But the cases where these fundamental rules of conduct have been laid down deal generally with Common Law wrongs. When, however, it comes to dealing with property and exercising the property rights appertaining to freemen, there has been built up and safeguarded an absolutely different system. It has become fundamental that men should compete with each other and with an absolute and untrammeled freedom of discretion, and it is not only the best


text: Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/William IV


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Page:The Plays of Euripides Vol. 1- Edward P. Coleridge (1910).djvu/126

98 past speech, past bearing, I behold within my house; myself a ruined man, my home a solitude, my children orphans!

. Gone and left us hast thou, fondest wife and noblest of all women 'neath the sun's bright eye or night's star-lit radiance. Poor house, what sorrows are thy portion now! My eyes are wet with streams of tears to see thy fate; but the sequel to this tragedy has long with terror filled me.

. Ha! what means this letter? clasped in her dear hand it hath some strange tale to tell. Hath she, poor lady, as a last request, written her bidding as to my marriage and her children? Take heart, poor ghost; no wife henceforth shall wed thy Theseus or invade his house. Ah! how yon seal of my dead wife stamped with her golden ring affects my sight! Come, I will unfold the sealed packet and read her letter's message to me.

. Woe unto us! Here is yet another evil in the train by heaven sent. Looking to what has happened, I should count my lot in life no longer worth one's while to gain. My master's house, alas! is ruined, brought to naught, I say. Spare it, O Heaven, if it may be. Hearken to my prayer, for I see, as with prophetic eye, an omen boding mischief.

. O horror! woe on woe! and still they come, too deep for words, too heavy to bear. Ah me!

. What is it? speak, if I may share in it.

. This letter loudly tells a hideous tale! where can I escape my load of woe? For I am ruined and undone, so awful are the words I find here written clear as if she cried them to me; woe is me!


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Rh. Alas! thy words declare themselves the harbingers of woe.

. I can no longer keep the cursed tale within the portal of my lips, cruel though its utterance be. Ah me! Hippolytus hath dared by brutal force to violate my honour, recking naught of Zeus, whose awful eye is over all. O father Poseidon, once didst thou promise to fulfil three prayers of mine; answer one of these and slay my son, let him not escape this single day, if the prayers thou gavest me were indeed with issue fraught.

. O king, I do conjure thee, call back that prayer; hereafter thou wilt know thy error. Hear, I pray.

. Impossible! Moreover I will banish him from this land, and by one of two fates shall he be struck down; either Poseidon, out of respect to my prayer, will cast his dead body into the house of Hades; or exiled from this land, a wanderer to some foreign shore, shall he eke out a life of misery.

. Lo! where himself doth come, thy son Hippolytus, in good time; dismiss thy hurtful rage, King Theseus, and bethink thee what is best for thy family.

. I heard thy voice, father, and hasted to come hither; yet know I not the cause of thy present sorrow, but would fain learn of thee. Ha! what is this? thy wife a corpse I see; this is passing strange; 'twas but now I left her; a moment since she looked upon the light. How came she thus? the manner of her death? this would I learn of thee, father. Art dumb? silence availeth not in trouble; nay, for the heart that fain would know all must show its curiosity even in sorrow's hour. Be sure it is not right, father, to hide misfortunes from those who love, ay, more than love thee.

. O ye sons of men, victims of a thousand idle errors,


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100 why teach your countless crafts, why scheme and seek to find a way for everything, while one thing ye know not nor ever yet have made your prize, a way to teach them wisdom whose souls are void of sense?

. A very master in his craft the man, who can force fools to be wise! But these ill-timed subtleties of thine, father, make me fear thy tongue is running riot through trouble.

. Fie upon thee! man needs should have some certain test set up to try his friends, some touchstone of their hearts, to know each friend whether he be true or false; all men should have two voices, one the voice of honesty, expediency's the other, so would honesty confute its knavish opposite, and then we could not be deceived.

. Say, hath some friend been slandering me and hath he still thine ear? am I, though guiltless, banned? I am amazed indeed; thy random, frantic words fill me with wild alarm.

. O the mind of mortal man! to what lengths will it proceed? What limit will its bold assurance have? for if it goes on growing as man's life advances, and each successor outdo the man before him in villainy, the gods will have to add another sphere unto the world, which shall take in the knaves and villains. Behold this man; he, my own son, hath outraged mine honour, his guilt most clearly proved by my dead wife. Now, since thou hast dared this loathly crime, come, look thy father in the face. Art thou the man who dost with gods consort, as one above the vulgar herd? art thou the chaste and sinless saint? Thy boasts will never persuade me to be guilty of attributing ignorance to gods. Go then, vaunt thyself, and drive thy petty trade in viands formed of lifeless food; take Orpheus for thy chief and go


text: Author:Joseph Jackson Lister (1857-1927)


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Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/236

220 king of the western Galla is stiled Lubo, the other Mooty. At this assembly, the king allots to each their scene of murder and rapine; but limits them always to speedy returns in case the body of the nation should have occasion for them. The Galla are reputed very good soldiers for surprise, and in the first attack, but have not constancy or perseverance. They accomplish incredible marches; swim rivers holding by the horses tail, (an exercise to which both they and their horses are perfectly trained;) do the utmost mischief possible in the shortest time; and rarely return by the same way they came. They are excellent light horse: for a regular army in an enemy's country.

is very scarce among them, so that their principal arms are poles sharpened at the end, and hardened in the fire, which they use like lances. Their shields are made of bulls hides of a single fold, so that they are very subject to warp in heat, or become too pliable and soft in wet weather. Notwithstanding these disadvantages, the report of their cruelty made such an impression upon the Abyssinians, that, on their first engagements they rarely stood firmly the Galla's first onset. Besides this, the shrill and very barbarous noise they are always used to make at the moment they charge, used to terrify the horses and riders, so that a flight generally followed the attack made by Galla horse.

