The great majority of the Filipino people are simply apathetic toward the material and spiritual appliances of their present status. (Please do not infer, however, that they are apathetic toward the status itself.) Fortune is continually thrusting upon them a ready-made article, be it of transportation, of furniture, of education, or even of creed.  With no factories of its own, their land is deluged with cheap manufactured goods.  With almost no authors, they have been inundated with literature and texts.  With no experience in government, they have a complicated system presented to them, and are told to go ahead, to fulfil the requirements, to press the button, and to let the system do the rest.  And they are, with few exceptions, making the mistake of assuming that their aptitude in learning to press the button is equivalent to the power of creating the system.  They are like some daring young chauffeur who finds that he can run an automobile, and can turn it and twist it and guide it and control it with the same ease that its inventor does, and who feels that he is as fully its master—­as indeed he is, till something goes wrong.

The intelligent Filipinos who are pressing for immediate self-government have no intentions of changing the “press-the-button” system if they get what they want.  Nor can the American Government, if it remain here, do any more than it is now doing to urge the Filipino into real industrial and mental activity.  Until the Filipino takes more interest in things than he takes in himself; until he learns to approach life from some other standpoint than the social one, and with some other object than seeing how large a figure he can cut in it, it makes no difference what flag flies over his head, his national existence is an artificial one, a semblance of living nourished by the selfishness of those with whom he has commercial relations.

The intelligent Filipinos (I speak of the ordinary middle classes of Manila and the provinces, not of the really eminent Filipinos who are associated with the Government, for with them I have little acquaintance) have had so little practical contact with the great world, so little conception of what a strong commercial and manufacturing nation is, that it is impossible to make them understand that no nation of the present day can achieve greatness except by industry.  If you can get them to talk freely, you find them absorbed in a glorious dream of the Filipino people dazzling the world with pure intellectuality—­a Philippines full of poets, artists, orators, authors, musicians, and, above all, of eloquent statesmen and generals.  They do not reflect that a statesman is wasted who has nothing but a handful of underfed people to govern, and that it is commerce and agriculture which furnish the propelling power to the ship of state on which the statesman is a pilot.  They want to be progressive, and their idea of progress is a constant stream of mechanical appliances flowing