to utilizing
existing agencies as much as possible, developing native initiative and
control in local matters as fast and as far as we can, and ultimately
giving them the greatest degree of self-government for which they prove
themselves fitted.

Under any conditions that exist now, or have existed for three hundred
years, a homogeneous native government over the whole archipelago is
obviously impossible. Its relations to the outside world must
necessarily be assumed by us. We must preserve order in Philippine
waters, regulate the harbors, fix and collect the duties, apportion the
revenue, and supervise the expenditure. We must enforce sanitary
measures. We must retain such a control of the superior courts as shall
make justice certainly attainable, and such control of the police as
shall insure its enforcement. But in all this, after the absolute
authority has been established, the further the natives can themselves
be used to carry out the details, the better.

Such a system might not be unwise even for a colony to which we had
reason to expect a considerable emigration of our own people. If
experience of a kindred nation in dealing with similar problems counts
for anything, it is certainly wise for a distant dependency, always to
be populated mainly, save in the great cities, by native races, and
little likely ever to be quite able to stand alone, while,
nevertheless, we wish to help it just as much as possible to that end.

[Sidenote: The Duty of Public Servants.]

Certainly this is no bed of flowery ease in the dreamy Orient to which
we are led. No doubt these first glimpses of the task that lies before
us, as well as the warfare with distant tribes into which we have been
unexpectedly plunged, will provoke for the time a certain discontent
with our new possessions. But on a far-reaching question of national
policy the wise public man is not so greatly disturbed by what people
say in momentary discouragement under the first temporary check. That
which really concerns him is what people at a later day, or even in a
later generation, might say of men trusted with great duties for their
country, who proved unequal to their opportunities, and through some
short-sighted timidity of the moment lost the chance of centuries.

It is quite true, as was recently reported in what seemed an
authoritative way from Washington, that the Peace Commissioners were
not entirely of one mind at the outset, and equally true that the