melancholy and frantic howls I had occasion to hear often in those engagements that happened while I was in Abyssinia. The Edjow, a body of Galla who had been in the late king Joas's service, and were relations to him by his mother, who was of that clan of southern Galla, were constantly in the rebel army, and always in the most


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Rh a-revelling, with all honour for the vapourings of many a written scroll, seeing thou now art caught. Let all beware, I say, of such hypocrites! who hunt their prey with fine words, and all the while are scheming villainy. She is dead; dost think that this will save thee? Why this convicts thee more than all, abandoned wretch! What oaths, what pleas can outweigh this letter, so that thou shouldst 'scape thy doom? Thou wilt assert she hated thee, that 'twixt the bastard and the true-born child nature has herself put war; it seems then by thy showing she made a sorry bargain with her life, if to gratify her hate of thee she lost what most she prized. 'Tis said, no doubt, that frailty finds no place in man but is innate in woman; my experience is, young men are no more secure than women, whenso the Queen of Love excites a youthful breast; although their sex comes in to help them. Yet why do I thus bandy words with thee, when before me lies the corpse, to be the clearest witness? Begone at once, an exile from this land, and ne'er set foot again in god-built Athens nor in the confines of my dominion. For if I am tamely to submit to this treatment from such as thee, no more will Sinis, robber of the Isthmus, bear me witness how I slew him, but say my boasts are idle, nor will those rocks Scironian, that fringe the sea, call me the miscreants' scourge.

. I know not how to call happy any child of man; for that which was first has turned and now is last.

. Father, thy wrath and the tension of thy mind are terrible; yet this charge, specious though its arguments appear, becomes a calumny, if one lay it bare. Small skill


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 While returning to Dembea, he met a party of the Falasha, called Abati, at Wainadega, and entirely destroyed them, so that not one escaped.

king was now so formidable that no army of the enemy dared to face him, and he obliged the Falasha to give up their king Radaet, whom he banished to Wadge; and the four following years he spent in ravaging the country of his enemies the Galla, in Shat and Bed, and that of the Falasha in Samen and Serke, where he beat Caliph king of the Falasha, who had succeeded Radaet.

Galla, in advancing towards Gojam and Damot, had over-run the whole low country between the mountains of Narea and the Nile. The king, desirous to open a communication with a country where there was a great trade, especially for gold, crossed the Nile in his way to that province, the Galla flying everywhere before him. He was received with very great joy by the prince of that country, who looked upon him as his deliverer from those cruel enemies. Here he received many rich presents; more particularly a large quantity of gold, and he wintered at Cutheny in that province, where Abba Hedar his brother died, having been blown up with gun-powder, with his wife and children. The Nareans desired, this year, to be admitted to the Christian faith; and they were converted and baptised by a mission of priests sent by the king for that purpose.

the time he was rescuing the kingdom of Narea, Cadward Basha, a young officer of merit and reputation, lately come from Constantinople to Dawaro as basha of Masuah, had begun his command with making inroads into Tigré,


text:
Corazon Aquino's Third State of the Nation Address

Mr. Senate President; Mr. Speaker; Members of both Houses of Congress; Mr. Vice-President and the Members of the Cabinet; the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court; Your Excellencies of the Diplomatic Corps; distinguished guests; minamahal kong mga kababayan,

Pursuant to the Constitution, I have come to report on the state of the nation. This recurring event, however, has another significance today. For it comes midway in my term of office. It is time to review what has gone before, how things stand today, and what must be done tomorrow.

Three and a half years have passed since the Revolution. Recalling the perils we passed, and the ground we have covered, I marvel at the kindness of God and the strength of our people – at the fortitude and ingenuity of a race that did so much with so little, and in so short a time.

We revived a dead economy and in three years had it well on the road to recovery. The figures are well-known and unimpeachable, yet some bear repeating.

Industrial capacity, idle for lack of capital, markets, and confidence under the dictatorship, has been fully utilized. In the past two years, investments have increased 25% annually. P30.97 billion was invested in 1988. Industry grew by 8.6% in gross value added last year, improving yet further on the already impressive growth of7.7% in 1987.

The number of business enterprises increased by 38%, most of them small and medium-scale and located outside Metro Manila.

More than 2.3 million new jobs have been created. Unemployment declined from 12.5% in 1985 to 9.6% in 1988.

Last year, we posted a 6.7% growth. This year, we anticipate less because of a slight contraction of the world economy and the shift from consumer-led to the more substantive but slower investment-led growth that we see as the safer course to take.

The economic upturn is reflected in the reduction of industrial actions. The exuberance of a suddenly liberated labor sector has made room for a deeper appreciation of the need for all sectors to work together-rather than against each other-for the general improvement. Let us not, however, use the reduction in strikes by itself as an invitation to more investments, but rather as a barometer of the more equitable distribution of the progress we are making. We are instructed by this welcome development to work towards even greater equity in the distribution of wealth as the surest means to social order and peace.

Our greatest investment in enhancing national productive capacity is in education – in developing the intelligence and the sinews of our people, as it were.

Thus, we have put 98% of school age children in school; we are close to universal elementary education. The universal free high school program is also well underway. Ouantitatively, we are close to our targets; qualitatively we are far. A rigorous and high quality secondary education, the Japanese and German experiences teach, is the foundation of a modern economy.

