A potent means of winning the undying regard of the wild man is to cure him when he is sick, or heal him when he is injured. Hospitals have already been established in two of the special government provinces and are doing untold good. Practically every officer of these provinces carries a set of simple remedies with him when he travels, and treats the sick without compensation as opportunity offers, but this work is as yet in its infancy.
The Filipinos have not doctors enough to heal their own sick. Would they remember to heal the wild men? Hardly.
Several of the wild tribes have progressed much more rapidly during the brief period since the American occupation than have any of the Filipino peoples, and if given adequate protection and friendly assistance they will continue to progress. Their splendid physiques and high intelligence, no less than their truthfulness, honesty and morality, certainly make them well worth saving.
Under Filipino rule the more helpless of these tribes would speedily come under the control of their former oppressors, but people like the Ifugaos, Bontoc Igorots, Kalingas and wild Tingians would fight to the death before submitting to them, and there would result a guerrilla warfare as endless and disastrous as that which has lasted so long between the Dutch and the Achinese. There is every theoretical reason to believe that the Filipinos would adopt toward such hostile primitive peoples the policy of extermination which the Japanese have been so vigorously carrying out in dealing with the hill people of northern Formosa, who do not differ in any important respect from the hill people of northern Luzón, with whom such helpful and friendly relations have now been established.
We have encouraged the primitive Philippine peoples to stand up for their rights. We have promised them our protection and help if they would do it, and thus far we have kept our promise. To break it now, and turn them over to the tender mercies of the Filipinos, who have never ceased to make threats as to what they will do when they get the chance, would in my opinion be a crime against civilization.
The Moros openly boast that if the Americans go they will raid the Christian towns, and this is no idle threat. They will most assuredly do it.
Were American control to be withdrawn before the civilization of the wild tribes had been effected, their future would be dark indeed. Under continued American control they can be won over to civilized ways, and will in the end become mentally and morally, as they now are physically, superior to the lowlanders.
No man has been blessed with better subordinates than I have had to assist me in the work carried on under my direction for the non-Christian tribes of the Philippines. I wish it clearly understood that it is to the loyalty and efficiency of these men that the results which have been obtained are due. Fearlessly, tirelessly, uncomplainingly, they have borne their heavy shares of the white man’s burden, finding their greatest reward in the respect, gratitude, and in many cases the affection, of those whom they have so faithfully and effectively served.
Think of Pack, weakened by illnesses which twice brought him within a hair’s breadth of death, wearing himself out riding over the Mountain Province trails, many of which he himself had laboriously built, in order to keep the little handful of men who control its 400,000 non-Christian inhabitants up to the high-water mark of efficiency, when he could have gone home any day and spent his remaining years in leisurely comfort; of Bryant, wandering for weeks on end through the trackless forests of Nueva Vizcaya in order to get in touch with Ilongot savages who were a good deal more than “half devil” with the balance not “half child” but peculiarly treacherous, vicious and savage man; of Offley, packing the bare necessities of life on his own back while he struggled out to the coast from the centre of Mindoro, where his frightened carriers had deserted him; of Kane, burning in the heat of the lowlands or soaked and shivering on chilly mountain crests, while building new roads and keeping old ones open for traffic; of Lewis, trying to cover a territory large enough to tax the energies of three men, and in his efforts to do so riding until so weary that at night he fell from his horse unable to dismount; of Fortich, a Filipino lieutenant-governor, faithfully carrying out the white man’s policy and protecting the Bukidnons from his own people who charged him with murder because he drove them from their prey; of Gallman, risking his life a thousand times in a successful individual effort to bring 125,000 head-hunting savages under effective control and to establish relations of genuine friendship with them; of Hale, turning tattooed Kalinga devils into effective officers for the maintenance of law and order, or making a bundle of the lances thrown at him and sending them back to the people who threw them with a mild suggestion that it was impolite to treat a would-be friend in such an unceremonious way; of Johnson, tramping through the reeking filth of the Butuan swamps with a cancer eating away the bone of his leg, and referring to it as “a little swelling” when asked what made him lame; of Bondurant, spending the last afternoon of his life in pursuing Moro outlaws through that worst of all tropical infernos, a mangrove swamp, when burning with pernicious malarial fever and fighting for the very breath of life; of Miller, faithful unto death!
We are wont to quote with feeling the familiar words, “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend,” but what shall we say of the love of duty of men like Miller and Bondurant, who in doing their country’s work cheerfully laid down their lives for an alien people?