If the task we have undertaken is higher than that assumed by other nations, its accomplishment must demand even more patience.  We must not forget that we found the Filipinos wholly untrained in government.  Up to our advent all other experience sought to repress rather than encourage political power.  It takes long time and much experience to ingrain political habits of steadiness and efficiency.  Popular self-government ultimately must rest upon common habits of thought and upon a reasonably developed public opinion.  No such foundations for self-government, let alone independence are now present in the Philippine Islands.  Disregarding even their racial heterogeneity and the lack of ability to think as a nation, it is sufficient to point out that under liberal franchise privileges only about 3 per cent of the Filipinos vote and only 5 per cent of the people are said to read the public press.  To confer independence upon the Filipinos now is, therefore, to subject the great mass of their people to the dominance of an oligarchical and, probably, exploiting minority.  Such a course will be as cruel to those people as it would be shameful to us.

Our true course is to pursue steadily and courageously the path we have thus far followed; to guide the Filipinos into self-sustaining pursuits; to continue the cultivation of sound political habits through education and political practice; to encourage the diversification of industries, and to realize the advantages of their industrial education by conservatively approved cooperative methods, at once checking the dangers of concentrated wealth and building up a sturdy, independent citizenship.  We should do all this with a disinterested endeavor to secure for the Filipinos economic independence and to fit them for complete self-government, with the power to decide eventually, according to their own largest good, whether such self-government shall be accompanied by independence.  A present declaration even of future independence would retard progress by the dissension and disorder it would arouse.  On our part it would be a disingenuous attempt, under the guise of conferring a benefit on them, to relieve ourselves from the heavy and difficult burden which thus far we have been bravely and consistently sustaining.  It would be a disguised policy of scuttle.  It would make the helpless Filipino the football of oriental politics, tinder the protection of a guaranty of their independence, which we would be powerless to enforce.

REGULATION OF WATER POWER

There are pending before Congress a large number of bills proposing to grant privileges of erecting dams for the purpose of creating water power in our navigable rivers.  The pendency of these bills has brought out an important defect in the existing general dam act.  That act does not, in my opinion, grant sufficient power to the Federal Government in dealing with the construction of such dams to exact protective