But this is not all. The Filipino peoples are divided into two great classes, the Christian and the non-Christian. Now, these non-Christians number over a million, and are themselves broken up into many subdivisions, not only differing in language, customs, habits and traditions, but until very recently bitterly hostile to one another, and so low in the scale of political development that, unlike our own Indians, they have never risen to any conception of even tribal government or organization. Moreover, in Moroland, in the great island of Mindanao with its neighbors, the situation is further complicated by the fact that the dominant elements are Mohammedan. Over most of these non-Christians the Spaniards had not even the shadow of control. The appellation "Filipino people" is therefore wholly erroneous; more than that, it is even dangerously fallacious, in that its use blinds or tends to blind our own people to the real conditions existing in the Archipelago. It is correct to speak of the Filipino _peoples_, because this expression is, geographically, accurately descriptive; but it is absolutely misleading to speak of the Filipino _people_, because of the false political idea involved and conveyed by the use of the singular number. Similarly, there is no objection to the term "Filipino" or "Filipinos," so long as we understand it to mean merely an inhabitant or the inhabitants of the Philippine Archipelago, more narrowly the Christianized inhabitant or inhabitants; but it is distinctly wrong to give to the term a political or national color. It may be remarked now that the divisions, both Christian and non-Christian, of which we have been speaking, determined as they are by natural conditions, are likely to survive for many generations to come. At any rate, the fact that many, and those the most important, constituent elements of the proposed independent government are widely separated by the seas, and that even those situated on the same islands are confined by mountain ranges hitherto extremely difficult to cross, makes it plain that the homogeneity necessary to the formation and permanency of a strong government will be hard to secure, or, if ever secured, to maintain. When, therefore, it is proposed to grant independence to the Philippine Islands, let it be recollected that this grant is to be made not to a single homogeneous people, of one speech, of one religion, of one state of civilization, of one degree of social and political development, but to an aggregation of peoples, of different speech, of different religions, of widely varying states of social and political development, of little or no communication with one another--to an aggregation, in short, whose elements, before 1898, had had but one bond, the involuntary bond of inherited subjection to Spanish authority, and all of which to-day are distinguished by the characteristic trait of the Oriental, absence of the quality of sympathy. IV.