the pirate are those most highly regarded; and it has not been found practical to give them self-government in the sense that we have been giving it to the Christian inhabitants. To abandon the Moro country as our opponents propose in their platform, would be precisely as if twenty-five years ago we had withdrawn the Army and the civil agents from within and around the Indian reservations in the West, at a time when the Sioux and the Apache were still the terror of our settlers. It would be a criminal absurdity; and yet our opponents have pledged themselves thereto. If successful in the coming election they would either have to break faith, or else to do an act which would leave an indelible stain upon our national reputation for courage, and for good sense. During the last five years more has been done for the material and moral well-being of the Filipinos than ever before since the islands first came within the ken of civilized man. We have opened before them a vista of orderly development in their own interest, and not a policy of exploitation. Every effort is being made to fit the islanders for self-government, and they have already in large measure received it, while for the first time in their history their personal rights and civil liberties have been guaranteed. They are being educated; they have been given schools; they have been given libraries; roads are being built for their use; their health is being cared for; they have been given courts in which they receive justice as absolute as it is in our power to guarantee. Their individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are now by act of Congress jealously safeguarded under the American flag; and if the protection of the flag were withdrawn their rights would be lost, and the islands would be plunged back under some form of vicious tyranny. We have given them more self-government than they have ever before had; we are taking steps to increase it still further by providing them with an elected legislative assembly; and surely we had better await the results of this experiment—for it is a wholly new experiment in Asia—before we make promises which as a Nation we might be forced to break, or which they might interpret one way and we another. It may be asserted without fear of successful contradiction that nowhere else in recent years has there been as fine an example of constructive statesmanship and wise and upright Administration as has been given by the civil authorities, aided by the Army, in the Philippine Islands. We have administered them in the interest of their own people; and the Filipinos themselves have profited most by our presence in the islands; but they have also been of very great advantage to us as a nation.