from boils and impure blood and many skin diseases.  Consumption is rife, and rheumatism attacks old and young alike.  They are tormented by gnats and mosquitoes, and frequently to rid themselves of the pests build fires under the house and sleep away the hot tropical night in the smoke.  While the upper classes are abstemious, the lower orders drink much of the native vino, which is made from the sap of cocoanut and nipa trees, and the men are often brutal to women and children.

I think the most hopeful person must admit that this is an enumeration of real and not fancied evils, that the old saw about happiness and prosperity being relative terms is not applicable.  The Filipino laborer is still far below even the lowest step of the relative degree of prosperity and happiness.  Yet in spite of these ills he is happy because he has not developed enough to achieve either self-pity or self-analysis.  He bears his pain, when it comes, as a dumb animal does, and forgets it as quickly when it goes.  When the hour of death descends, he meets it stoically, partly because physical pain dulls his senses, partly because the instinct of fatalism is there in spite of his Catholicism.

Of course this poverty-stricken condition is largely his own fault.  He has apparently an ineradicable repugnance to continued labor.  He does not look forward to the future.  Fathers and mothers will sit the whole day playing the guitar and singing or talking, after the fashion of the country, with not a bite of food in the house.  When their own desires begin to reinforce the clamors of the children, they will start out at the eleventh hour to find an errand or an odd bit of work.  There may be a single squash on the roof vine waiting to be plucked and to yield its few centavos, or they can go out to the beach and dig a few cents’ worth of clams.

The more intelligent of the laboring class attach themselves as cliente to the rich land-holding families.  They are by no means slaves in law, but they are in fact; and they like it.  The men are agricultural laborers; the women, seamstresses, house servants, and wet nurses, and they also do the beautiful embroideries, the hat-plaiting, the weaving of pina, sinamay, and jusi, and the other local industries which are carried on by the upper class.  The poor themselves have nothing to do with commerce; that is in the hands of the well-to-do.

As the children of the clientele grow up, they are scattered out among the different branches of the ruling family as maids and valets.  In a well-to-do Filipino family of ten or twelve children, there will be a child servant for every child in the house.  The little servants are ill-fed creatures (for the Filipinos themselves are merciless in what they exact and parsimonious in what they give), trained at seven or eight years of age to look after the room, the clothing, and to be at the beck and call of another child, usually a little older, but ofttimes younger