impartial observers on the spot, declare freely that
we have gone much too fast, and that we have granted a measure of
political administration and government beyond the native power of
assimilation and digestion. With this opinion, sound though it be,
we are not immediately concerned: the point we wish to bring out is
that the experiment we have made is not free; that the case is one
of constrained motion, since everyone knows that the mighty power of
the United States dominates the entire situation, and that under these
conditions the Filipinos have been exercising themselves in the form of
government, rather than in responsible government itself. The Filipino
government as such has faced no crisis: behind its treasury stands
that of the metropolis. Order is assured by the garrison maintained
by us, internal police by the Constabulary, another agency of American
origin. But, even if all this were not true, it is questionable if an
experience of only eight or nine years affords sufficient ground for
the belief that a nascent government could exist and advance under
its own power alone.

Our training, ample and generous though it may have been, as it has
not, for lack of time if for no other reason, prepared the native to
govern himself, so it furnishes no real test of his capacity to govern
himself. Self-government is not a function of the mere ability to fill
certain offices, to discharge certain routine duties of administration:
it depends for its existence and maintenance on the possession of
certain qualities, and still more, perhaps, on the possession of those
qualities by a majority of the people who practice or are to practice
self-government, on an educated and inherited interest of the citizen
in the questions affecting his welfare in so far as this is conditioned
by government. Tested in this wise, the Filipino breaks down locally;
to believe that anything else will happen internationally is to blind
one's self to the teaching of experience.

But there is yet another test. If political independence is to be of
value to those who have it, if it is to endure in any useful way,
it must rest on economic independence. The state must be able to
meet its obligations, and by this we do not mean merely its current
bills, its housekeeping bills, as it were, but its obligations of
all and whatever nature, interior police, finance, administration,
dispensation of justice, communications, sanitation, education,
defense.