A few weeks ago a Filipino workman was making an electric light installation in my house.  He handled the wires very carelessly, and I asked him if he was not afraid of a shock.  On his replying that the current was very light, I put the inevitable American query, How did the company manage to get a light current on one street, and at the same time to keep up the current in other parts of the city?  His reply was, “There is a box on Calle San Andres, and the current goes in strong on one side and comes out light on the other,” On my asking if he knew how the box was able to produce such a result, he replied blithely that he did not know; and to a third question, why he did not try to find out, he asked me why he should want to know.  He was a very ignorant man, but his attitude was not uncharacteristic of much wiser men than he.  I discovered one morning, in talking to the most advanced class in the Manila School of Arts and Trades, that not one of them knew what steam is, or had any idea of how it is applied to manufacture; and yet they were working every day, and had been working, most of them for two or three years, in the machine-shops and the wood-working shops where a petroleum engine was in constant operation.  The boys had shown such a courteous interest in what was pointed out to them, and had so little real interest and curiosity in what they were working with, that their shop teachers had never guessed that they did not know the elementary principles of mechanics.

If a flying machine should suddenly descend in an American village with no sign of steam gear, electric motor, compressed air, or any other motive power with which we are familiar, can you imagine that eighty per cent of the population of the village would stand around, begging the inventor to make it fly and alight again, exhibiting all the delight of children in a strange toy, but giving it not one close glance, one touch to determine how it is made, and not even wondering anything about it?  Can you imagine all those people placidly accepting the fact that there are other nations interested in making strange machines, and receiving the strange toy as an example of foreign energy with which, at that or at any other time, they had no concern?  Yet such is the actual condition of affairs in the Philippine Islands, and I am not sure that my estimate of eighty per cent is not too low.  Filipinos of the educated classes, gentlemen who can talk about

    “The grandeur that was Greece,
    And the glory that was Rome,”

or who can quote Tom Paine or Voltaire or Rousseau, or discuss the fisherman’s ring of the Pope, or the possibilities of an Oriental race alliance, would give a glance at such a machine and dismiss it with such a remark as this:  “Ah! a new flying machine.  Very interesting.  If it proves practical, it should be a great benefit to the Philippines.  The Government should buy two or three and put them in operation to show the people how they can be used.”