In all, there were thirty or more races, with an even greater number of different dialects. Northern Luzon housed the advanced Ilocoans, Pampangos, Pangasinanes, and Cagayanes, with their hardy bronze heathen neighbors, the Igorrotes. The Visayas had many degraded aborigines, the Negritos among them. Over against the Moros in the Mindanao group one could not ignore the warlike Visayan variation, or the swarming savages of the interior, hostile alike to Moro and Visaya.
Three Hundred Boys in the Parade of July 4, 1902, Vigan, Ilocos.
The population of the islands numbered 8,000,000 or 10,000,000, 25,000 being Europeans. Half the islanders were Christians, eight or ten per cent. Mohammedan, perhaps ten per cent. heathen. One considerable fraction were Chinese, another of mixed extraction. Probably none of the races were of pure Malay blood, though Malay blood predominated. Mercantile pursuits were largely in Chinese hands. The Moros disdained tillage and commerce alike, living on slave labor and captures in war.
Spain had done in the islands much more educational work than the Americans at first recognized, though none of an advanced kind. Schools were numerous but not general. Many Filipinos had studied in Europe. There was a select class possessing information and manners which would have admitted them to cultivated circles in Paris or London, and thousands of Filipinos were intellectually the peers of average middle-class Europeans. The University of St. Thomas graced Manila. Some seventy colleges and academies at various centres professed to prepare pupils for it.
Filipinos of aught like cosmopolitan intelligence numbered less than 100,000. Below them were the half-breeds, perhaps 500,000 strong, white, yellow, or brown, according to the special blend of blood. They were “intelligent but uneducated, active but not over industrious. They loved excitement, military display, and the bustle and pomp of government.” Farther down still were the vast toiling masses neither knowing nor caring much who governed them. Only in suffering were they experts, having learned of this under the iron heel of Spain all there was to be known.
Girls’ Normal Institute, Vigan, Ilocos, April, 1902.
In the Philippines one had incessantly before him social and economic problems in their rudimentary form—populations the debris of centuries, and the reactions upon them of their first contact with real civilization. In case of any but the most advanced tribes the immediate suggestion was despair, a feeling that they could never appropriate the culture offered them. But the heartiness of the response which even such communities made to our advances brought hope. Our methods were better than the Spanish, and our progress correspondingly rapid; yet the task we undertook bade fair to last centuries. Nor were its initial steps undefaced by errors.
A Blue Book would not suffice to describe this motley material. We can only illustrate.