live up to the traditions of race and family.  When I took my book to her in the joy of an author in her first complete production, she looked at it a minute and burst into tears.  “Poor Filipino trash!” was all she could say for a long time, and I finally pieced it out that she was enraged because the Filipino boys and girls in my book were sometimes barefooted, sometimes clad in chinelas, and wore native camisas instead of American suits and dresses.  I pointed out to her that not one Filipino child in a hundred dresses otherwise, but my argument was of no avail.  The children in the American readers wore natty jackets and hats and high-heeled shoes, and winter wraps, even at play, and she wanted the Filipino children to look the same.

A great deal has been said in the American press about the eagerness for education here.  The desire for education, however, does not come from any real dissatisfaction which the Filipinos have with themselves, but from eagerness to confute the reproach which has been heaped upon them of being unprogressive and uneducated.  It is an abnormal condition, the result of association of a people naturally proud and sensitive with a people proud and arrogant.  At present the desire for progress in things educational and even in things material is more or less ineffective because it is fed from race sensitiveness rather than from genuine discontent with the existing order of things.  The educated classes of Filipinos are not at all dissatisfied with the kind and quality of education which they possess; agriculturists are not dissatisfied with their agricultural implements; the artisans are not, as a class, dissatisfied with their tools or ashamed of their labor.  If you talk to a Filipino carpenter about the carefully constructed houses of America, he does not sigh.  He merely says, “That is very good for America, but here different custom,” Filipino cooks are not dissatisfied with the terrible fugons which fill their eyes with smoke and blacken the cooking utensils, and have to be fanned and puffed at every few minutes and occasionally set the house on fire.  The natural causes of growth are not widely existent, and it is still problematic if they will ever come into being.  Meanwhile growth goes on stimulated by the eternal criticism, the sting of which the Filipinos would move heaven and earth to escape.

Our own national progress and that of the European nations from whom we are descended have been so differently conceived and developed that we can hardly realize the peculiar process through which Filipinos are passing.  We cannot conceive of Robert Fulton tearing his hair and undertaking a course in mechanics with the ulterior view of inventing something to prove that the American race is an inventive one.  We cannot imagine Eli Whitney buried in thought, wondering how he could make a cotton gin to disprove the statement that the Americans are an unprogressive people.  Cyrus Hall McCormick did not go out and manufacture a reaper because he was infuriated by a German newspaper taunt that the Americans were backward in agriculture.  Nor can we fancy that John Hay while dealing with the Chinese crisis in 1900 was continually distracting his mind from the tremendously grave points at issue by wondering if he could not do something a little cleverer than the other diplomats would do.