Students of the subject at first hand, impartial observers on the spot, declare freely that we have gone much too fast, and that we have granted a measure of political administration and government beyond the native power of assimilation and digestion.  With this opinion, sound though it be, we are not immediately concerned:  the point we wish to bring out is that the experiment we have made is not free; that the case is one of constrained motion, since everyone knows that the mighty power of the United States dominates the entire situation, and that under these conditions the Filipinos have been exercising themselves in the form of government, rather than in responsible government itself.  The Filipino government as such has faced no crisis:  behind its treasury stands that of the metropolis.  Order is assured by the garrison maintained by us, internal police by the Constabulary, another agency of American origin.  But, even if all this were not true, it is questionable if an experience of only eight or nine years affords sufficient ground for the belief that a nascent government could exist and advance under its own power alone.

Our training, ample and generous though it may have been, as it has not, for lack of time if for no other reason, prepared the native to govern himself, so it furnishes no real test of his capacity to govern himself.  Self-government is not a function of the mere ability to fill certain offices, to discharge certain routine duties of administration:  it depends for its existence and maintenance on the possession of certain qualities, and still more, perhaps, on the possession of those qualities by a majority of the people who practice or are to practice self-government, on an educated and inherited interest of the citizen in the questions affecting his welfare in so far as this is conditioned by government.  Tested in this wise, the Filipino breaks down locally; to believe that anything else will happen internationally is to blind one’s self to the teaching of experience.

But there is yet another test.  If political independence is to be of value to those who have it, if it is to endure in any useful way, it must rest on economic independence.  The state must be able to meet its obligations, and by this we do not mean merely its current bills, its housekeeping bills, as it were, but its obligations of all and whatever nature, interior police, finance, administration, dispensation of justice, communications, sanitation, education, defense.  We do not find these things too easy in our own land, and all of us can without effort bring to mind examples of independent societies in tropical regions, where, these things being neglected, the resultant government is a mockery.  Have we any reason to believe that the Filipino, untrained, inexperienced, occupying an undeveloped area of special configuration in a region where continuous effort is disagreeable and initiative distressing, will achieve success where others of greater original fitness have made a failure?