inventor to make it fly and alight again, exhibiting all
the delight of children in a strange toy, but giving it not one close
glance, one touch to determine how it is made, and not even wondering
anything about it? Can you imagine all those people placidly accepting
the fact that there are other nations interested in making strange
machines, and receiving the strange toy as an example of foreign energy
with which, at that or at any other time, they had no concern? Yet
such is the actual condition of affairs in the Philippine Islands,
and I am not sure that my estimate of eighty per cent is not too
low. Filipinos of the educated classes, gentlemen who can talk about

"The grandeur that was Greece,
And the glory that was Rome,"

or who can quote Tom Paine or Voltaire or Rousseau, or discuss the
fisherman's ring of the Pope, or the possibilities of an Oriental
race alliance, would give a glance at such a machine and dismiss
it with such a remark as this: "Ah! a new flying machine. Very
interesting. If it proves practical, it should be a great benefit to
the Philippines. The Government should buy two or three and put them
in operation to show the people how they can be used."

The great majority of the Filipino people are simply apathetic toward
the material and spiritual appliances of their present status. (Please
do not infer, however, that they are apathetic toward the status
itself.) Fortune is continually thrusting upon them a ready-made
article, be it of transportation, of furniture, of education, or
even of creed. With no factories of its own, their land is deluged
with cheap manufactured goods. With almost no authors, they have been
inundated with literature and texts. With no experience in government,
they have a complicated system presented to them, and are told to go
ahead, to fulfil the requirements, to press the button, and to let
the system do the rest. And they are, with few exceptions, making
the mistake of assuming that their aptitude in learning to press the
button is equivalent to the power of creating the system. They are like
some daring young chauffeur who finds that he can run an automobile,
and can turn it and twist it and guide it and control it with the
same ease that its inventor does, and who feels that he is as fully
its master--as indeed he is, till something goes wrong.

The intelligent Filipinos who are pressing for immediate
self-government have no intentions of changing th