Note 11 — Chapter XXIII · Corrigenda

“I think the above table makes clear the enormity of the injustice I am now trying to crucify. Without stopping to use your pencil, you can see that Mindanao, the island where the ‘intractable Moros’ Governor Forbes speaks of live, contains about a half million people. Half of these are civilized Christians, and the other half are the wild, crudely Mohammedan Moro tribes. Above Mindanao on the above list, you behold what practically is the Philippine archipelago (except Mindanao), viz. Luzón and the six main Visayan Islands. If you will turn back to pages 225 et seq., especially to page 228, where the student of world politics was furnished with all he needs or will ever care to know about the geography of the Philippine Islands you will there find all the rocks sticking out of the water and all the little daubs you see on the map eliminated from the equation as wholly unessential to a clear understanding of the problem of governing the Islands. That process of elimination left us Luzón and the six main Visayan Islands above as constituting, for all practical governmental purposes all the Philippine archipelago except the Moro country Mindanao (i.e. parts of it), and its adjacent islets. Luzón and the Visayan Islands contain nearly 7,000,000 of people, and of these the wild tribes, as you can see by a glance at the above table constitute less than 300,000, sprinkled in the pockets of their various mountain regions. Nearly all these 300,000 are quite tame, peaceable and tractable, except, as Governor Forbes suggests, they ‘might possibly mistake the object of a visit.’”11