The “Philippine Commission” has had men of considerable talent, men of opportunity and availableness and its rule has not we believe been stained with any greater faults, or crimes, than that of most governing bodies. And it has been distinguished by much work well done.
Some witty foreigner has said:
“America is rather old to give as an excuse for her blundering that she is young,” behind that sarcasm as behind all there is just a stinging grain of truth. Our blunders as our self-assurance, the latter very largely responsible for the former are often as amusing as instructive to lookers-on of older civilizations, especially to those of the East, who like the grandmother with the small boy, are startled and perplexed at all the fancied improvements, she having spelt out that wonderous word “life” which is the most bewildering in its meaning, some time since.
The aged granddame the Orient is being taught by a somewhat flighty and exceedingly imperious and headstrong youngster and she smiles through her wrinkles often a superfine smile as she has seen so many toy inventions and toy states rise, fall and even pass from memory while she still lives on. She enjoys the spectacle of western sweat and energy and she watches as all age does to see what sort of beings this fancied superiority has produced. It is no wonder she still keeps on smiling as she sees the pitiful result of so much dazzling modernism and exquisite theories and grandiloquent faith shattered the moment you touch its adherents. It is a very, very old story as old as when woman first bore the transgression for herself and for man and through her patience and heroism brought atonement. But the sun still rises in splendor over Manila and we hope and wait and long, as they have since the first whiteness followed the first darkness—for the day. There is late talk of giving up the task America has set herself in the East. If she does, it will be another sign of the triumph of those qualities which are disintegrating her life at home, greed, ambition, social, religious and political, the unsatisfied passion for pleasure which makes her one of the most lawless and frivolous modern Nations.
If you touch an orange it will roll over but many shocks will not turn a world out of its orbit, for it is held in the hand of One, who can guide a tangent, quite as well as a steady methodical body, and who can remove at will a whole astral system. What the future holds is one of the most solemn enigmas but only what America is can she put in here and “would it were worthier.”
Across the East the dawn is coming, not because the West is come to teach her new forms of greed and ambition, but because the forces within her, the eternal primeval elements are stirring and forming in the combinations which mean life.
Within her will come her salvation, not from without, from the Oriental himself will come the best of his future.
Western civilization has failed to produce on any large scale, noble character, the East knows it. It has watched the falseness of the state craft, the greater falseness of its religious love of aggrandizement, it has seen in the adherents of the latter no reason to choose them as a pattern, quite the contrary.
The simple truthful faith of Christ whose ethical teachings are so direct, so free from sophistry, a child might read it has been and is today, the excuse for the darkest crimes. Said one of the leaders of the Christian faith in Japan, “It is only with sinking heart one can point to a faith which bears such fruits, when the so-called heathen can teach us any day conduct which outshines ours as the sun a glow worm.” From within must come the truth of God in her own soul as men are every day more powerless to live it or teach it, though the truth remains eternally vital.
May the God of light guide this great, glorious Orient into a future of illustrious achievement and untarnished ideals.