in the Philippines presses with a sense of personal obstruction and weight heavy enough to make them desire overt action; but upon the majority of the race the fact of an alien occupation sits very lightly.  No man, American or Filipino, wants to risk his life for the abstract principles of human justice until the circumstances of life growing out of the violation of those principles are well-nigh unendurable to him.  The actual condition of the Philippines is such that the violation of abstract justice—­that is, alien occupation—­does not bear heavily upon the mass of the people.  For the entire race alien occupation is, for the time being, an actual material benefit.  Personal liberty in the Philippines is as absolute as personal liberty in the United States or England.  Far from making any attempt to keep the native in a condition of ignorance, the alien occupiers are trying to coax or prod him, by all the short cuts known to humanity, into the semblance of a modern educated progressive man.  There is no prescription which they have tried and found good for themselves which they are not importing for the Philippines, to be distributed like tracts.  And to the quick criticism which Filipinos of the restless kind are prone to make, that what is good for an American is not necessarily good for a Filipino, the alien occupiers may reply that, until the body of the Filipino people shows more interest in developing itself, any prescription, whether it originate with Americans or with those who look upon themselves as the natural guides and rulers of this people, is an experiment to be tried at the ordinary experimental risk.

The common people of the Philippine Islands enjoy a personal liberty never previously obtained by a class so rudimentary in its education and in its industrial development.  They would fight blindly, at the command of their betters, but not because they are more patriotic than the educated classes.  The aristocrats, who would certainly hesitate to fight for their convictions, really think a great deal more about their country and love it a great deal more than do the common people, who would, under very little urging, cheerfully risk their lives.  But the poorer people live under conditions that seem hard and unjust to them.  The country is economically in a wretched state, and the working-classes have neither the knowledge nor the ambition to apply themselves to its development.  Unable to discover the real cause of their misery (which is simply their own sloth), they have heard just enough political talk to make them fancy that the form of government is responsible for their unhappy condition.  With them the causes which drive men into dying for an abstract idea do exist; and it is easy for a demagogue to convince them that the alien occupation is the root of all evil, and that a political change would make them all rich.