be worth while to dwell upon the matter here, were
it not for the ignorance of our people at large. It is convenient
to speak of the Filipino people, just as it is convenient to speak
of the Danish people, or of the English; but whereas, when we say
"Danish" or "English" we mean one definite thing that exists as such,
when we say "Filipino" we should understand that the term stands
for a relatively great number of very different things. For example,
confining ourselves for the moment to the Christianized tribes, it
may be asserted that the inhabitants of the great Cagayan Valley, the
tobacco-growing country, are at least as different from those of the
Visayas, the great middle group of Islands, as are the Italians from
the Spanish. Precisely similar differences, increasing, roughly, with
the difference of latitude, may be drawn almost at random between any
other pairs of the elements constituting the Filipino population. The
Ilokanos, to give only one more illustration, have almost nothing more,
in common with the Bicols than the fact that they both probably come
from the same original stock, just as the English and the Germans have
the same ancestors. All these subdivisions speak different languages,
and the vast majority do not speak Spanish at all.

But this is not all. The Filipino peoples are divided into two
great classes, the Christian and the non-Christian. Now, these
non-Christians number over a million, and are themselves broken up into
many subdivisions, not only differing in language, customs, habits and
traditions, but until very recently bitterly hostile to one another,
and so low in the scale of political development that, unlike our
own Indians, they have never risen to any conception of even tribal
government or organization. Moreover, in Moroland, in the great island
of Mindanao with its neighbors, the situation is further complicated by
the fact that the dominant elements are Mohammedan. Over most of these
non-Christians the Spaniards had not even the shadow of control. The
appellation "Filipino people" is therefore wholly erroneous; more
than that, it is even dangerously fallacious, in that its use blinds
or tends to blind our own people to the real conditions existing in
the Archipelago. It is correct to speak of the Filipino _peoples_,
because this expression is, geographically, accurately descriptive;
but it is absolutely misleading to speak of the Filipino _people_,
because of the false political