Also you might live in the Philippines a long lifetime and never see anything but wild people. The question of where they live is not intimately connected with that of their number, which is the point under discussion.
Blount devotes considerable space to alleged newspaper accounts of “a speech” said by him to have been delivered by me in the Y. M. C. A. auditorium at Manila. I delivered two illustrated lectures there, entitled respectively “The Non-Christian Tribes of the Philippines,” and “What has been done for the Non-Christian Tribes under American Rule.”
In the course of the latter discourse I made the point that Filipinos who claim that conquest confers no right of sovereignty are hoist with their own petard, for the simple but sufficient reason that the Negritos were the aborigines of the Philippines and were later conquered and driven out of the lowland country into inaccessible, forested mountain regions by the Malay invaders who were the ancestors of the present Filipino claimants not only to the territory thus conquered, but to territory which was held up to the time of the American occupation by wild tribes whom they now propose to conquer and rule if given the opportunity!
My shaft struck home and called forth a howl of rage from the politicians, which was the louder because I further expressed with entire frankness my firm belief that the Filipinos were unfit to govern the non-Christian tribes, whether or not they were fit to govern themselves.
In the course of further reference to the above-mentioned lecture, Blount says:—
“Another of the Manila papers gives an account of the speech, from which it appears that the burly Professor succeeded in amusing himself at least, if not his audience, by suggestions as to the superior fighting qualities of the Moros over the Filipinos, which suggestions were on the idea that the Moros would lick the Filipinos if we should leave the country. (The Moros number 300,000, the Filipinos nearly 7,000,000.) The Professor’s remarks in this regard, according to the paper, were a distinct reflection upon the courage of the Filipinos generally as a people.”[17]
Here, as is so often the case, he finds newspaper statements more suited to his purpose than cold facts. I yield to no one in my admiration for the courage of Filipinos, and have expressed it on a score of occasions. In my first book on the Philippines I made the following reference to it:—
“I once saw a man in Culion who was seamed and gashed with horrible scars from head to foot. How any one could possibly survive such injuries as he had received I do not know. It seemed that his wife and children had been butchered by four Moros while he was absent. He returned just as the murderers were taking to their boat. Snatching a machete, he plunged into the water after them, clambered into their prau, and killed them all. When one remembers the sort of weapons that Moros carry, the thing seems incredible, but a whole village full of people vouched for the truth of the story.”[18]
This was not the only tribute which I paid to the courage of the Filipinos[19] and I have never made a statement intended to reflect on it in the slightest degree. It is true that their fighting ability is on the average far below that of the Moros, and I may add that the same thing holds for Americans on the average.