speakers always had been small and always would be so.

When I had finished, the son of a local editor, arose and replied
as follows: "Yes, madame, what you say of Americans is true. But we
are different. We are a literary people. We are only eight millions,
but we have hundreds and thousands of orators. We have the literary
sense for all languages."

Nearly thirty years ago, when I was a pupil in the Kansas City,
Missouri, High School, the stepson of a United States Circuit judge
made a brutally rude and insubordinate reply to a woman teacher
who said to him, in reference to an excuse which he had given for
tardiness, "That is not a good excuse." The young man turned an
insolent eye upon the teacher--a gray-haired woman--and replied,
"It's good enough for me. What are you going to do about it?"

I cannot conceive that a Filipino child would be guilty of such
insolence, such defiance of decency and order. But never have I met
an American child who would have the artless indiscretion to put
himself in the position of Domingo. The American child does not mind
violating a rule. He is chary of criticising its propriety or its
value. In other words, the American child does not mind doing wrong,
but he is wary of making a fool of himself; and I have yet to meet
the Filipino child who entertained the faintest suspicion that it was
possible for him to make a fool of himself. Nor is the attitude of
dissent among Filipinos limited to those who express themselves. It
is sometimes very trying to feel that after long-winded eloquence,
after citation and demonstration, you have made no more real impression
upon the silent than upon the talkative, and that, indeed, the gentle
reserve of some of your auditors is based upon the conviction that
your own position is the result of indomitable ignorance. One of my
friends has met this spirit in a class in the Manila High School. A
certain boy insists that he has seen the iron head of a thunderbolt,
and although he makes "passing grades" in physics, he does not
believe in physics. He regards our explanations of the phenomena of
lightning as a parcel of foolishness in no wise to stand the test of
his own experience, and nothing can silence him. "But, ma'am," he says,
when electricity is under discussion, "I am see the head of a thunder
under our house." This young gentleman will graduate in a year or two,
and the tourist from the States will look over the course of study
of the Manila