Here was a revelation to shake the towers of accepted doctrine. In the light of it how great (and how hideous!) was the wrong done to the people of the Philippines! The pretense upon which Spain ruled in this iron fashion, with so much cruelty and dishonesty, was (in effect) that in the cells of the brains and in the corpuscles of the blood of these people some undefined and mysterious essence was lacking, and for want of this they were incapable of ruling themselves or even of taking a place among the other children of earth. Being put to the test, no such lack appeared, but only aptitude, mental health, mental vigor, equal at least to those of the white man. The European ruled, then, because he had a larger share of the brute in him, because he had a sensual ambition to rule, because his taste found pleasure in humiliating and exploiting others, because he had a tougher conscience, and because luck had been on his side. Of any essential, irradicable, structural difference between race and race there was not an indication. What the Asiatic really lacked was opportunity, not intellect; and liberty, not character. He came to these conclusions without haste, because his was a mind that worked deliberately and over stretched-out periods of observation. He has left a record of them: of the time when they caused him to believe that the Malayan mind must really be better than the Caucasian; of his final conviction that between mind and mind there is no racial distinction with which reasoning men will bother themselves; that all the children of mother earth under the same conditions will average about the same results. In the end he came to discard the whole theory of races; to his mind it was nothing but the manufacture of prejudice, ignorance, or profit-mongering. Mankind he saw not separated by perpendicular lines into races but by horizontal lines into strata. [35] Everywhere some groups of men, favored by conditions, by liberty first of all, by institutions, by opportunity, had climbed to higher strata; everywhere other groups of men less fortunate as to conditions, having less liberty, worse institutions, and narrower opportunity, remained still in the lower strata. But everywhere it was, first of all, conditions that determined whether men should climb or remain, and not blood nor the color of skin nor the texture of hair.