of rice and some
sweet potatoes, a man would carry fifty or even seventy-five pounds on
his head or back all day over the most difficult mountain trails. The
Igorrotes had a mild form of slavery, and, though good-natured and at
times industrious, appeared utterly without spirit of progress. It was
interesting to mark whether or not contact with a superior race would be
a stimulus to them.

[Illustration]
Igarrote Head Hunters with Head Axes and Spears.

A contrast, again, to the Igorrotes was presented by the Ilocoans, an
intelligent, industrious, Christian people, eager for education, yet
promising to cherish independent ideals the more dearly the more
prosperous and advanced they became.

[Illustration: Six men on horseback.]
Native Moros-Interior of Jolo.

Most implacable of all the races were the Moros of the Sulu Islands.
Warlike, and despising labor, their terrible piracies had been curbed
only within fifty years, and their depredations and slave raiding by
land were never wholly prevented. They were suspiciously eager to
"assist" our forces in subduing the insurgents. The American authorities
negotiated a treaty with the Sultan and his dattos, involving their
submission to the United States. A provision of this treaty excited
reprobation, that permitting a slave to buy his freedom, a recognition
of slavery in derogation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the
Constitution. The provision was excused as an absolutely necessary
makeshift to put off hostilities till the United States had a freer
hand.

Spain never governed a colony well. Her whole record outre-mer was of a
piece with the enslavement and extermination of the gentle Caribs, with
which it began. In slavery and the slave trade Anglo-Saxon conquistadors
shared Spain's dishonor, but in sheer ugliness of despotism, in
wholesale, systematic, selfish exploiting, and in corrupt and clumsy
administration the Iberian monarchy surpassed all other powers ever
called to deal with colonies. The truth of this indictment was, if
possible, more manifest in the Philippines than anywhere else in the
Spanish world.

The religious orders, which early achieved the conversion of Tagals,
Visayas, and some other tribes, after generations of evangelical
devotion, ceased to be aggressive religiously, growing opulent and
oppressive instead. They were the pedestal of the civil government.
Their word could, and often did, cause natives to be deported, or even
put to