Candle lights flickered in innumerable thatched houses where brown and naked women fluttered about dodging the rain, looking strangely like great paintings in the night. At the edge of each side porch a Bamboo ladder reached up from the ground. A fire burned against the rain. This fire leapt up for two feet.
One could easily imagine on this stormy night, with every road a river, every field a flood, and every vacant space a sea, that the thatched houses raised on Bamboo poles were boats, afloat in a great ocean. The fires on the back porches looked for all the world like the fires that I have seen flaring against the night from Japanese fishing boats.
We had been warm, personal friends since college days, this driver and I. He had chosen the harder way of the mission fields to spend his life.
"After all," said he, "that was a dream worth dreaming!"
"What do you mean?" I asked him, a bit startled.
"Why the American occupation of these islands; the dream that McKinley had, of teaching them to govern themselves; and then giving them their independence; an Imperial Dream such as the world never heard of before; a dream that, if it has done nothing else, has won for America the undying friendship of the intelligent Filipino."
"Right you are, man! But why such a thought at this ungodly hour? I should think rather that you would be sending out an S. O. S."
"Dunno! Just flashed over me that that was a dream worth dreaming; and, by gad, boy, we're seeing it come to pass. Look at those contented people living in peace and security; their home fires lighted; their children in school; plenty to eat; not afraid that to-morrow morning some Friar will sell their home from under them. No wonder they have given their undying friendship to America!"
He continued as we sped through the rain.
"England and Germany sneered at America's dream. Such a dream of friendship through serving its colony had never been born in any other national soul from the Genesis of colonization up to this day, save in the soul of America in the Philippines. We have set the ideals of the world in many ways but never in a more marked way than this.