Note 19 — Chapter XVIII · Governor Wright—1904

We can point with pride to many things we have done in the Philippines, the public improvements,19 the school system, the better sanitation, and a long list of other benefits conferred. But in the greatest thing we have done for them, we have builded wiser than we knew. “God moves in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.” In fourteen years we have welded the Filipinos into one homogeneous political unit. In a most charming book, entitled An Englishwoman in the Philippines,20 we can see our attempts to fit government by two political parties into over-seas colonization caricatured without sting until we really remind ourselves of a hippopotamus caressing a squirrel. In one passage the British sister describes our programme as one “to educate the Filipino for all he is worth, so that he may, in the course of time, be fit to govern himself according to American methods; but at the same time they have plenty of soldiers to knock him on the head if he shows signs of wanting his liberty before the Americans think he is fit for it”—“A quaint scheme,” she naïvely adds, “and one full of the go-ahead originality of America.”