XVII
WHITE FILIPINOS, AGUINALDO, AND THE BUSY MOTH
In my last letter I believe I changed my style somewhat and became an historian. I realize I'm serving up several different styles of narrative in these letters, and know it's taking a chance to adopt the historical. History is dry stuff, but another chapter of it seems necessary to clear the situation at this mile-post I'm passing—the Philippine Islands.
You can't get the President of a republic running around in the woods, and as goodly a land as the Philippines in chaos, and then go off and leave it without some further word of explanation than I gave in my last letter, in which I left the President safely anchored on a farm.
The Philippine Islands at this time were in a fearful mess. The natives were half child, half savage. Dirt, vice, degradation, war, pestilence, everything but famine, were the rule—you cannot starve these people; they live in a land of perpetual summer: clothing not a necessity; and they can pick their living off the trees.
You cannot starve these people; they live in a land of perpetual summer
Under the stimulus of being named "Little Brown Brothers" to the nation which had discovered them, they bucked up and went to it; and they have made the most wonderful progress in the past sixteen years!
From the worst city they have made Manila the best city in the Orient. There is not another city in Japan, China, or India that can equal it in cleanliness and healthfulness, with well-paved roads running through it, and leading out from it in all directions. One of these roads they have made, a hard macadam, none better anywhere, reaches clear across the Island of Luzon, from Manila Bay to the Pacific Ocean, 110 miles. They have actually eclipsed their big white brothers in respect to roads.