annually into our pockets
were going to Filipinos instead, there would be money in plenty for
battleships, deep-water harbors, railroads, irrigation, agricultural
banks, standing armies, extended primary and secondary education;
and that the resources of the Government would even permit of the
repeal of the land tax, of the abolition of internal revenue taxes,
and of the lowering of the tariff. One of their favorite dreams of
raising money is to put a tremendously high license upon all foreigners
doing business in the Islands; and so high an opinion have they both
of their value to the world at large and of their prowess, that they
do not take into consideration the probability of the foreigner's
either getting out of the country or appealing to his own Government
to protect his invested capital. When they speak of independence,
they invariably assume that America is going to protect them against
China, Japan, or any of the great colony-holding nations of Europe.

Such are the peculiar governmental conceptions of the middle-class
Filipino--a class holding the ballot by the grace of God and the
assistance of the American Government. Their inverted ideas come
from real inexperience in highly organized industrial society, and
from perfectly natural deductions from books. When they study Roman
and Greek history, they learn there the names of generals, poets,
artists, sculptors, statesmen, and historians. Books do not dwell
upon that long list of thriving colonies which filled the Grecian
archipelago with traffic, and reached east and west to the shores
of Asia and to the Pillars of Hercules. The Filipinos learn that
Rome nourished her generals and her emperors upon the spoils of war,
but they do not reflect that the predatory age--at least in the Roman
sense--is past. Their imaginations seize upon the part played by the
little island republic of Venice, and they gloat over the magnificence
of the Venetian aristocracy, but they hardly give a thought to the
thousands of glass-blowers, to the weavers of silken stuffs, to the
shipbuilders and the artisans, and to the army of merchants that
piled up the riches to make Venice a power on the Mediterranean.

Filipinos have come in contact, not with _life_ but with _books_, and
their immediate ambition is to produce the things which are talked
of in books. Situated as these Islands are, remote from any great
modern civilization, there is no criterion by which the inhabitants
can a