stages of progress toward civilization. Our earnest effort is to help
these people upward along the stony and difficult path that leads to
self-government. We hope to make our administration of the islands
honorable to our Nation by making it of the highest benefit to the
Filipinos themselves; and as an earnest of what we intend to do, we
point to what we have done. Already a greater measure of material
prosperity and of governmental honesty and efficiency has been attained
in the Philippines than ever before in their history.

It is no light task for a nation to achieve the temperamental qualities
without which the institutions of free government are but an empty
mockery. Our people are now successfully governing themselves, because
for more than a thousand years they have been slowly fitting themselves,
sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, toward this end. What
has taken us thirty generations to achieve, we cannot expect to see
another race accomplish out of hand, especially when large portions
of that race start very far behind the point which our ancestors had
reached even thirty generations ago. In dealing with the Philippine
people we must show both patience and strength, forbearance and
steadfast resolution. Our aim is high. We do not desire to do for the
islanders merely what has elsewhere been done for tropic peoples by even
the best foreign governments. We hope to do for them what has never
before been done for any people of the tropics--to make them fit for
self-government after the fashion of the really free nations.

History may safely be challenged to show a single instance in which a
masterful race such as ours, having been forced by the exigencies of war
to take possession of an alien land, has behaved to its inhabitants with
the disinterested zeal for their progress that our people have shown in
the Philippines. To leave the islands at this time would mean that they