But most of all I wuz interested in the educational exhibit.  So anxious have they been to learn night schools have had to be established.  The big normal school building in Manila is handsome enough for any American city, and the smaller district and industrial schools are doing jest as good work.  Our Government sent five hundred and forty teachers there in 1901, and now we have about seven hundred there.  I took comfort in seein’ the great work they have done, as well as the church and private schools, and how well they’re learning and getting along.

Anyone could spend five weeks at least jest at the Philippine display, and find abundance to interest ’em all the time in the educational, art, manufacturing, horticultural, agricultural and other displays, but we hadn’t no five weeks to spend, so we had to move on, but I felt proud enough to see what my revered Uncle Sam had done and wuz doing.

Truly he took a big job on his hands to take care of such an immense family, and differin’ so widely in cultivation, temperament and clothes, to lead the ignorant ones into civilization and keep peace in the family and among his own folks.

He’ll have as hard work to do it as that widower I hearn on who had three or four children of his own, and married a widow who also had a number, and then they had several, and one day she came callin’ to her husband, “Come quick! come quick!  Your children and my children are fightin’ with our children.”

But Uncle Sam will be on hand, he’ll wade right in with a birch gad or a spellin’ book, jest which he thinks they need most at the time, and settle the differences all right, and I believe it will be a star in his crown in time to come:  turning the savages and cannibals that inhabit part of these new possessions into good American citizens.

I don’t spoze I shall see the day when this shall fully come to pass, and mebby the babies of to-day will be great-grandpas before it takes place, but it will be, I believe, and so duz Josiah.

Yes, he’s doin’ a good job by his step-children, I guess they would be called that seein’ he stepped in when they wuz poor and oppressed and took ’em under his care.

I honor him for it, but wish he would do as well by his steal children, the dark complexioned ones stole away from their own land to be slaves and drudges for his white children.

He’ll mebby tell me they wuz ignorant and degraded and wuz better off here than in their own land, but I’ll say back to him, “Samuel, Josiah and I would probable be in a better house and more high-toned society if some king or other should steal us and carry us away from our humble farm to their palace.  But do you spoze we would enjoy ourselves as well?  No indeed!”

And ’tennyrate they’re here, the problem that lays so heavy on the Southern and Northern heart and conscience and the riddle gits harder and harder to solve.  The lurid blaze of livin’ torches makes bloody blindness in the eyes of them that look on and light them fires.  The disgraceful glare flames out, shamin’ you in the eyes of the world, and streams up to the pityin’ heavens askin’ for justice.