Last year, 70.9% of all infants one year old or younger were immunized, representing 1,318,000 babies-a dramatic improvement over 30% in 1985. 7.7 million children were treated for various illnesses. Our aim, as we said, is sharper minds and sounder bodies for the next generation of Filipinos.

Economic Recovery and Poverty

Yet poverty remains prevalent. The lowest 30% of our population remains mired in unchanging misery. They think nothing has changed and I don’t blame them. Liberty is a poor substitute for food. The economic improvement we have experienced has had some impact on the incidence of poverty, which declined from 59% in 1985 to 49% in 1988. But the 500,000 families who crossed the official poverty threshold may not even be aware of it.

The economic recovery has restored old fortunes far more significantly than it has touched the lives of the vast majority of our people. For all that, we cannot downplay our economic progress. For it has spoken more eloquently to the world than words ever could. It has earned us tremendous respect throughout the world. This was shown in the Tokyo Consultative Group meeting which paid tribute to the country’s growth with low inflation, despite the debt. A similar respect was evident throughout my European visit. My hosts were clearly encouraged to support what they saw as a record of success against great odds. We have been working to translate this respect into concrete support to reduce those odds.

Yet nothing generated greater admiration than our political achievements.

In little over a year, we uprooted a dictatorship and planted the freest democracy in the world – with all its good and bad features. We held elections that were the freest and most participative in the history of this – perhaps of any – republic in the world.

Our swift democratization was done against the advice that I reserve emergency powers in the face of rising military adventurism and communist terrorism. But I believed then-and time has proved me right-that this nation shall find no greater source of strength to defend democracy than in the enjoyment of all its rights and liberties. Democracy is our faith and the root of our strength to defend it.

Added to that faith was the will to stand for no more nonsense from military adventurers who thought that failure to shave qualified them for national leadership. Some people don’t like the way I dress. Well I didn’t like the way they looked. I am in power and they are out. Surely there is a lesson here to be learned about delusions of self-importance and the realities of power.

Peace and Order

My assessment of the peace and order situation is mixed. With regard to the insurgency, the tide has turned-I believe permanently. The main weapons were democracy, a greater concern by government for rural needs, the economic recovery, a heightened respect for political and human rights, and a deeper commitment to their proper mission on the part of the Armed Forces. The.AFP reports an 8% reduction in NP A troop strength. A better indicator is the brutality with which the Communist leadership has treated the common people and even their own ranks. This self-destructive course reveals a movement whose organizational and moral center has ceased to hold. This picture of disarray is both good news and bad. For we must brace ourselves for greater cruelties from a cause that is now indistinguishable from a common crime. In summary, we have beaten the insurgents less by fighting than by the example of our humanity, our concern, and the impact of our economic progress.

On the subject of common crimes, the situation is nothing less than terrible. What compounds it is the general distress occasioned by the prominence of military and police elements in the worst criminal activities. The first duty of the State is the enforcement of order. Until we-the Executive, the Congress, and the Judiciary-bring the situation totally under control, none of our accomplishments elsewhere will have a lasting impact on the opinion of the public. For criminality threatens the most basic rights of man-the right to live, to raise a family, and enjoy and bequeath the prosperity he has worked for.

The Challenges Ahead

I recall our achievements not to make the past compensate for the pr sent nor to excuse inaction in the future, but so we do not lose faith in the essential strength of our race to rebuild, to recuperate, to grow, and to meet the challenges that lie ahead.

There is the challenge of rising world oil prices that threatens to undercut our continued growth.

There is the challenge of continuing debt service that eats 40% of the national budget, or 7.7% of GNP. We are expected, in the next five years, to make a net payment to our creditors of $12 billion or approximately P260 billion at the current exchange rate.

There is the challenge of sustaining growth and meeting our medium-term targets.

And there is the age-old challenge and threat that poverty and underdevelopment pose to the viability of democracies in the Third World. How long can we stay poor and still free?

Poverty has lessened but 5.3 million households or 29 million people remain poor. Unemployment has been reduced but try telling that to the 2.9 million still jobless and the 7.2 million underemployed.

What Must Be Done

For these reasons, we critically need to sustain economic growth.

First, we have to strengthen the foundations of a vigorous market-oriented economy. This would involve continued adherence to prudent fiscal and monetary policies and reliance on market forces in the functioning of the economy. These policies have engendered robust growth of private investment, output, employment and consumption. These have also kept inflation at acceptable levels and helped protect the real incomes of wage earners. Our record of high growth with low inflation is a singular achievement among heavily indebted countries.

We must steer away from the siren songs of quick fixes, easy spending, unwarranted subsidies, and irrational price controls, which elsewhere have contributed to bloated deficits, tailspin hyperinflation, and social instability.

Second, we must go on building structures essential to the efficiency and productivity of the economy. Government has improved or constructed 1,124 kilometers of major roads and 7,821 kilometers of secondary and feeder roads to bring markets and producers closer to each other. Yet this is a small part of the projects in the pipeline-numerous ports, power generation plants, and modern telecommunications.

Third, no less important than physical infrastructure, we must continue to strengthen our public institutions and find ways to do things better, faster, and, with the greater appearance and substance of integrity. I have a few words to say on the subject of corruption. Yesterday, a pastoral letter was read in all the churches deploring the resurgence of official corruption. How can the Cabinet, the Congress, and the Supreme Court deny what is plain for all to see: that corruption is again a way of public life?

I will not preempt a Congress that feels its time is better spent in investigations of anything, nor a Supreme Court that has a longer backlog of unresolved cases than there are decisions in the casebooks from the turn of the century. I have my own responsibilities to face, and my own people to hold to account.

