Islands. Mr. Taft says: "Not only did the existence of actual war prevent farming, but the spirit of laziness and restlessness brought about by guerrilla life affected the willingness of the natives to work in the fields. More than this, the natural hatred for the Americans which a war vigorously conducted by American soldiers was likely to create, did not make the coming of real peace easy."

When the war ended the ladrones were still about and were still keen to live in idleness by blackmail. They needed considerable attention. There was the great mass of the population, 5,000,000 out of 7,000,000 of whom could neither read nor write, and who had sixteen spoken languages, no one of which was recognizably like any of the others. It recalled the Tower of Babel. There was no Esperanto. Every community was under a boss who ruled chiefly because

of the fact that he could read and write. Master or owner might be a more correct word than boss. He had far too much power. "The history of the insurrection," says Mr. Taft, "and of the condition of lawlessness which succeeded the insurrection is full of instances in which simple-minded country folk, at the bidding of the local leader, have committed the most horrible crimes of torture and murder, and when arrested and charged with it, have merely pleaded that they were ordered to commit the crime by the great man of the community."

This irresponsible power which the bosses possessed over communities would have been fatal to anything like successful government had the Islands been handed over to Fili

pinos. Filipino leaders, whether bosses or municipal officials, were given to oppression and subject to corruption. There was no public opinion to restrain them, and could not be where eighty per cent of the inhabitants were wholly without education, a prey to fraud, mistreatment, to religious fakirs

a condition, in short, that was intolerable altogether, and which demanded far-seeing vision to apply the remedy.

In another chapter I shall show how William Howard Taft appeared, applied - and

5

CHAPTER X.

PANISH friars have made possible the
Americanization of the Filippines;

have made it certain that the Filipinos can become self-governing. They blazed the trail and prepared the way by converting the Filipinos to Christianity three hundred years ago. The Filipinos have been professing Christians ever since; the only Christian

race in the Orient. "The friars," says Mr. Taft, "beat back the wave of Mohammedanism and spread their religion through all the Islands. They taught the people the arts of agriculture. They preached to them in their own dialect. They lived and died among them. They controlled them. The friars left the people a Christian people that is, a people with Western ideals, who looked

towards Rome, Europe and America. They were not like the Mohammedan or the Buddhist, who despise Western civilization as inferior. They were in a state of tutelage, ripe to receive modern Western conceptions as they should be educated to understand them. This is the reason why I believe that the whole Christian Filipino people are capable by training and experience of becoming a self-governing people."

Those Spanish friars builded better than

The Secretary and Governor-General Smith at a Ball Game

they knew. Possibly they would have builded differently had they looked clearly into the future, but surely the Christian world owes much to these early men who, without question or hesitation, went to the uttermost parts of the earth to preach their faith, to preach it with no hope of reward or even of comfort in this world-taking, as the Master had commanded, "neither scrip nor raiment," and with only the joy of service for their recompense.