her first complete production,
she looked at it a minute and burst into tears. "Poor Filipino
trash!" was all she could say for a long time, and I finally pieced
it out that she was enraged because the Filipino boys and girls in
my book were sometimes barefooted, sometimes clad in _chinelas_, and
wore native camisas instead of American suits and dresses. I pointed
out to her that not one Filipino child in a hundred dresses otherwise,
but my argument was of no avail. The children in the American readers
wore natty jackets and hats and high-heeled shoes, and winter wraps,
even at play, and she wanted the Filipino children to look the same.

A great deal has been said in the American press about the eagerness
for education here. The desire for education, however, does not come
from any real dissatisfaction which the Filipinos have with themselves,
but from eagerness to confute the reproach which has been heaped
upon them of being unprogressive and uneducated. It is an abnormal
condition, the result of association of a people naturally proud and
sensitive with a people proud and arrogant. At present the desire for
progress in things educational and even in things material is more
or less ineffective because it is fed from race sensitiveness rather
than from genuine discontent with the existing order of things. The
educated classes of Filipinos are not at all dissatisfied with the
kind and quality of education which they possess; agriculturists are
not dissatisfied with their agricultural implements; the artisans
are not, as a class, dissatisfied with their tools or ashamed of
their labor. If you talk to a Filipino carpenter about the carefully
constructed houses of America, he does not sigh. He merely says, "That
is very good for America, but here different custom," Filipino cooks
are not dissatisfied with the terrible _fugons_ which fill their eyes
with smoke and blacken the cooking utensils, and have to be fanned
and puffed at every few minutes and occasionally set the house on
fire. The natural causes of growth are not widely existent, and it is
still problematic if they will ever come into being. Meanwhile growth
goes on stimulated by the eternal criticism, the sting of which the
Filipinos would move heaven and earth to escape.

Our own national progress and that of the European nations from whom
we are descended have been so differently conceived and developed that
we can hardly realize the peculiar process through w