ised to civilized life,
Christianized, and by the acquisition of the English language brought
within a world of ideas inaccessible to their ancestors. Emancipated
by the fortune of war they are now living intermingled with a ruling
race, in it, but not of it, in an unsettled social status, oppressed
by the stigma of color and harassed and fettered by race prejudice.

In the other case there are six or seven millions of Malays whose
ancestors were raised from barbarism, taught the forms and manners
of civilized life, Christianized, and trained to labor by Catholic
missionaries three centuries ago. A common religion and a common
government have effaced in large measure earlier tribal differences
and constituted them a people; yet in the fullest sense of the word a
peculiar people. They stand unique as the only large mass of Asiatics
converted to Christianity in modern times. They have not, like the
African, been brought within the Christian pale by being torn from
their natural environment and schooled through slavery; but, in their
own home and protected from general contact with Europeans until
recent times, they have been moulded through the patient teaching,
parental discipline, and self-sacrificing devotion of the missionaries
into a whole unlike any similar body elsewhere in the world. They,
too, by the fortunes of war have lost their old rulers and guides
and against their will submit their future to alien hands. To govern
them or to train them to govern themselves are tasks almost equally
perplexing, nor is the problem made easier or clearer by the clash
of contradictory estimates of their culture and capacity which form
the ammunition of party warfare.

What is needed is as thorough and intelligent a knowledge of their
political and social evolution as a people as can be gained from
a study of their history. In the case of the Negro problem the
historical sources are abundant and accessible and the slavery
question is accorded, preeminent attention in the study of American
history. In the Philippine question, however, although the sources
are no less abundant and instructive they are and have been highly
inaccessible owing, on the one hand, to the absolute rarity of the
publications containing them, and, on the other, to their being
in a language hitherto comparatively little studied in the United
States. To collect these sources, scattered and inaccessible as they
are, to reproduce them and interpret them in t