studying the past history of the Philippines, he had been equally
honest with himself in judging the conditions of his own time, and
he knew and applied with the same fairness the teaching which holds
true in history as in every other branch of science that like causes
under like conditions must produce like results, He had been careful in
his reasoning, and it stood the test, first of President Roosevelt's
advisers, or otherwise that Fargo speech would never have been made,
and then of all the President's critics, or there would have been
heard more of the statement quoted above which passed unchallenged,
but not, one may be sure, uninvestigated.

The American system is in reality not foreign to the Philippines,
but it is the highest development, perfected by experience, of the
original plan under which the Philippines had prospered and progressed
until its benefits were wrongfully withheld from them. Filipino
leaders had been vainly asking Spain for the restoration of their
rights and the return to the system of the Laws of the Indies. At the
time when America came to the Islands there was among them no Rizal,
with a knowledge of history that would enable him to recognize that
they were getting what they had been wanting, who could rise superior
to the unimportant detail of under what name or how the good came as
long as it arrived, and whose prestige would have led his countrymen to
accept his decision. Some leaders had one qualification, some another,
a few combined two, but none had the three, for a country is seldom
favored with more than one surpassingly great man at one time.