We wait until population and improvements in the way of well-tilled farms strike us, and then, after a great while, in rare instances, after enough wagons and horse flesh have been worn out hauling produce over muddy soft dirt roads to build a good road several times, we get wise and build a good road. Not so our progressive Filipinos. They put the road through first. Then, when the country settles up, and the natives decide to come down out of the trees and till the land, there will be a good hard road to haul their produce over.
There is not another city in Japan, China, or India that can equal it in cleanliness
We ought to be jarred out of our rut—get discovered.
That 110 miles of road runs largely through rich bottom land, the major part of which is as innocent of cultivation as Adam and Eve were of clothing before the Lord caught them stealing apples.
Occasional villages of nipa palm shacks, stuck up on bamboo poles, are passed, the chief industry of the owners of the shacks being to roost in them out of the sun and rain, when they are not out gathering something to eat that Nature provides without labor. But they have made good roads.
There is not another city in the Orient that equals Manila in hotel accommodations; in an up-to-date telephone system; in electricity and ice; in rapid transit by trolley, carriages, and automobiles; in a fire department, and a live and enterprising press.
These Filipinos are truly a wonderful and progressive people!
I've been so busy stepping over the ground in seven-league boots, jumping from premise to conclusion, that I haven't, perhaps, dwelt enough on details.