The magnitude of unresolved disputes has frozen innumerable billions of pesos worth of assets in litigation. The staggering number of unsolved crimes has eroded the credibility of the state to be respected as such.

The problem is massive for having been left unattended by the branch of government, and the departments and agencies specifically charged with the dispensation of justice and the punishment of crimes. But a start must be made.

I have ordered a review of the structure and performance of the National Bureau of Investigation with a view to making it the lead arm in criminal investigation. I have ordered a review of the prosecution service, and call upon the Supreme Court to do the same to the judiciary, with a view to relieving the incompetent and the passive who have allowed so many cases to languish unresolved.

A Clean and Honest Government

I am tired of being taken to task for the thing above all others that I wanted to leave as a legacy: the example of a clean and honest government. To my fellow workers in government specifically involved in this area -and in all other areas as well- let me say that unless the public sees results soon, it will be goodbye for you.

The compassion that marked my administration in the past may generate doubts about my resolve in this matter, but the actions that will be taken by me in the next weeks and months will dispel them all.

Fourth, as the lynchpin of our efforts to lift the mass of our people from poverty, we must implement agrarian reform with greater vigor, doing our best to combine speed with the necessary caution. I would like to stress again the aim of agrarian reform. Our objective is not merely to subdivide the misery on the land, but to raise the living standards of our farmers to the level of their dignity as the backbone of our economy.

Fifth, for our development to be at all sustainable, we need to redress the years of degradation and neglect of our environment, and preserve what remains of our natural resources. We have embarked on projects to restore and conserve our marine and forest resources-among them the largest reforestation program in history covering 100,000 hectares a year to the end of the century.

Sixth, we must mobilize the resources, both domestic and foreign, necessary to sustain public and private investment and provide basic social services. To generate domestic resources, vigorous tax collection efforts, banking reforms, and the development of capital markets are underway. Measures to enhance public confidence in the stock markets are needed and I look to the Congress to study and initiate them.

Improving Tax Collection

I cannot overemphasize the importance of improving our tax performance.

We have one of the lowest tax to GNP ratios of any country in the world. No longer can we tolerate tax evasion as a national pastime, especially of the rich, when indeed our economic future is at stake. The place for tax evaders is not high society but behind bars.

As regards external financing resources, except for one component we have installed a financing structure which will support sustained growth.

We are currently engaged in negotiations with commercial creditors for a package that will support our external financing program. An important element of this package will include debt and debt service reduction schemes inspired by new debt initiatives. By firm adherence to its strong record of economic adjustment and performance, the Philippines is particularly well placed to be favored by these initiatives.

With the endorsement of the multilateral institutions and foreign governments-and in the conviction that we have done our part in keeping our economic house in order-we shall negotiate forcefully to secure the cooperation of the commercial banks in the Philippine recovery. In the riot-torn streets of Caracas, in the teeming barrios of Mexico, in our own barangays-no less than in Washington, Tokyo and Paris-there is growing recognition that something real must be done about the Third World Debt.

Let us not forget that we have come from a 2O-year struggle between our people and a dictator, and that we are here engaged in the reconstruction of an economy and a polity as though from the ruins of war. Except the destruction has been more sweeping. We did not emerge from the Second World War with losses anywhere near the $28 billion being exacted by our creditors.

Rural Development

Our principal focus must be on rural development-the liberation of the economic, social and political energies of the countryside. We need the physical infrastructure to link rural production and consumption with the national and international economies. We need to enhance education and health to make the best use of our best assets-our people. We need to decentralize political structures to widen the people’s participation in national life.

A people-powered revolution must aim for a people-empowered democracy and economy. Rural development will best realize this aim. The alleviation of poverty will come with the upliftment of the rural poor.

Unless we draw our rural areas into the dynamics of the national economy, turning hinterlands of decay into frontiers of progress, our growth and equity goals will not be attained, neither in the short nor the long term.

Law and Good Government

The great task that we have set ourselves will require two great instruments of social transformation: a just but iron-fisted law and good government.

There will be no progress in our communities without order, without securing the lives and properties of our citizens against criminality and the insurgency.

I have already noted the progress that has been made against the insurgency. The increasing isolation of the rebels has allowed military operations to succeed as never before. But such operations must take greater care to avoid collateral damage to the civilian population. For our moral ascendancy has accounted for the greater part of our superiority in this conflict. The protection of human rights even under conditions of conflict must be a key consideration in military operations and missions.

Our other great task is to deliver good government. This, I believe, consists of maintaining closeness to the people, honesty and efficiency in their service, and making a difference for the better in their lives. Thus, I have brought an active presidency to bear on the many issues that shape our lives from police work to women’s concerns, from improving customs collections to disaster relief operations. I have brought the physical presence of the presidency to 54 provinces, from Tawi- Tawi to Batanes.

Dedication and Discipline

I shall emphasize even further the standard of my example by exacting the same dedication and discipline-from my Cabinet, the bureaucracy and the local governments. A quarterly review of departmental performance shall become the forum for diagnosing the strengths and weaknesses of programs and performance, and the basis for the proper remedies.

I expect to see the departments pull together in more coherent and focused efforts to advance policies and programs across the board, and to translate this Address into action. The process should involve the participation of mayors and governors, and consultation with members of Congress.

On local autonomy and decentralization, it was never my intention to substitute the abuses of over-centralization with widespread incompetence in local leadership. Our people will simply regard both as our failure. Thus, as we devolve greater authority and resources to local governments, we shall exact from them greater responsibility to their communities and more support of the national objectives.

