Governor Taft left the Philippines on or about December 23, 1903, to become Secretary of War in President Roosevelt's Cabinet, and shortly afterward Vice-Governor Luke E. Wright succeeded to the governorship. After the accession of Governor Wright, there was no more hammering it into the American business men having money invested in the Islands that the Filipino was their "little brown brother," for whom no sacrifice, however sublime, would be more than was expected. Governor Wright was quite unpopular with the Filipinos and immensely popular with the Americans and Europeans, because, soon after he came into power, he "let the cat out of the bag," by letting the Filipinos know plainly that they might just as well shut up talking about independence for the present, so far as he was advised and believed; in other words, that Governor Taft's "Philippines for the Filipinos" need not cause any specially billowy sighs of joy just yet, because it had no reference to any Filipinos now able to sigh, but only to unborn Filipinos who might sigh in some remote future generation; and that the slogan which had caused them all to want to sob simultaneously for joy on the broad chest of Governor Taft was merely a case of an amiable unwillingness to tell them an unpleasant truth, viz., that in his opinion they were wholly unfit for self-government--all of which, in effect, meant that Governor Taft had been merely "Keeping the word of promise to the ear and breaking it to the hope." The Wright plain talk made the Filipinos one and all feel: "Alackaday! Our true friend has departed." But as Secretary of War Taft, after four years more of trying to please both sides, at home, at last frankly told the Filipinos when he went out to attend the opening of the first Philippine legislature, in 1907, practically just what Governor Wright had begun to tell them from the moment his predecessor had exchanged the parting tear with them on the water-front at Manila in 1903, the net result of the Wright policy of uncompromising honesty on the present political situation, may easily be guessed.