In Manila they conduct a mission for Filipinos in connection with a hospital which does most valuable work, but they mean to leave Catholic Filipinos alone.
The Catholics recognize no corresponding limitations. They conduct missions for the Benguet-Lepanto Igorots at Baguio, Itogon, Kabayan, Cervantes and elsewhere; for the Bontoc Igorots at Bauco and Bontoc and for the Ifugaos at Quiangan.
The other Protestant denominations having missions in the Philippines work chiefly among the Catholics.
I have absolutely no connection with any such enterprises except that I have helped to make them possible in the wild man’s territory by the establishment of law and order there, and have sometimes made both Catholic and Protestant missionaries my agents for administering simple remedies to sick persons who might otherwise have perished miserably.
To this extent, and to this extent only, has our government gone into the missionary business.
I am proud to count Bishop Brent and Archbishop Harty among my personal friends. I am in complete sympathy with the purposes which actuate both of them in prosecuting Christian missions. I have sometimes disapproved, personally, of methods employed by their subordinates in this work, and have felt free to tell them so!
Blount complains bitterly over the exhibition of members of non-Christian tribes at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. For a wonder he admits that Tagálog and Visayan Filipinos were also exhibited. He fails to record the fact that a commission of highly educated and cultured Filipino men and women were sent to the exposition and travelled quite widely in the United States, so that they were seen, and heard of, by great numbers of people who never visited St. Louis at all. Of the exhibition of wild men, he says:—
“I think no deeper wound was ever inflicted upon the pride of the real Filipino people than that caused by this exhibition, the knowledge of which seems to have spread throughout the islands.”[8]
And he rather ingeniously gives it to be understood that I was responsible for this exhibition, although he carefully avoids stating that this was the case.
I am quite as strongly opposed to the exhibition of members of the Philippine non-Christian tribes as is Blount himself, but for very different reasons hereinafter set forth. As such peoples constitute an eighth of the population of the Islands, I also object to the attempt of certain Filipino politicians to conceal the fact of their existence, and to the efforts of certain misguided Americans to minimize the importance of the problems which their existence presents. Let us look the facts in the face. The Moros are as “real” as the Tagálogs.