I call also on the support of constitutional bodies, such as the Civil Service Commission, the Commission on Audit and the Ombudsman. Even as they perform their duties with the required independence and integrity, let them be reminded that good government can be achieved as well by cooperation as by adversarial relations. The purpose of checks in government is not to induce paralysis but to achieve balance and foster progress.

As we emerge from a singular pre-occupation with economic recovery, we must remind ourselves of initiatives that will have a major impact now and profound implications tomorrow. Three particular priorities are: the protection of the environment, the promotion of family planning and responsible parenthood, and the development of science and technology.

While the lead in the environmental movement must be taken by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, responsibility must be assumed by all of us. While the Department of Health is the designated lead agency for family planning, we should all contribute towards building the family as a purposeful act of confidence in the future. The Department of Science and Technology needs to bring academe, government and business together in· promoting science and technology.

Agenda for the Future

Our gains in the past three years serve as the base for launching a comprehensive advance on all fronts. The scale of the effort and the importance of the outcome call for the wisdom of Congress to consider and affirm these intentions. I propose the following:

First, measures to alleviate poverty:

1) Tax and other incentives to small and medium countryside business enterprises;

2) Authorizing the bidding out to the private sector of BOT projects, or projects to build, operate and transfer self-liquidating infrastructure projects; and

3) Promoting countryside investments.

Second, measures to improve peace and order:

1) Immediate creation of a civilian national police force;

2) Limiting discretion in the disposition of seized importations;

3) Penalizing the crime of plunder to deter the accumulation of ill-gotten wealth by public officials;

4) Further protecting human rights.

Third, measures promoting honesty and efficiency in the government:

1) Devolution of more substantial powers to local governments;

2) Doubling the financial resources of local governments effective 1990 by increasing internal revenue allotments, granting incentives for improved real estate tax collections, and abolishing mandatory contributions to the PC-INP and hospitals;

3) Reorganizing and strengthening the Philippine foreign service.

Fourth, measures promoting social justice:

1) Defining ancestral domains;

2) Providing a more extensive program of urban housing development;

3) Setting ceilings and limiting deductions on travel, representation, and other expenses;

4) Encouraging cooperatives;

5) Rationalizing small-scale mining;

Finally, measures for the protection of the environment:

1) Increasing forest charges;

2) Increasing penalties for pollution; and

3) Adopting a national land-use plan.

Finally, I seek your support for the 1990 budget that I shall be submitting in the next few days. I ask you to consider our proposals in light of the priorities I have outlined, and the deep concerns that we all share for the upliftment of our people from poverty, and of our nation to progress. I ask you to regard with sympathy and understanding my deep desire and my unshakeable resolve to give our people all that I have promised them. Let me make myself especially clear on this point: I shall complete the work that we have started, the work that God gave us to do-to make a new nation, strong, and free and prosperous. I shall not rest from that labor until its fruits have been enjoyed by you, by me and by all our people. Only success will stop my unceasing efforts, my undying commitment to the great task before us. God bless us all. Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!


text:
Corazon Aquino's Second State of the Nation Address

Mister President of the Senate, Mister Speaker of the House of Representatives, Members of both Houses of Congress, the Vice-President and members of the Cabinet, the Chief Justice and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court, Your Excellencies of the Diplomatic Corps, distinguished guests, minamahal kong mga kababayan.

In fulfillment of my pledge to uphold and defend the Constitution, I stood here last year and divested myself of the power and authority to govern this nation single-handedly. The act seemed premature to many. We had only finished laying the groundwork for recovery. The objectives of our policies had yet to be achieved; their real consequences could not be known. We had done more clearing of the rubble than building on the ruins.

We had freed the spirit of enterprise which has accounted, far more than the directions of government, for the progress of our neighbors.

We had laid with speed and care, the foundations for a stronger and broader-based democracy. We had applied the first measures for the resurrection of a virtually dead economy.

Memory will bring more vividly to mind than a recitation of statistics the devastation of our country then, the deep and sweeping poverty of the great mass of the people, the trauma of a wounded nation.

Many said it was not the time for divided counsel and shared government. It was too soon to venture into the world without the protection of the extraordinary powers I had inherited, and which I had sparingly used to steer the nation to that first day of full democracy: the inauguration of the Congress of the Philippines.

I ignored these counsels of fear.

It could never be too soon for democracy. I was almost proved wrong.

One month after I stood here and sounded a call for unity, the Right made its boldest and bloodiest move against the new democracy. With characteristic treachery, it lunged in the middle of the night at the heart of the Republic. While the attack was repulsed, the August 28 coup attempt almost wiped out the hard-won gains of a whole year and revived the nagging doubt that this country could have any future other than turmoil.

I called on the people to gather the scattered stones of the edifice and build anew.

Despite the great losses sustained, I felt no regret that we had completely restored democracy. For I had not been called to power to achieve economic progress at the cost of the ideals of the Revolution that swept me into office.

To Make Democracy Work

My mandate was not just to make a country rich, but to make democracy work: To make it work as a system of genuine popular participation. To make it meaningful to the lives of the common people by giving them jobs and justice, work with dignity, health and education, and reason to hope that the future will be better for themselves and their children.

I believed that nowhere could you find more effective cures for the ills of our country – such as the habit of oppression, the inclination to corruption, betrayal of the public interest – than in the blessings of democracy: freedom; rights; transparent dealings; and a government of the people by the people themselves.

Despite the difficulties of democracy, we would bring to the prosperous state we sought, the freedom and dignity with which we had started on February 25, 1986.

How well we have succeeded, it is my distinct pleasure and pride to report. How far we have fallen short of our needs, it is our unavoidable duty to acknowledge and rectify.

No one can deny the obvious: the economy has taken off.

