Prejudice and racial hatreds have obscured about this one other fact that never should be overlooked. The Filipinos would not have stood still if the Spaniards had left them alone. True estimate, therefore, is to be made, not on a comparison between what they were when the Spaniards came and what they were when the Spaniards left them, but on what they probably would have made of themselves. They were no backward race; they had shown a remarkable aptitude to absorb the best of the progress around them, taking on arts, inventions, manufactures, and developing them. They made and used gunpowder before it was known in Europe; they made and used cannon of a considerable size, built better sea-going ships than the Spaniards, had developed more skilful artificers in silver and gold, and had evidently a disposition to improve methods and manners. [14] In those three hundred years, supposing them to have been left to their own devices, they would never have ceased to look forward. Yet when the line comes to be drawn below the items of their progress under Spanish control and we glance across even to the most dilatory countries of Europe, we are compelled to admit that relatively the advance is small. But because the natives writhed under the crude and savage oppression that walked with this, we are not to suppose the Spaniards they hated were all bad men. Goodness and badness hardly enter into the matter. There came to the Philippines in these 325 years many a governor-general with a worthy inspiration to overturn the tables of the money-changers and bring in righteousness and justice. It appears that what was going on in the Philippines was not always ignored at home, and many a private citizen of good character started out to support a reforming governor-general. The significant fact is that all these efforts had one end. Nothing was ever changed. The best of the governor-generals fell impotent against the same menacing wall of System. Securely it had been based upon favoring conditions; it had grown under generations of greedy maladministration; it extended to every part of the Archipelago where Spain had authority; and it was buttressed by the power that in all times has proved the most difficult foe to the freedom and progress of the masses. For such is the power of accumulated profits to breed more power to make more profits and still more power. Here was indeed the appetite that grows by what it feeds on. The invisible government had swallowed the visible.