not the aims and ideals
which it is their business to instil make a greater showing after ten
years of American occupation? American teachers have talked themselves
hoarse, and as far as talking can go, they have influenced ideals. The
child's _conscious ideal_ about which he talks in public, and to
which he devotes about one one-thousandth of his thinking time, is
some such person as George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, or James
A. Garfield, who drove the canal boat and rose to be President of
the United States. But the subconscious ideal which is always in
his mind, upon which he patterns unthinkingly his speech and his
manners and his dreams of success, is--and it would be unnatural if
it were otherwise--some local potentate who will not carry home his
own little bag of Conant currency when he receives his salary at the
end of the month. What are a name and a few moral platitudes about a
dead-and-gone hero? What can they mean to a shirtless urchin with a
hungry stomach, against the patent object-lesson of his own countryman
whom not only his fellow citizens, but the invader, must treat with
consideration? It would be far easier to distract the attention of the
children of the State of Ohio from their distinguished fellow-citizens,
William H. Taft and John D. Rockefeller, to fix it upon the late Lord
Cromer or that Earl of Halifax known as the "Trimmer," than it is to
tell a Filipino child that the way to distinction lies through toil
and sweat. Children are very patient about listening to talk, but
they are going to pattern themselves upon what is obvious. Twenty or
thirty years from now, when the American school system will have aided
certain sons of the people, men of elemental strength, to bully and
fight their way to the front, and they will have become the evidence
that we were telling the truth--then will the results be visible in
more things than in annual school commencements and in an increase
in the output of stenographers and bookkeepers.

The weakest point in a Filipino child's character is his quick jealousy
and his pride. His jealousy is of the sort constitutionally inimical
to solidarity. Paradoxical as the statement may seem, the Filipinos
are more aristocratic in their theories of life than we are, and more
democratic in their individual constitution. Our democracy has always
been tempered by common sense and practicality. We like to say at
church that all men are brothers, and on the Fourth of Jul