The economic indicators show it; the general feeling confirms it. The economy is on the move – not fitfully anymore but in firm strides on the path of sustainable growth.

GNP grew by 5.7 percent in 1987; by 7.6 percent in the first quarter of 1988. The source of this growth, on the supply side, was increased industrial activity; on the demand side, by vastly increased consumer spending. The industrial sector grew by 8 percent in 1987; by another 9.7 percent in the first quarter of 1988. Manufacturing posted the highest growth since 1981, mainly in electronics and garments. The steep rise in primary energy consumption confirms the dramatic increase in economic activities. Oil consumption grew by 15.8 percent, and by an additional 9.2 percent this year. Our energy capabilities have begun to feel the strain – a sure sign of increased economic energy.

Unemployment dropped from 11.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 1986 to 9.5 percent in one year. One million six hundred thousand jobs had been created in 1987; well over a million of them generated by the private economy.

We have tracked this growth and found it accounted for mainly by small and medium businesses and by Filipino-Chinese entrepreneurs, sectors that made few demands on the public sector, other than to be left alone to work in the democratic economic space we have created. We are seeing people- powered capitalism in action.

People Powered Capitalism

Unavoidably, growth exacted the price of inflation, which grew from 6.9 percent in 1986 to 7.4 percent at the end, of 1987. But even these figures compare somewhat favorably with a peak of 64 percent inflation in the last years of the dictatorship, when workers’ real wages plunged. In sharp contrast, improvements in real wages in the past two years have enabled the working classes to cope with it. In manufacturing, workers’ compensation increased by 21 percent; minimum wages of non-plantation workers – the poorest – by 23.2 percent. Real wages of government employees increased by 11.2 percent.

We do not gloss over the fact that the number of unemployed who do not partake 9f these gains remains significant. Still, the improvement has been marked enough to explain the drop in the number of strikes since October last year. This confirms our belief that only economic progress can produce enduring harmony in the workplace. The relative self-restraint exercised by the labor sector in allowing the economic recovery to proceed with a minimum of disruption underscores the maturity, wisdom and patriotism of the working classes and their leaders.

We lowered the duty on crude, and revised taxes on petroleum products. We rolled back prices four times. And there are at present on-going studies which we hope will result in a future reduction of the prices of petroleum products, particularly of kerosene, diesel, and LPG, on which the greater mass of our people depend.

To keep energy supply in step with the demands of economic growth, we have put energy development among our highest priorities. I shall set up an energy coordinating council, composed of the Executive Secretary and the heads of the National Power Corporation, the Office of Energy Affairs, the National Electrification Administration, and the Philippine National Oil Company, to keep track of developments in this area. This should allay fears that we may outgrow our energy capabilities and choke the economic takeoff.

The 1986 Tax Reform Program has apparently worked.

The increase of revenues from 10.6 to 12.2 percent of GNP reflects this.

To cut overhead and inject energy into the bureaucracy, I have directed Budget and Management to trim excess personnel from the head offices of the Departments; at the very least to put a lid on new hires of overhead items.

The Privatization Program has generated P 11.2 billion in gross revenues. The Program has proceeded less swiftly than interested parties may desire, but due care must be exercised in the disposition of assets that belong to the people. We must get the most we can for the people, in as fair and transparent a manner as possible, leaving no room for the smallest doubt about the integrity of the procedure and the people involved.

In spite of the clear guidelines I have set of transparency and open bidding, and against the urgent deadline for the privatization of certain major assets, some people still try to gain undue advantages. Let no one delude himself on that score. Those who fought with us in the Campaign and Revolution must remember that we fought to stop corruption of public officials and privileges to special friends. Let us not cash in on our patriotism in 1986. Let us rather be grateful to the nation and to the historical moment for the privilege we had of being heroes.

Let me return to the measures taken to spur the growth of the economy.

Decentralization

The dramatic improvement in rural purchasing power was accounted for by the Community Employment and Development Program or the CEDP and, of course, by the unexpected improvement in copra prices. The regions are forging ahead. Three of them – Region IV or Southern Tagalog, Region VII, the Central Visayas, and Region XI, Eastern Mindanao grew faster than Metro Manila. Their great potential is only waiting to be tapped by capital investments, such as roads and communications, and by the devolution of decision-making to the local level.

Thus, we have decentralized the operations of the 16 major government departments, and increased private sector representation in regional and local development councils to one-fourth. Budgets are now released directly to local governments and budget priorities are now determined in the first instance on the provincial level. An increase of revenue allotments and repeal of mandatory contributions by local units to the national government will place more resources at the disposal of the local governments.

We have given them, for the first time in history, the principal initiative in the development of their communities.

We have marked out certain pilot provinces – at present, Davao del Norte, Laguna, Negros Occidental and Tarlac – to which greater development efforts will be directed. The idea is to see what can be accomplished by an integrated and intensive approach in a specified area, and apply the lessons learned to other provinces.

Debt Burden

Great as our gains have been, we could have gone twice as fast and twice as far if we did not have one foot manacled to the Debt.

Our external debt burden must be dramatically reduced. On this I believe all Filipinos are united. It should be understood that we cannot indefinitely give more than 40 percent of the budget for total debt service. We estimate a net payment to creditors of around $12 billion over the next five years. This is intolerable for a country whose basic needs are as acute as ours. I hope that message is clearly heard.

Yet we understand the realities of power, the vulnerabilities of the underdeveloped, and the ways of international finance. Debtors with shorter tempers who had stormed out of negotiations have been forced to return to the table, their economies having cracked under the pressure of isolation from the international system.

We must grow; yet maintain access to the international financial system. We must find ways of funding our growth without being held hostage to our debt. If we are to meet our commitments to our creditors, the bankers must first meet our financing needs.

