The average public man in the United States would not feel "nat'ral" unless intermittently bedewed with steam from the exhaust valve of the soul of some "outraged citizen," through the medium of the public press. But in the Philippines a public man occupying a conspicuous position with the government may be very generally detested and actually not know it. [424] The American in the Philippines, with all his home connections severed, might as well send his family to the poor-house at once as to come out in a paper with an interview or speech,--even supposing any paper would publish it--which, copied by the papers back in the United States, would embarrass the National Administration's Philippine policy in any way. The same applies to talking too freely for the newspapers when home on a visit. I think the foregoing makes sufficiently obvious the inherent impossibility of the American people ever knowing anything about current governmental mistakes in the Philippines, of which there must be some, in time for their judgment to have anything to do with shaping the course of the government out there for which they are responsible. And therefore it shows the inherent unfitness of their governmental machinery to govern the Filipinos so long as they do not change the home form of government to meet the needs of the colonial situation, by providing a method of invoking the public judgment on a single issue, as in the case of monarchical ministries, instead of lumping issues as we now do. It is certainly a shame that the fate and future of the Philippines are to-day dependent upon issues as wholly foreign to anything Philippine as is the price of cheese in Kamchatka or the price of wool in the United States. Whether the Filipinos are fit for self-government or not, under our present form of government we are certainly wholly unfit to govern them. In our government of the Filipinos, the nature of the case eliminates our most valuable governmental asset, to wit, that saving grace of public opinion which stops public men, none of whom are infallible, before they can accomplish irreparable mischief, through uncorrected faith in plans of questionable wisdom and righteousness to which their minds are made up.