A Filipino cacique is quite a different being.  He owes his prestige to fear—­material fear of the consequences which his wealth and power can bring down on those that cross him.  He does not have to play a hypocritical role.  He need neither assume to be, nor be, a saint in his private or public life.  He must simply be in control of enough resources to attach to him a large body of relatives and friends whose financial interests are tied up with his.  Under the Spanish regime he had to stand in by bribery with the local governor.  Under the American regime, with its illusions of democracy, he simply points to his clientele and puts forward the plea that he is the natural voice of the people.  The American Government, helpless in its great ignorance of people, language, and customs, is eager to find the people’s voice, and probably takes him at his word.  Fortified by Government backing, he starts in to run his province independently of law or justice, and succeeds in doing so.  There are no newspapers, there is no real knowledge among the people of what popular rights consist in, and no idea with which to combat his usurpations.  The men whom he squeezes howl, but not over the principle.  They simply wait the day of revolution.  Even where there is a real public sentiment which condemns the tyrant, it is half the time afraid to assert itself, for the tyrant’s first defence is that they oppose him because he is a friend of the American Government.  Local justice of the peace courts are simply farcical, and most of the cacique’s violations of right keep him clear at least of the courts of first instance, where the judiciary, Filipino or American, is reliable.  Thus our Government, in its first attempts to introduce democratic institutions, finds itself struggling with the very worst evil of democracy long before it can make the virtues apparent.

The poor people among the Filipinos live in a poverty, a misery, and a happiness inconceivable to our people who have not seen it.  Their poverty is real—­not only relative.  Their houses are barely a covering from rain or sun.  A single rude bamboo bedstead and a stool or two constitute their furniture.  There is an earthen water jar, another earthen pot for cooking rice, a bolo for cutting, one or two wooden spoons, and a cup made of cocoanut shells.  The stove consists of three stones laid under the house, or back of it, where a rice-pot may be balanced over the fire laid between.  There are no tables, no linen, no dishes, no towels.  The family eat with their fingers while sitting about on the ground with some broken banana leaves for plates.  Coffee, tea, and chocolate are unknown luxuries to them.  Fish and rice, with lumps of salt and sometimes a bit of fruit, constitute their only diet.  In the babies this mass of undigested half-cooked rice remains in the abdomen and produces what is called “rice belly.”  In the adults it brings beriberi, from which they die quickly.  They suffer