are hospitable, courageous, and uncomplaining; their women are on a footing of equality, more or less, with the men, and are respected by them.  Where they have had an opportunity, they have shown an aptitude to learn of no mean quality.  Physically they are the best people of the Archipelago, and under this head would be remarkable anywhere else in the world.  Now, the Spaniards, with a few exceptions, made no systematic, continuous attempt to civilize these peoples; or, if they did, no measurable results have come down to our own day, even Villaverde’s efforts, genuine as they were, having left almost no trace.  So far from having done anything for the hillmen, the record of the Spanish at the very few points garrisoned by them is one of injustice and robbery, and worse.  That of the Filipinos, [45] in imitation of their Spanish masters, is no better.  At any rate, when we took over the Archipelago in 1898, a vast area of Luzon was held by a people who looked, and justly, so far as their experience had gone, upon the white man and his Filipino understudy as an enemy.  The difficulty of guiding and controlling these people undoubtedly had been (and still is) great, and partly accounts for the state of affairs we encountered when we first entered the country, but it was necessarily no greater for our predecessors in the Islands than it has been for us.  Now, where they failed, we, it may be said without fear of contradiction, are succeeding, and it is but the simplest act of justice to say that the credit for our success belongs to the Secretary of the Interior of the Philippine Islands, Mr. Dean C. Worcester.  He would be the last man on earth to say that his success is complete; on the contrary, he would assert that a very great quantity of work yet remains to be done, and that what he has done so far is but the beginning.  But it is nevertheless a successful beginning, and successful because it rests on the solid foundation of honesty and fair dealing, and is inspired by interest in and sympathy for a vast body of people universally hated and feared by the Filipino, and until lately neglected and misunderstood by almost everybody else.

The physical difficulty alone of reaching these various peoples was not only very great, but mere presence in their country involved great risk of one’s life.  Again, the absence of even the rudest form of tribal organization made the way hard.  Take the Ifugaos, for example, about 120,000 in number, all speaking essentially the same language, inhabiting the same country, and having the same origins and traditions.  Yet this large body was and is yet broken up into separate rancherias, or settlements, each formerly hostile to all the others, this hostility being so great that merely to walk into a neighboring rancheria in plain sight, not more than two miles off across the valley, was a sure way to commit suicide.  And what is true of the Ifugaos is true of all the others.  Could any other field have