University, Washington; Rev. Thomas Hughes, S.J., and Rev. Rudolf J. Meyer, S.J., Rome, Italy; Dr. N. Murakami, Imperial University, Tokyo, Japan; Sr.  D. Vicente Vignau y Balester, Director of Archivo Historico-Nacional, Madrid; Sr.  D. Conde de Ramonones, Minister of Public Instruction, Madrid; Sr.  D.W.E.  Retana, Civil Governor of province of Huesca, Spain; Sr.  D. Clemente Miralles de Imperial (director) and Sr.  D. J. Sanchez Garrigos (librarian), of Compania General de Tabacos de Filipinas, Barcelona; Rev. Julius Alarcon, S.J., Rev. Joaquin Sancho, S.J., Rev. J.M. de Mendia, S.J., and the late Rev. Jose Maria Velez, S.J., Madrid; Rev. T. M. Obeso, S.J., Bilbao; Rev. Jose Algue, S.J., Director of Observatory, Manila, Luzon; Fray Tirso Lopez, O.S.A., and Fray Antonio Blanco, O.S.A., Colegio de Agustinos, Valladolid; Sr.  Antonio Rodriguez Villa, Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid; Sr.  Roman Murillo y Ollo, Librarian, Real Academia Espanola, Madrid; and officials of Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid; Sr.  Gabriel Pereira, Director of Bibliotheca Nacional, Lisbon; Sr.  P.A. d’Azevedo, Director of Archivo Nacional (Torre do Tombo), Lisbon; Sr.  Jose Duarte Ramalho Ortigao (director) and Sr.  Jordao A. de Freitas (official), Bibliotheca Real da Ajuda, Lisbon; officials of Academia Real das Sciencias, Lisbon; and officials of U.S.  Legations, Lisbon and Madrid.

Emma Helen Blair James Alexander Robertson

Historical Introduction

by Edward Gaylord Bourne

The American people are confronted with two race problems, one within their own confines and long familiar but still baffling solution; the other, new, remote, unknown, and even more imperatively demanding intelligent and unremitting effort for its mastery.

In the first case there are some eight millions of people ultimately derived from various savage tribes in Africa but long since acclimatized, disciplined to labor, raised to civilized life, Christianized, and by the acquisition of the English language brought within a world of ideas inaccessible to their ancestors.  Emancipated by the fortune of war they are now living intermingled with a ruling race, in it, but not of it, in an unsettled social status, oppressed by the stigma of color and harassed and fettered by race prejudice.

In the other case there are six or seven millions of Malays whose ancestors were raised from barbarism, taught the forms and manners of civilized life, Christianized, and trained to labor by Catholic missionaries three centuries ago.  A common religion and a common government have effaced in large measure earlier tribal differences and constituted them a people; yet in the fullest sense of the word a peculiar people.  They stand unique as the only large mass of Asiatics converted to Christianity in modern times.  They have not, like the African, been brought within the Christian pale by being torn from their natural environment