Happiness is merely comparative: with a lovely climate--a continual summer--and all the absolute requirements of life at hand, there is not one-tenth of the misery in the Philippines that there is in Europe, and none of that forlorn wretchedness facing the public gaze. Beggary--that constant attribute of the highest civilization--hardly exists, and suicide is extremely rare. There are no ferocious animals, insects, or reptiles that one cannot reasonably guard against; it is essentially one of those countries where "man's greatest enemy is man." There is ample room for double the population, and yet a million acres of virgin soil only awaiting the co-operation of husbandman and capitalist to turn it to lucrative account. A humdrum life is incompatible here with the constant emotion kept up by typhoons, shipwrecks, earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, brigands, epidemics, devastating fires, etc. It is a beautiful country, copiously endowed by Nature, where the effulgent morning sun contributes to a happy frame of mind--where the colonist's rural life passes pleasantly enough to soothe the longing for "home, sweet home." "And yet perhaps if countries we compare And estimate the blessings which they share, Though patriots flatter, yet shall wisdom find An equal portion dealt to all mankind." Such is America's new possession, wherein she has assumed the moral responsibility of establishing a form of government on principles quite opposite to those of the defunct Spanish _regime_: whether it will be for better or for worse cannot be determined at this tentative stage. Without venturing on the prophetic, one may not only draw conclusions from accomplished facts, but also reasonably assume, in the light of past events, what might have happened under other circumstances. There is scarcely a Power which has not, in the zenith of its prosperity, consciously or unconsciously felt the "divine right" impulse, and claimed that Providence has singled it out to engraft upon an unwilling people its particular conception of human progress. The venture assumes, in time, the more dignified name of "mission"; and when the consequent torrents of blood recede from memory with the ebbing tide of forgetfulness, the conqueror soothes his conscience with a profession of "moral duty," which the conquered seldom appreciate in the first generation. No unforeseen circumstances whatever caused the United States to drift unwillingly into Philippine affairs. The war in Cuba had not the remotest connexion with these Islands. The adversary's army and navy were too busy with the task of quelling the Tagalog rebellion for any one to imagine they could be sent to the Atlantic. It was hardly possible to believe that the defective Spanish-Philippine squadron could have accomplished the voyage to the Antilles, in time of war, with every neutral port _en route_ closed against it. In any case, so far as the ostensible