hich Filipinos
are passing. We cannot conceive of Robert Fulton tearing his hair
and undertaking a course in mechanics with the ulterior view of
inventing something to prove that the American race is an inventive
one. We cannot imagine Eli Whitney buried in thought, wondering how he
could make a cotton gin to disprove the statement that the Americans
are an unprogressive people. Cyrus Hall McCormick did not go out and
manufacture a reaper because he was infuriated by a German newspaper
taunt that the Americans were backward in agriculture. Nor can we
fancy that John Hay while dealing with the Chinese crisis in 1900 was
continually distracting his mind from the tremendously grave points
at issue by wondering if he could not do something a little cleverer
than the other diplomats would do.

All the natural laws of development are turned around in the
Philippines, and motives which should belong to the crowning years
of a nation's life seem to have become mixed in at the beginning--a
condition, due, of course, to the fact that the Filipinos began
the march of progress at a time when the telegraph and the cable
and books and newspapers and globe-trotters submitted their early
development to a harrowing comparison and observation. The Filipino
is like an orphan baby, not allowed to have his cramps and colic and
to cut his teeth in the decent retirement of the parental nursery,
but dragged out instead into distressing publicity, told that his
wails are louder, his digestive habits more uncertain, his milk teeth
more unsatisfactory, than the wails or the digestive habits or the
milk teeth of any other baby that ever went through the developing
process. Naturally he is self-conscious, and--let us be truthful--not
having been a very promising baby from the beginning, both he and
his nurses have had a hard time.

However, turned around or not, we are not responsible for the
condition. The Filipinos had arrived at the self-conscious stage
before we came here, and we have had to accept the situation and make
the best of it.

The American press of Manila, with the very best of intentions, has
indulged itself in much editorial comment, and the more the condition
of things is discussed, the more the native press strengthens in its
quick sensitiveness. The present attitude of the upper, or governing,
class of Filipinos is this: "We want the best of everything in the
world--of education, of morals, of business methods, of social pol