stic Americans, engineers, health officers, executives, school
teachers, Constabulary, labored on in the glory of service: eradicated
cholera, built roads and bridges, brought six hundred thousand
children into school that two score tribes might find a common tongue,
fought the devastating cattle plagues, wiped out brigandage and
piracy, brought order and first semblance of prosperity to eight
millions of people.

Young men did it all. The old-timers suddenly found that they were
living in new times, in clean, healthful towns: found that business
was increasing by leaps and bounds as the natives fell in behind the
young Americans with a quicker stride than Orientals had ever known.
And they are the reasons--those few thousands of smooth-faced
Americans who laughingly threw themselves at the wall of immemorial
sloth and apathy--why Kipling's phrase is seldom quoted east of India,
and now not often there. And they are the reasons, those carefully
chosen, confident young men of whom too many are buried over there,
that we have so much of which to be proud in what has been done in our
name for a backward, unfortunate people.

But we, you and I, do not know very much about it all: it is so far
away and we are so busy with our affairs, our politics, our--

... You know ... we are just too busy to bother about those Tagalogs
and headhunters who live over there where Dewey licked Cervera, and
Aguinaldo was king of the Igorotes or something, and Pershing rose
from a captain to a general: why, I heard one of those Filipinos make
a speech about independence and he was so smart and bright--he had
been sent to our congress or something and was handsome and polished
and....

Yes, he doubtless was. That is why he was sent: but he bore about the
same mental relation to the race he is supposed to represent as a
Supreme Court Justice bears to a Georgia cracker!

* * * * *

Terry had thoroughly assimilated the atmosphere of the Luzon provinces
in his seven months in the Islands, so he found a real pleasure in
studying a Moro town which had been under the energizing influence of
the Army for nearly two decades. He wandered slowly through the native
quarter, cutting down clean cross streets lined with neat nipa huts
inclosed behind latticed bamboo fences, enjoying the novelty of a
community different from any he had known. Every detail of the well
kept streets testified to the strictness of the standard