more than they do, and that our advice is to be accepted. Others
reject everything with a blind resentment because it comes from
our hands. They feel that, in accepting or rejecting, they are
demonstrating their capacity to do their own thinking, when in reality
they are only asserting their right to do their own _feeling_. A sense
of discrimination in what they accept or reject in our thought has
not yet appeared, to any great extent, in those classes of Filipinos
with whom I have come in contact; nor as yet have I ever beheld in the
laboring classes a desire to understand the mechanisms to which they
are constantly introduced, which will be the first symptoms of growth.

A few weeks ago a Filipino workman was making an electric light
installation in my house. He handled the wires very carelessly, and
I asked him if he was not afraid of a shock. On his replying that
the current was very light, I put the inevitable American query, How
did the company manage to get a light current on one street, and at
the same time to keep up the current in other parts of the city? His
reply was, "There is a box on Calle San Andres, and the current goes
in strong on one side and comes out light on the other," On my asking
if he knew how the box was able to produce such a result, he replied
blithely that he did not know; and to a third question, why he did
not try to find out, he asked me why he should _want_ to know. He
was a very ignorant man, but his attitude was not uncharacteristic of
much wiser men than he. I discovered one morning, in talking to the
most advanced class in the Manila School of Arts and Trades, that not
one of them knew what steam is, or had any idea of how it is applied
to manufacture; and yet they were working every day, and had been
working, most of them for two or three years, in the machine-shops
and the wood-working shops where a petroleum engine was in constant
operation. The boys had shown such a courteous interest in what was
pointed out to them, and had so little real interest and curiosity
in what they were working with, that their shop teachers had never
guessed that they did not know the elementary principles of mechanics.

If a flying machine should suddenly descend in an American village
with no sign of steam gear, electric motor, compressed air, or any
other motive power with which we are familiar, can you imagine that
eighty per cent of the population of the village would stand around,
begging the