Such as they are, the schoolboy desires to be.  One of the periodic frenzies of the local American press is an appeal to teachers—­why are they not remodelling character, why do not the aims and ideals which it is their business to instil make a greater showing after ten years of American occupation?  American teachers have talked themselves hoarse, and as far as talking can go, they have influenced ideals.  The child’s conscious ideal about which he talks in public, and to which he devotes about one one-thousandth of his thinking time, is some such person as George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, or James A. Garfield, who drove the canal boat and rose to be President of the United States.  But the subconscious ideal which is always in his mind, upon which he patterns unthinkingly his speech and his manners and his dreams of success, is—­and it would be unnatural if it were otherwise—­some local potentate who will not carry home his own little bag of Conant currency when he receives his salary at the end of the month.  What are a name and a few moral platitudes about a dead-and-gone hero?  What can they mean to a shirtless urchin with a hungry stomach, against the patent object-lesson of his own countryman whom not only his fellow citizens, but the invader, must treat with consideration?  It would be far easier to distract the attention of the children of the State of Ohio from their distinguished fellow-citizens, William H. Taft and John D. Rockefeller, to fix it upon the late Lord Cromer or that Earl of Halifax known as the “Trimmer,” than it is to tell a Filipino child that the way to distinction lies through toil and sweat.  Children are very patient about listening to talk, but they are going to pattern themselves upon what is obvious.  Twenty or thirty years from now, when the American school system will have aided certain sons of the people, men of elemental strength, to bully and fight their way to the front, and they will have become the evidence that we were telling the truth—­then will the results be visible in more things than in annual school commencements and in an increase in the output of stenographers and bookkeepers.

The weakest point in a Filipino child’s character is his quick jealousy and his pride.  His jealousy is of the sort constitutionally inimical to solidarity.  Paradoxical as the statement may seem, the Filipinos are more aristocratic in their theories of life than we are, and more democratic in their individual constitution.  Our democracy has always been tempered by common sense and practicality.  We like to say at church that all men are brothers, and on the Fourth of July to declare that they are born free and equal; but we do not undertake to put these theories into practice.  Every individual citizen of the United States is not walking about with a harrowing dread of doing something that admits a lesser self-esteem than his neighbor may possess.  If a fire breaks out in his neighborhood, and a little action on his part can stop it before