pathy felt for them at
the seat of government. It is best to be plain about this matter:
the Filipinos of the lowlands dislike the highlander as much as
they fear and dread him. They apparently can not bear the idea that
but three or four hundred years ago they too were barbarians; [47]
for this reason the consideration of the highlander is distasteful
and offensive to them. The appropriations of the Philippine Assembly
for the necessary administration of the Mountain Province are none
too great; they would cease entirely could the Assembly have its own
way in the matter. The system of communications, so well begun and
already so productive of happy results, would come to an end. To turn
the destiny of the highlander over to the lowlander is, figuratively
speaking, simply to write his sentence of death; to condemn as fair a
land as the sun shines on to renewed barbarism. We are shut up to this
conclusion, not by theoretical considerations, but by experience. The
matter is worth examining a little closely, covering, as it does,
not only the hill tribes, but non-Christians everywhere else.

Certain persons have demanded from time to time that the control
of non-Christian tribes shall be turned over to the Filipinos. Now,
pointing out in passing that the Filipinos and the non-Christians are
distinct peoples, fully as distinct as the Dutch and the Germans,
and that the Filipinos have no just claim to the ownership of the
territory occupied by the wild men, let us ask ourselves if the
Filipinos are able and fit to control the non-Christian tribes. [48]

Consider for a moment the facts set out in the
following extracts:

"With rare exceptions, the Filipinos are profoundly ignorant of the
wild men and their ways. They seem to have failed to grasp the fact
that the non-Christians, who have been contemptuously referred to in
the Filipino press as a 'few thousand savages asking only to be let
alone,' number approximately a million and constitute a full eighth
of the population of the Archipelago."

"The average hillman hates the Filipinos on account of the abuses which
his people have suffered at their hands, and despises them because of
their inferior physical development and their comparatively peaceful
disposition, while the average Filipino who has ever come in close
contact with wild men despises them on account of their low social
development, and, in the case of the more warlike tribes, fears them
because of their pas