Having heard much of the Mandaya villages near Mati, I improved the opportunity to visit them in August, 1912, only to find to my amazement that the local constabulary officer, who ought to have been in the closest possible touch with these people, did not even know the way to their settlements. At another place where some 1400 hill people had been compelled to come down from their native mountains and settle in a village which could have been made a model of cleanliness, and should have been surrounded by rich cultivated fields, not half enough ground had been cleared to furnish food for the inhabitants, even under the most favourable circumstances. The houses were falling down; the streets were deep in mud; the garden patches were overgrown with weeds; more than half of the people had taken to the hills again in a search for food, and small blame to them! I found here as fine appearing a young constabulary officer as one could hope to meet, eating his heart out because he had nothing to do! Neither he nor any of his soldiers spoke the local dialect. He was supposed to be running a store, among other things, for the benefit of the hill people. I asked to see it, and it took him half an hour to find the key! In sixty minutes I could have set him work enough to keep him busy for three months. All that he needed was some one to direct him, but there was no one to do it. With the best intentions in the world he was using his soldiers to chase a lot of poor hill people back into a village where they ought never to have been asked to live. In other words, the Moro Province, having brought these people down and ordered them to settle on a site selected for them, had signally failed to back its own game. I myself would not think of trying to compel members of a wild tribe to live in any given place, unless it were necessary to do so in the interest of public order. Life in villages can, and should, be made so attractive to them that they will be glad to adopt it. The Moros, with their fanatical religious beliefs and prejudices, present a very grave problem. Conditions have undoubtedly greatly improved in Davao, Cotabato and Zamboanga. I am not sufficiently familiar with affairs in the Lanao district to express an intelligent opinion concerning them. So far as concerns Joló, it is my opinion that things have come to a bad pass there; that life and property are not as safe to-day as they were during the early days of the American occupation, and that we have progressed backward for some time. However, Joló pirates have at least been pretty effectively kept off the sea, and that in itself is a very important result.