that it would hardly be worth while to dwell upon the matter here, were it not for the ignorance of our people at large.  It is convenient to speak of the Filipino people, just as it is convenient to speak of the Danish people, or of the English; but whereas, when we say “Danish” or “English” we mean one definite thing that exists as such, when we say “Filipino” we should understand that the term stands for a relatively great number of very different things.  For example, confining ourselves for the moment to the Christianized tribes, it may be asserted that the inhabitants of the great Cagayan Valley, the tobacco-growing country, are at least as different from those of the Visayas, the great middle group of Islands, as are the Italians from the Spanish.  Precisely similar differences, increasing, roughly, with the difference of latitude, may be drawn almost at random between any other pairs of the elements constituting the Filipino population.  The Ilokanos, to give only one more illustration, have almost nothing more, in common with the Bicols than the fact that they both probably come from the same original stock, just as the English and the Germans have the same ancestors.  All these subdivisions speak different languages, and the vast majority do not speak Spanish at all.

But this is not all.  The Filipino peoples are divided into two great classes, the Christian and the non-Christian.  Now, these non-Christians number over a million, and are themselves broken up into many subdivisions, not only differing in language, customs, habits and traditions, but until very recently bitterly hostile to one another, and so low in the scale of political development that, unlike our own Indians, they have never risen to any conception of even tribal government or organization.  Moreover, in Moroland, in the great island of Mindanao with its neighbors, the situation is further complicated by the fact that the dominant elements are Mohammedan.  Over most of these non-Christians the Spaniards had not even the shadow of control.  The appellation “Filipino people” is therefore wholly erroneous; more than that, it is even dangerously fallacious, in that its use blinds or tends to blind our own people to the real conditions existing in the Archipelago.  It is correct to speak of the Filipino peoples, because this expression is, geographically, accurately descriptive; but it is absolutely misleading to speak of the Filipino people, because of the false political idea involved and conveyed by the use of the singular number.  Similarly, there is no objection to the term “Filipino” or “Filipinos,” so long as we understand it to mean merely an inhabitant or the inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago, more narrowly the Christianized inhabitant or inhabitants; but it is distinctly wrong to give to the term a political or national color.  It may be remarked now that the divisions, both Christian and non-Christian, of which we have been speaking, determined as they are