“The undersigned is strongly opposed to the sending of members of wild tribes to the United States or to other civilized countries for exhibition purposes. Apart from all other considerations experience shows that the men and women thus taken away from their natural surroundings are apt to be pretty thoroughly spoiled and to be trouble makers after their return.
“The undersigned has recently informed Mr. R. Schneiderwind that he would, if necessary, do everything in his power to prevent the latter gentleman from taking another set of Igorots away from the Philippines for exhibition purposes. This, too, in spite of the fact that Mr. Schneiderwind has apparently been very considerate in his treatment of the Igorots whom he has taken to the United States for exhibition purposes.
“The undersigned would assume the same attitude toward any other person endeavouring to obtain Igorots for exhibition purposes.”
The advocates of the “united people” theory for these islands are forced to insist on the unimportance of the non-Christian tribes and it is needless to say that Blount does this. His contentions on the subject are rather concisely stated in the following passage:—
“You see our Census of 1903 gave the population of the Philippines at about 7,600,000 of which 7,000,000 are put down as civilized Christians; and of the remaining 600,000 about half are the savage, or semi-civilized, crudely Mohammedan Moros, in Mindanao, and the adjacent islets down near Borneo. The other 300,000 or so uncivilized people scattered throughout the rest of the archipelago, the ‘non-Christian tribes,’ which dwell in the mountain fastnesses, remote from ‘the madding crowd,’ cut little more figure, if any, in the general political equation, than the American Indian does with us to-day.”[10]
If there were ten million American Indians who were in undisputed occupation of half the territory of the United States, this statement might in a way approximate the truth. Blount’s ten-year-old population figures are a trifle out of date, but before demonstrating this I wish to show certain peculiarities in his method of manipulating them. He says:—
“That the existence of these wild tribes—the dog-eating Igorrotes and other savages you saw exhibited at the St. Louis Exposition of 1903–4—constitutes infinitely less reason for withholding independence from the Filipinos than the American Indian constituted in 1776 for withholding independence from us, will be sufficiently apparent from a glance at the following table, taken from the American Census of the Islands of 1903 (vol. ii., p. 123):—
| Island | Civilized | Wild | Total |
| Luzón | 3,575,001 | 223,506 | 3,798,507 |
| Panay | 728,713 | 14,933 | 743,646 |
| Cebu | 592,247 | 592,247 | |
| Bohol | 243,148 | 243,148 | |
| Negros | 439,559 | 21,217 | 460,776 |
| Leyte | 357,641 | 357,641 | |
| Samar | 222,002 | 688 | 222,690 |
| Mindanao | 246,694 | 252,940 | 499,634 |
“I think the above table makes clear the enormity of the injustice I am now trying to crucify. Without stopping to use your pencil, you can see that Mindanao, the island where the ‘intractable Moros’ Governor Forbes speaks of live, contains about a half million people. Half of these are civilized Christians, and the other half are the wild, crudely Mohammedan Moro tribes. Above Mindanao on the above list, you behold what practically is the Philippine archipelago (except Mindanao), viz. Luzón and the six main Visayan Islands. If you will turn back to pages 225 et seq., especially to page 228, where the student of world politics was furnished with all he needs or will ever care to know about the geography of the Philippine Islands you will there find all the rocks sticking out of the water and all the little daubs you see on the map eliminated from the equation as wholly unessential to a clear understanding of the problem of governing the Islands. That process of elimination left us Luzón and the six main Visayan Islands above as constituting, for all practical governmental purposes all the Philippine archipelago except the Moro country Mindanao (i.e. parts of it), and its adjacent islets. Luzón and the Visayan Islands contain nearly 7,000,000 of people, and of these the wild tribes, as you can see by a glance at the above table constitute less than 300,000, sprinkled in the pockets of their various mountain regions. Nearly all these 300,000 are quite tame, peaceable and tractable, except, as Governor Forbes suggests, they ‘might possibly mistake the object of a visit.’”[11]
This is all very well unless you take the Judge at his word and turn to the page of the census report referred to, but if you do this a rude shock awaits you, for instead of the table above quoted the following is the table which you will find:—