Our debt strategy will be rooted in the recent recognition of industrial democracies that the management of the debt crisis is too important to be left to bankers. At the Toronto Summit, they singled out the Philippines as a country which needed support in its debt reduction efforts. Japanese Prime Minister Takeshita and US President Reagan argued strongly for the extension of such support.

The world economy is held back by the debt that countries such as ours carry. In 1987 there was a negative outflow of $2.2 billion to our foreign creditors. It was blood from the veins of our economy, and took a heavy toll in missed output and lost employment. We need a transfusion to maintain our growth.

The international initiative for a consortium of donor countries to support Philippine development plans could give us that transfusion. I welcome the support of world leaders for the economic development assistance program for the Philippines. We see innovative and far-reaching debt reduction as a vital component of this international initiative.

Few countries, if any, have hewed as faithfully to the conditionalities of debt restructuring as the Philippines has. Our people have endured the most rigorous austerities, yet received no better treatment than those of countries that resisted. Yet, even as the realities of power force us to seek a just solution to the debt problem within the international financial system, those same realities may urge us someday to find that solution anywhere we can.

Foreign Policy Review

This has been a year of action on the foreign policy. In addition to hosting both the ASEAN Summit and the Newly Restored Democracies Conference, we have made state visits to China, Switzerland, Italy, and the Vatican. These trips have been part of an active process of strengthening and extending our international friendships. Our foreign policy should promote our assets in a way that strengthens us politically, economically, and in terms of our security. Through the two conferences held here, we furthered our goal of broadening our friendships and making common cause with those who share similar circumstances to ourselves. We are even now engaged in the periodic review of one of our oldest foreign policy commitments, our hosting of the U.S. military facilities on Philippine soil.

New Army for Democracy

This may be remembered as the year the insurgency was broken. For the armed Left, it has been a year of defeats and retreats; a year of propaganda by terror rather than the strategic initiative of which it had boasted. The rejection of our peace efforts restored to Government the moral basis for war.

I wish we could still pursue the path of peace. Yet until the NPA and their friends come to trust their doctrines to the ballot box rather than the armalite, Government has no choice except to defend our people with the gun.

Five members of the CPP central committee have been captured, eight regional leaders, 19 staff officers and 397 NPA regulars. More than 7,000 regulars and tens of thousands of mass activists and supporters surrendered earlier to the National Reconciliation and Development Program and AFP special operations teams. About 2,000 of the CPP/NPA were killed in action over the last year.

To all of you in this chamber today who are here because you won at the ballot box, democracy is beating back the challenge of the totalitarian Left. We are winning because we have given back to the people control of their lives and faith in the future. To that renewed hope we add the fresh vigor of a new army for democracy. Above all, we now have a future.

With the victories come responsibilities. The first is to keep open the door of reconciliation. These are our brothers and sisters but for as long as fratricide must be a national policy, this nation cannot be whole.

The second responsibility is to ensure an adequate level of security to our people. This means our Armed Forces must be supplemented by unarmed Civilian Volunteer Organizations or Bantay Bayan, and Citizen Armed Force Geographical Units. Our armies cannot be everywhere and be expected to achieve decisive victories. We need civilians to assist in defending their communities.

Yet they must do this with the same respect for human lives and disciplined restraint we expect of our soldiers in dealing with non-combatants. Let us not lose the moral edge in this conflict.

This morning I instructed the Chief of Staff to begin the process of disbanding all so-called vigilante groups in line with the Constitutional injunction against paramilitary groups. Every measure must be taken to protect the people’s security against communist terrorism while the CVO and CAFGU systems are put in place.

Of equal importance as security against insurgent violence is protection against common criminality. From armed robbery to carnapping, our citizens live in intolerable uncertainty about the safety of their families and their properties. I expect the military and police to arrest, not abet, this slide into criminal anarchy taking place right under our noses. Targets will be set and I shall relieve those who fail to meet our people’s expectations of peace and order.

I am conscious that history will judge the achievements of this Government and the usefulness of democracy not through the narrow perspective of the business centers in Manila, but by our success in making a better future for all Filipinos. It is in the fields and barrios, in the slums of our cities, that we will ultimately be judged. It is our duty as elected leaders of this nation to describe a vision of the future that lifts up the lives of this, the great mass of Filipinos: those whose voices are not raised in business councils, social happenings, and in the opinion pages of the newspapers.

For them we must build a future that is based not solely on issues of foreign affairs or the volatility of business confidence, however important. What is the good of international harmony if it does not put food in the mouths of hungry children? Of what value is a business confidence that is built on the suppression of the legitimate aspirations of the poor? Rather, we must have an action agenda that meets their urgent needs in a simple and direct way.

Action Agenda

That agenda is straightforward:

• education • jobs • alleviation of poverty • and an economy that can sustain these goals.

Ours is renowned as the People Powered Democracy. As we must live by the decisions of the people, we must ensure the quality of those decisions. Provision for education in the 1989 budget is increased by more than a third – an essential investment in the future. Free high school education led to a record enrollment of 2.3 million students. Yet, we have far from achieved a universal education. Only 70 percent of our children attend elementary school; of these, only 60 percent complete it. Unless we act decisively now, we face a future of rampant functional illiteracy. Then we shall have People Without Power.

This is the real national emergency, for what is involved here is not underutilized manufacturing capacity or insufficient incentives for the rich, but the very quality of the Filipino who symbolizes the great Asian miracle: a revolution without blood, democratic restoration without tears.

