"The undersigned is strongly opposed to the sending of members of wild tribes to the United States or to other civilized countries for exhibition purposes. Apart from all other considerations experience shows that the men and women thus taken away from their natural surroundings are apt to be pretty thoroughly spoiled and to be trouble makers after their return. "The undersigned has recently informed Mr. R. Schneiderwind that he would, if necessary, do everything in his power to prevent the latter gentleman from taking another set of Igorots away from the Philippines for exhibition purposes. This, too, in spite of the fact that Mr. Schneiderwind has apparently been very considerate in his treatment of the Igorots whom he has taken to the United States for exhibition purposes. "The undersigned would assume the same attitude toward any other person endeavouring to obtain Igorots for exhibition purposes." The advocates of the "united people" theory for these islands are forced to insist on the unimportance of the non-Christian tribes and it is needless to say that Blount does this. His contentions on the subject are rather concisely stated in the following passage:-- "You see our Census of 1903 gave the population of the Philippines at about 7,600,000 of which 7,000,000 are put down as civilized Christians; and of the remaining 600,000 about half are the savage, or semi-civilized, crudely Mohammedan Moros, in Mindanao, and the adjacent islets down near Borneo. The other 300,000 or so uncivilized people scattered throughout the rest of the archipelago, the 'non-Christian tribes,' which dwell in the mountain fastnesses, remote from 'the madding crowd,' cut little more figure, if any, in the general political equation, than the American Indian does with us to-day." [40] If there were ten million American Indians who were in undisputed occupation of half the territory of the United States, this statement might in a way approximate the truth. Blount's ten-year-old population figures are a trifle out of date, but before demonstrating this I wish to show certain peculiarities in his method of manipulating them. He says:-- "That the existence of these wild tribes--the dog-eating Igorrotes and other savages you saw exhibited at the St. Louis Exposition of 1903-4--constitutes infinitely less reason for withholding independence from the Filipinos than the American Indian constituted in 1776 for withholding independence from us, will be sufficiently apparent from a glance at the following table, taken from the American Census of the Islands of 1903 (vol. ii., p. 123):-- Island Civilized Wild Total