Whatever their capacity for achieving the Anglo-Saxon ideal of self-government, it ought to be recognized that the Filipinos are both aided and handicapped by receiving not only their government but their civilization ready made.  Their newly aroused sense of nationality is asserting itself at a period in the world’s development when the mechanical aids to industry and the conscience of a humane and civilized world relieve Filipino development from the birth throes by which other nations have struggled to the place at which the Filipinos begin.  Thus, at the same time that individuals are spared the painful experiences which have moulded and hardened the individual units of other races, the Filipinos have, as a race, received an artificial impetus which tends to deceive them as to their own capacity, and to increase their aggregate self-confidence, while the results of personal ineptitude are continually overlooked or excused.

Both civilization, as acquired in the three hundred years of Spanish occupation, and self-government have descended upon the Filipino very much as the telephone and the music box have done—­as complete mechanisms which certain superficial touches will set in motion, the benefits of which are to certain classes and individuals quite obvious, and the basic principles of which they have memorized but have not felt.  At present there are not, in the emotional being of the Filipinos, the convictions about liberty and government which are the heritage of a people whose ancestors have achieved liberty and enlightenment by centuries of unaided effort, and who are willing to die—­die one and all—­rather than lose them; and yet there is a sincere, a passionate desire for political independence.  The Filipino leaders, however, have no intention of dying for political independence, nor do they desire to sacrifice even their personal pleasures or their effects.  They talk a great deal about independence, they write editorials about it, it fills a great part of their thoughts; and no reasonable person can doubt their sincerity.  But most of the political talk in the Philippines is on a par with certain socialistic thought in the United States—­the socialistic talk of modern writers and speakers, of idealists and dreamers.  It seems as great a perversion of abstract justice, to a Filipino, that an alien nation should administer his Government, as it seems to a hard-working American woman that she should toil all her life, contributing her utmost to the world’s progress and the common burden of humanity, while her more fortunate sisters, by the mere accident of birth, spend their lives in idleness and frivolity, enriched by the toil of a really useful element in society.  But to most Filipinos, as to most American women, the contemplation of the elemental injustice of life does not bring pangs sufficient to drive them into overt action to right the injustice.  There are a few Filipinos upon whom the American administration