of Lands as we used to do. Then we should have more land cultivated, and we should have homesteaders more numerous, more interested, and most confident in their work.

"We did have an American Director of the Bureau of Lands

some years ago.

"Then, before your land title was approved, it was properly looked into by an American inspector who understood his work and who really went to the place and made a real examination of the land and gave real records. Him nobody could frighten or buy. We should have all American inspectors of land. If we had, my poor old father would not have been robbed of all he owned, and left stripped and miserable in his last days.

"When the Americans first came, we taos were told, by the caciques, that Americans are all huge monsters who devour everything and who chop off the heads of every Filipino they can catch. But then, after a month or so, we saw that Americans hurt no one, and paid for every bunch of bananas, every mango, every egg they took. And from that time we knew that if America had not come we should have lost all hope in the world.

"When Aguinaldo's Insurrection ended we taos, wherever his 'army' had been, had no fowls, only small chicks. No carabaos. No more salt. No crops-for no one had planted. What was the use?

"Now what we want is a peaceful condition--a chance to work undisturbed and to save-to get ready for the future. I said I want Independence. I do. We all do. But not for two or three hundred yo yet. Let us taos get ready, first. Do not hand us over, helpless as we now are, and ignorant, to the mercy of our robbers.

"Our homesteaders here are very busy raising rice. Very contented. They don't notice what the politicos in Manila do and say. They would not understand if they did. They could only gauge what 'Independence' would mean after the change had come. And then they would use their bolos.

"Only those leaders who are strong to-day and who are now speaking in the United States, want Independence now. All the weak, all the speechless, don't want it, because they know all the power would remain in the hands of the oppressors.

"We shall not always be afraid before them, if you will give us a chance, and your protection, to grow strong. But to-day we could not hold our own. They would take away all that we have gained under America. Quezon, Aguinaldo and those others—they would be the head of the Islands. And all their train would have a free hand against us.

"As to these rice-growers-these homesteaders-if you ask them if they want 'Independence,' they will say yes. Because they have been told by political speech-makers that 'Independence' means paying no more taxes and doing no more work -a sort of magic to make everybody rich and idle. But they have no idea at all, beyond that, what the word signifies.

"Ask them if they want America to go away. Ask them how many years they want America to keep on governing them, and you will get the truth-if no politico is listening.

"Or, if they understand a little, they are afraid to speak straight out, because they know that if they are reported to be speaking against Independence, their houses will be burned, their crops,fired, their animals killed and more. Because that is just what is done."

"Independence! Why, we have Independence now!"

In closing this statement I wish to declare that I have made what amends I can for exposing its author by printing it. That is to say, I shall be informed by cable if, after its publication, any reprisals, direct or indirect, are begun upon the man who has risked his life to lay his people's case before America.

Chapter VII

MIDNIGHT TO MORNING

AND now, perhaps, the time is ripe for a little historic survey of the ground.

Where did all these people come from-these present-day "Christian Filipinos" with whom the earlier chapters have been concerned?

From Indo-China, from Borneo, from the west and the south, beginning two thousand years or more ago, came the ancestors of the tao millions of to-day. Wave by wave they came, sailing in their cockleshell boats, through succeeding centuries. And the first of the lot found already on the soil a set of curious little black fellows-pygmies with woolly heads, great shots with poisoned arrows, a race both timid and fierce.

But, before the newcomers, the pygmies fled to remote mountain forests where, known as "negritos," their descendants still survive unchanged. And the ancestors of the taos slipped into the pygmies' nests, squatting on their rich lowlands-the hot, rich, jungle lowlands, where men scarcely need to work.

Just as they had come in their cockleshell boats, strangers and foreigners to each other, without intercognizance or plan, so, party by party, they camped upon the land, starting their separate and unrelated settlements. And, as centuries still swung on, so they remained. Each settlement, as it gradually multiplied to many settlements, to a tribe, still retained its apartness-its tribal language and name and habits, its peculiar superstitions and ideas. And each looked at each other askance. No co-operation existed among them-no sort of understanding or union. Nor had any tribal unit a tribal gov

ernment. But each cluster of families-each village, obeyed its own strongest member.1

Such was the grade of these people in the biological development of man.

Such, too, did it remain, while changing powers claimed ownership of the islands. The Indo-Chinese, the Bornese, the Javanese, the Chinese Empires in turn took sovereigns' tribute without affecting, the while, the actual condition of the primitive and stagnant population. Never was it free from foreign dominion, yet never did that dominion touch its life. Then of a sudden, when the fifteenth century was already halfway spent, a new planet rose. Islam, appearing in the south, flamed north and still northward until, by the end of the next hundred years, it had advanced as far as the present Manila, with every prospect of casting the permanent form of the life of the whole archipelago.

And this event was only forestalled by the coming of militant missionary Spain.

Spain, herself swooping down out of the blue, established one garrison settlement at Cebu, one on the smoking ruins of the Mohammedan town where Manila now stands, and thence worked south, planting her flag along the shores.

But, try as she would, she could never subdue or greatly affect the originally Mohammedanized islands to the far southwest, neither the free high-mountain peoples-the Igorots of inmost Luzon.

The rest of the country, however, she gradually assumed, whether nominally or in fact, dividing it into provinces, establishing a sort of colonial government, organizing trading machinery, and always, under every difficulty, pushing her main purpose to Christianize the people to the greater Glory of God.

This was the task of the priests, supported at a distance by a mere handful of Spanish soldiers. The ships of Legazpi, the

1 Legazpi's Relation, July 7, 1569. Blair & Robertson, Vol. III, pp.

conqueror, brought five Augustinian friars, with but four hundred fighting men.

Legazpi's priests and their successors plunged into the stark unknown, made ghastly journeys, lived and died in hardship and privation of body and soul, in labours and dangers untold, that they might bring the heathen "under the bells." You find their big stone churches to-day, overgrown with jungle, crumbling to ruin, back in far wildernesses where, with incredible toil, they raised them two hundred years ago. You look at the rudimentary humanity about-so truly rudimentary, still, after centuries of continuance!-and you marvel at the faith and courage of those first gentlemen of the Church.

They began the long, slow lift from barbarism. And because of their heroic work and of the faithful support of Spain, the present Filipino majority stand alone as the only large mass of Asiatics converted to a profession of Christianity in modern times. The Filipino owes to the Roman Catholic Church, which taught them the outward forms of Christianity, and to Spain, which gave them a bystander's view of the forms of European law, points not often realized or confessed.

A

In the three hundred years of Spanish rule evils, however, grew up alongside the good. Weak spots, foolish spots, bad spots and big ones, at that-developed in the régime. "mestizo" class arose-half-breeds-and, as village overlords (caciques), cringing to the Spaniards above, merciless to the Malay below, enriched themselves by sucking the life of the people at its roots.

The Church did every one's thinking and preferred fixed boundaries. But the few young men that went abroad-mestizos all, or almost all-came back with new ideas. And when the opening of Suez Canal occurred, bringing suddenly more ships, more strangers, more glimpses of the world, the stir of the times had already filtered through, causing unrest.

From various roots and motives secret societies sprang up. Plots. Conspiracies. Well-grounded demands for reform. In