it gets a dangerous start, he does not hesitate to act for fear doing so will show him possessed of less personal pride than his neighbor up the street.  If he is earning sixty dollars a month, and learns that some other employee in another house is getting more money for the same work, he does not take the chances of starvation because to submit to the condition is to admit that he is less important than another man.  Yet the whole laboring element of the Filipino people is permeated by just such a spirit.  It is practically impossible to fix a price for labor or for produce by any of the laws of supply and demand that regulate such things elsewhere.  The personal jealousies, the personal assertions of individuals continually interfere with the normal conditions of trade.  If in the market some American comes along in a hurry and pays a peso for a fish, the normal price of which is about thirty-five cents, the price of fish goes up all through the market—­for Americans.  You may offer eighty cents and be refused, and the owner will sell two minutes after to a Filipino for thirty-five.  But in so doing he does not “lose his face.”  The other man got a peso from an American, and a man who takes less—­from an American—­is owning himself less able than his companions.

We talk of democracy, but we never know how little democratic we are till we come in contact with the real article.  Can you conceive what would be the commercial chaos of America to-morrow if the humblest laborer had the quick personal pride of the millionaire?  With all our alleged democracy, we realize the impossibility of ringing Mrs. Vanderbilt’s doorbell and asking her to sell us a few flowers from her conservatory or to direct us to a good dressmaker, though we can take just such liberties with houses where the evidences that money would be welcome are patent.

The American laborer does not mind going to and from his work in laboring clothes, and he makes no attempt to seem anything but a laboring man.  But you cannot tell in a Manila street car whether the white-clad man at your side is a government clerk at sixty pesos a month or a day laborer at fifteen.  I once lost a servant because I commanded him to carry some clothes to my laundress.  “Go on the street with a bundle of clothes, and get into the street car with them!  I would rather die!” he said; and he quitted rather than do it.

Compare that with the average common-sense attitude of the American laboring man or even the professional man.  Until he becomes really a great man and lives in the white light of publicity, the American citizen does not concern himself with his conduct at all as it relates to his personal importance.  He is likely to argue that he cannot do certain things which violate his ideal of manhood, or other things which are inconsistent in a member of the church, or other things which are unworthy of a democrat, or of a member of the school board, or even of an “all-round