While in the United States in 1910 I read Rudyard Kipling's "If" and thereafter did not rest until I had sent a copy of it to each governor and lieutenant-governor employed in the special provincial government service of the Philippine Islands. Kipling wrote for these men of mine up in the hills without knowing it. They understand him and he would understand them. There is not one of them who has not learned to "... fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds' worth of distance run"; not one whose personal experience has left him deaf to the appeal of the lines:-- "If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about don't deal in lies, Or being hated don't give way to hating, And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise." Furthermore, each of them has again and again finished on his nerve. Did not the words,-- "If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'" run through Bondurant's mind that last afternoon when he was following Moro outlaws through a foul mangrove swamp, while his senses reeled with the fever which was so soon to end his life? In his wonderful quadruplet of stanzas Kipling has fixed one criterion of manhood which it is hard indeed to meet:-- "If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build them up with worn-out tools." I beg my fellow-countrymen to remember that the non-Christians of the Philippines constitute an eighth of the population; that the work undertaken for their physical, mental and moral advancement has succeeded far beyond the hopes of those who initiated it; that its results would go down like a house of cards if American control were prematurely withdrawn. Shall the men who have devoted their lives to these things be forced to watch them broken, and then be denied the poor privilege of building them up again? If the splendid results of so much efficient, faithful, self-sacrificing and successful effort were to be lost, would not the dead who gave their lives for them turn in their graves? The greatest of the non-Christian tribe problems in the Philippines at present is, "Shall the work go on?" There is one satisfaction which no man can take from those of us who have worked for the advancement of these backward and hitherto neglected peoples. We have shown what can be done! CHAPTER XXV SLAVERY AND PEONAGE Chattel slavery existed in the Philippine Islands when Magellan discovered them in 1521. It exists there to-day.