do you think it will
take two hundred years, honestly, to subjugate the Filipinos, and tame
them, so that they will eat out of our hands?"

"Well, we ought to do it in half the time the Spaniards have been trying
and failed," said the old man, as he slapped a mosquito that was eating
him. "There, you see that mosquito is dead. No doubt about that, is
there? But what effect does the death of that mosquito have on the nine
or ten million of his race that are out here in the woods? This one
simply got through the screen, and bucked up against a sure thing,
and his bravery, or gall, got him killed, and I may think I am a hero
because I killed him. But let me take my gun and go out in the woods, or
on the marsh, where there are a million mosquitos to one of me, and what
kind of a life will they let me lead? I should have to be slapping and
kicking all the time, and couldn't attend to my shooting. It is just so
with those Filipinos. They will stay in the jungles and breed, and enjoy
the malaria and the rainy season, and a few will go around the camps and
sing their songs, and keep the soldiers awake, and bite and poison
them, and shoot and stab, and when the soldiers chase them they will
go farther into the jungle, harass the flanks of the boys that are
discouraged, and when another year is gone there will be more Filipinos
than there are now, better armed, and hating the Americans worse than
ever.. We may take towns, hold them if we have troops enough, and start
a new graveyard at every place we try to hold, and when we give it up
and go away, the human mosquitos will return buzzing and biting, and
they will dig up the remains of some mother's boy, just to get the
gold filling out of his teeth. If the war keeps on a few hundred years,
instead of one large cemetery at Manila, that can be watched and kept
a sacred spot, we shall have hundreds of small graveyards all over the
archipelago, where the boys in blue that are buried will find it mighty
lonesome when we take the living soldiers away. No, boy, it will not
take two hundred years to subdue the Filipinos. That is, we will not be
working at the job that long, because we are not built that way. If we
find we have got into a hornet's nest, and that the hornets don't
have any honey, anyway, and that we don't need hornets in our regular
business, somebody in authority will be apt to know when we have got
enough, and we will probably shake the dice with some nation that is
so