The second priority is jobs. For this we must accelerate economic growth. We expect GNP to grow by 6.4 percent, and investments to pick up at a strong rate. The industrial sector is likely to grow 9 percent this year.

Central to our strategy for improving rural incomes is the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program whose highest aim, I must stress again, is not mere land redistribution, but higher productivity from the land and a higher standard of living for the farming communities that are the backbone of our nation.

I signed into law the fruit of your long efforts, the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Bill, reflecting your wide knowledge and experience of conditions in the countryside.

We are increasing the expenditure for infrastructure “by 50 percent, most of it to be poured into the countryside. We expect to double our spending on water supply. PI.3 billion has been budgeted for school houses.

By 1992 we intend that

• three-fourths of the entire road network will be all-weather compared to less than 50 percent at the beginning of this year.

• 92 percent of the rural population will have clean water compared to 62 percent this year.

• there will be enough classrooms for all children of school age.

• a multi-purpose concrete road in each of the 46,000 barangays in the country, serving not only as a road but as a grain drying surface; a recreation area; as the first solid evidence in these difficult to reach places that here finally is a government truly their own.

Our fight against poverty includes meeting basic needs like health care. We will intensify public health programs and pursue the various drug policies that will make essential drugs more accessible and affordable.

We must achieve a viable consensus on an authentic family welfare program that is responsive both to the Constitutional mandate and the challenge of a growing population.

The provision of basic services also includes making telephones available to all communities. For a country separated by geography but driven by market forces, the social and economic cost of poor communications is too high.

With your congressional leadership I have agreed on certain legislative priorities that reflect the national agenda I outlined today.

On the economic front, we must provide long delayed incentives to the sectors that have powered our recovery, particularly the small and medium enterprises.

On the peace and order front, the urgency of a national civilian police force is obvious, and is high on your agenda as well, along with measures enhancing protection of human rights. Our other priorities are improved civil service effectiveness, education, population, social justice, the environment, the establishment of an independent central monetary authority, and the issue of a metropolitan commission to assure basic services in the hub of economic activity in our country: Metro Manila.

Time for Action is Now

A more detailed list will be submitted. A common agenda should be easy to arrive at. What is more important is implementation of policy. The time for planning is over; the time for action is now. A lot has been done, but it has barely scratched the surface of the problems.

At the end of the year in which the middle class has become better off, I now say this to my department heads: Bring more of the new prosperity to the common people, produce concrete results on your department programs – or you are out. Ours was a revolution for all Filipinos. Our poor have waited long enough. No sluggard will be allowed to stall the economic take-off.

Rediscovering National Purpose

Let me sum up:

It is liberty that has brought us progress, freedom that has generated growth. It is democratic space that has brought the insurgents down. But there is another side to freedom, where abuse displaces responsibility.

We have too often descended to mutual abuse, suspicion and recrimination in our political life. Far from respecting each other’s motives, we are losing the trust that held us together and gave us the strength to prevail. We are forgetting that we stood together to win this freedom that is now too often demeaned. We must find again that trust and that strength, for the task is far from complete.

That trust comes from expecting the best of each other, and equally from giving our best. Across our country, millions of Filipinos are doing that everyday: giving the sweat of their brows and the strength of their arm, above all their ingenuity and energy, to make a better future for us all. Those who stand on the pinnacles of power should be shamed by the more earnest commitments of those who labor anonymously below.

We complain of a lack of national purpose, but if we are big enough in ourselves and in our dealings with each other, we will rediscover it in ourselves and our countrymen.

It was a year when we faltered in this search; when losing faith in ourselves we listened to others, whether to those who say our nationalism is flawed or those who take it upon themselves to instruct us that our future confidence as a nation rests entirely on whether we do, or do not, keep the American facilities after 1991.

Our nationalism should stand upon a larger ground than the hectareage of the bases; it should turn on something higher than the insults of short-time journalists.

Do not let anyone dictate to us where our national pride should be. We know where it lies: In a sense of our past and a sense of our destiny; in the confidence of what we can make of this nation when we are united again by trust.

We saw what can be. A vision was born in EDSA. A vision of the future, of a people standing together, not just for four days on a highway, but on and on as a nation.

''Nakita natin kung ana ang maaaring maganap. Isang larawang diwa ang isinilang sa EDSA. Isang larawang diwa ng sambayanang nagkabuklod-buklod na nanindigan, hindi lamang sa loob ng apat na araw sa isang karaniwang lansangan .. kundi isang bansa. . . magpakailanman.''


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Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 2.djvu/247

 and driving off a number of the inhabitants into slavery. The king, necessarily engaged at a distance, suffered these injuries with a degree of impatience; and, after having provided for the security of the several countries immediately near him, he marched with his army directly for Woggora, committing every degree of excess in his march, in order to provoke the Falasha to descend from their heights and offer him battle.

oeconomical people, such as the Jews are, could not bear to see their cattle and crops destroyed in so wanton a manner before their very faces. They came, therefore, down in immense numbers to attack the king, one of the most excellent generals Abyssinia ever had, at the head of a small, but veteran army. Geshen, brother of the famous Gideon, was then king of the Jews, and commanded the army of his countrymen. The battle was fought on the plain of Woggora on the 19th of January 1594, with the success that was to be expected. Four thousand of the Jewish army were slain upon the spot; and, among them, Geshen, their unfortunate king and leader.

this victory, Sertza Denghel marched his army into Kuara, through the country where the Jews had many strong-holds, and received everywhere their submission. Then turning to the left, he came through the country of the Shangalla, called Woombarea, and so to that of the Agows. There he heard that new troubles were meditating in Damot; but the inhabitants of that province were not yet ripe enough to break out into open rebellion.