education which fits a man to be considered a gentleman and to be an adornment to the society of his peers.  They have no conception of the American specialization idea in education which grants a doctor’s degree to a man who says “would have went” and “He come to my house yesterday.”  The Filipino leaders have a perfectly clear idea of what they want educationally, of what they consider the best, and they are jealously watching the educational department to see that they get it.  The American press urges more and more manual training, and the Filipino press, because manual training is in the list of things marked “best,” echoes the general call.  But there is no small body of hobbyists in the Islands keeping a jealous eye on the manual-training department of education.  It could be dropped out of the curriculum by simply allowing it to become less and less effectual, and so long as no formal announcement was made the Filipinos would not find out what was being done.  But in Manila and in most provincial towns there are enough Filipinos who know what musical instruction is to watch that the musical training be not too badly administered.

There is plenty of complaint about the Sanitary System of Manila, there are plenty of people to complain about what is being done, but there is no small organized body of Filipinos whose paramount interest in life is fixed upon sanitation and health, and who make it their thankless task to harry the department and to preach ceaselessly at the unthinking public till they get what they want.  The legislators of the Philippines are gentlemen born, men educated in conformity to the ideals of education in aristocratic countries, but unfortunately they have not had, owing to the political conditions which have prevailed here, the practical experience of an aristocratic body in other lands.  In Mrs. Ward’s “William Ashe” there is an analysis of a gouty and rather stupid old statesman, who is so exactly a summary of what a Filipino statesman is not that I cannot forbear quoting it here: 

“He possessed that narrow, but still most serviceable fund of human experience which the English land-owner, while our English tradition subsists, can hardly escape if he will.  As guardsman, volunteer, magistrate, lord lieutenant, member (for the sake of his name and his acres) of various important commissions, as military attache even for a short time to an important embassy, he had acquired, by mere living, that for which his intellectual betters had often envied him—­a certain shrewdness, a certain instinct both for men and affairs which were often of more service to him than finer brains to other persons.”

The only large practical experience which Filipino leaders have enjoyed has come through their being land-owners and agriculturists.  But agriculture has not been competitive; and when the land-owning class travelled, it was chiefly in Spain, which can hardly be called a progressive agricultural country.  Of men of the artisan class who have worked their way up by their own efforts from ignorance to education, from poverty to riches; of men who have had any large available experience in manual labor or in specialised industries, the present Assembly feels the lack.  The Filipino leaders are a body of polished gentlemen, more versed in law than in anything else, with varying side lines of dilettante tastes in numerous directions.