Filipinos have come in contact, not with life but with books, and their immediate ambition is to produce the things which are talked of in books.  Situated as these Islands are, remote from any great modern civilization, there is no criterion by which the inhabitants can arrive at a correct estimate of their condition.  If here and there a single Filipino educated in Europe should dazzle society with novels or plays or happy speeches, most of his countrymen would be satisfied with his vindication of Filipino capacity.

There are two things which are absolutely necessary to the future development of the Philippines, whether they remain under our flag or become independent.  One is a new aristocracy to be a new type of incentive to the laborer; the other is an increase in the laborer’s wants which will keep him toiling long after he has discovered the futility of the hopes which urged him in the beginning.  At present, the American Government is trying to remodel a social system which consists of a land-holding aristocracy and an ignorant peasantry, the latter not exactly willing to work for a pittance, but utterly helpless to extricate themselves from the necessity of doing so.  To the aristocrat the Government says, “Come and aid us to help thy brother, that he may some day rob thee of thy prerogatives”; and to the peasant, “O thou cock-fighting, fiesta-harboring son of idleness and good-nature, wake up, struggle, toil, take thy share of what lies buried in thy soil and waves upon thy mountainsides, and be as thy brother, yonder.”  Nor is my picture complete if I do not add that, under his breath, both peasant and aristocrat reply, “Fool I for what?  That I may pick thy chestnuts out of the fire.”

There is a story which illustrates the Filipino’s sensitiveness to picking somebody else’s chestnuts out of the fire, not inappropriate to be told here.  The agent of the Kelly Road Roller Company had made an agreement with a number of Filipinos in the Maraquina Valley to take up a rice thresher and to thresh their crops for one-twelfth of the output.  As this was cheaper than the usual cost of rice-threshing, they accepted the offer, but they were anxious to compare the new machine with their own system.  One way of threshing rice is to have a kind of stone table like an armchair, in which the seat is a bowl for the grain which drops down as the thresher strikes the laden stalks against the stone back.  On the appointed day the American appeared with his thresher, and the Filipinos were on hand with their stone table and a confident expert who was reputed the best rice-thresher in the district.  The American began to feed his machine, and the Filipino made his bundles cut the air.  In a few seconds the Filipino had quite a little handful of grain collected in his stone bowl, but not a grain of rice had appeared from the thresher.  The workman cast supercilious glances at the machine, when suddenly a stream of rice as thick as his wrist