I trust that the foregoing incomplete outline of what has been accomplished toward bettering the condition of the non-Christian tribes of the Philippines has at least sufficed to convey some idea of the nature of the task which has confronted us and of the spirit in which it has been approached. Before considering further the difficulties which have been successfully met and the problems which still remain unsettled, I will correct some of the numerous misstatements which have been made relative to the unimportance of the non-Christian tribes, the nature of the work done for them, and the motives of some of those who have engaged in it. I once heard it said that the trouble with Blount's book was that it contained five thousand lies, that the correction of each would require, on the average, two pages of printed matter, and that no one would read the resulting series of volumes! I have not counted the misstatements of this author. They are sufficiently numerous to make it impracticable to answer them all in detail. It is hard to know just what to do in such a case, as one must run the risk of giving undue importance to them by noticing them, or of creating the impression that they cannot be answered by ignoring them. Under all the circumstances it has seemed to me well to reply somewhat fully to his more important allegations relative to non-Christian tribe matters, for the reason, among others, that many of his statements embody the more important claims of the Filipino politicians relative thereto; and to add that it would be equally easy to riddle his contentions relative to most other matters which he discusses. He says:-- "Professor Worcester of the Philippine Commission has for the last twelve years been the grand official digger-up of non-Christian tribes. He takes as much delight at the discovery of a new non-Christian tribe in some remote, newly penetrated mountain fastness, as the butterfly catcher with the proverbial blue goggles does in the capture of a new kind of butterfly." [31] I have never had the good fortune to discover even one new tribe, the net result of my explorations and studies having been to reduce the number of such tribes claimed to inhabit the Philippines from eighty-two to twenty-seven, and to throw serious doubt on the validity of several of those which I still provisionally recognize. Blount adds:-- "Professor Worcester's greatest value to President Taft, and also the thing out of which has grown, most unfortunately, what seems to be a very cordial mutual hatred between him and the Filipinos, is his activities in the matter of discovering, getting acquainted with, classifying, tabulating, enumerating, and otherwise preparing for salvation, the various non-Christian tribes." [32]