The Spaniards had failed in their government in the Philippines as they had elsewhere. In Mindanao and Sulu--the country, or islands, inhabited by the Moros--they had failed signally because of their intolerance of the religious beliefs of the people and their careless impatience generally towards a colony which from its very nature could not produce much money. Furthermore they did not send sufficient military forces or sufficiently able officers to maintain their supremacy. And finally they did not deal with the people through the native clergy and priests. Consequently when the Americans came in the Moros were united only {176} in their hatred of the white race, placed no confidence in anything their rulers told them and only obeyed white-man-made laws as long as the white man was in sight. After all a sultan or datu had his position and authority which had come down to him through generations and his religion which had been taught him from birth. He saw no reason why he should give up these without a struggle just because some other man arrived with a different religion and a different form of sultan government. The country was such that it was easy to avoid the new rulers. Transportation over large parts of the southern islands was through jungle and pathless forests where even riding a horse was impossible. Streams without bridges, settlements without approaches except a trail, tropical climates to which only the Moros themselves were accustomed spread over a land of almost impenetrable jungle. The Moros themselves understood such a situation and could easily move from one spot to another, one island to another, one settlement to another; while the army had to fight its way in and then fight its way out again. {177} While the problem of administration was not unlike that in Cuba in so far as the organizing of courts, law, education, native officials and so on went, there were here in Moroland the infinitely more difficult and delicate tasks of dealing with many different religious laws and customs and the hereditary rank and rights of tribal rulers, none of which existed in Cuba. The quality of statesmanship in Wood which dealt with these problems and settled them so that from a slave-holding, polygamous, headhunting land there arose a self-governing community is of the highest order.