Among the extremely poor of the Filipinos there exists a certain amount of bitterness against Americans, because they think that our strong bodies, our undoubtedly superior health and vitality, our manner of life, which seems to them luxurious past human dreams, and our personal courage are attributes which we enjoy at their expense.  The slow centuries which have gone to our building up, mental and physical, are causes too remote for their limited thinking powers to take into consideration.  Moreover, though we say that we have come to teach them to work and to make their country great, we ourselves do not work; at least, they do not call what we do work.  A poor Filipino’s conception of work is of something that takes him into the sun or that soils his clothing.  Filipinos hate and fear the sun just as they hate the visible tokens of toil on their persons.  Where they know the genteel trades such as hat weaving, dressmaking, embroidering, tailoring, and silversmithing, there is relatively a fair industrial willingness.  Men are willing to be cooks and house servants, but they do not want to learn carpentry or blacksmithing or gardening, all of which mean soiled clothes and hot work; and women are unwilling to work in the kitchen.  From the poor Filipinos’ standpoint, the Americans do not work—­they rule.  It would be difficult to make a Filipino of the laboring class believe that a teacher or a provincial treasurer had done a day’s work.  Loving, as all Filipinos do, to give orders to others, ignorant as they are of the responsibilities which press upon those who direct, they see merely that we do not soil our hands, and they envy us without giving us credit for the really hard work that we do.

Meanwhile there pours in upon the country a stream of modern mechanism and of modern formulated thought, and the laborer has just as little real interest in knowing what is inside the machine as his slightly more intelligent neighbor has in examining the thought and in accepting or rejecting it on its merits.  Some accept all that we offer them, doing so in a spirit of real loyalty, on the assumption that we know more than they do, and that our advice is to be accepted.  Others reject everything with a blind resentment because it comes from our hands.  They feel that, in accepting or rejecting, they are demonstrating their capacity to do their own thinking, when in reality they are only asserting their right to do their own feeling.  A sense of discrimination in what they accept or reject in our thought has not yet appeared, to any great extent, in those classes of Filipinos with whom I have come in contact; nor as yet have I ever beheld in the laboring classes a desire to understand the mechanisms to which they are constantly introduced, which will be the first symptoms of growth.