When it is remembered that in the present instance each of these dialects is very poor in literature, and that its use is limited to a million or two of human beings at the most, the enormous value of instruction in English will be realized, to some extent at least. CHAPTER XX THE EXPLORATION OF NON-CHRISTIAN TERRITORY At the time of their discovery the Philippine Islands were inhabited by a very large number of distinct tribes the civilization of which was directly comparable with that of the Negritos, the Igorots and the Moros as they exist to-day. Do not understand me to imply that the Negritos, the Igorots and the Moros have attained to the same stage of civilization. The Negritos belong to a distinct race. They are woolly-headed, nearly black, and of almost dwarfish stature. They seem to be incapable of any considerable progress and cannot be civilized. Intellectually they stand close to the bottom of the human series, being about on a par with the South African bushmen and the Australian blacks. The Igorots are of Malayan origin. They are undoubtedly the descendants of the earlier, if not the earliest, of the Malay invaders of the Philippines, and up to the time of the American occupation had retained their primitive characteristics. The Moros, or Mohammedan Malays of the southern Philippines, exemplify what may be considered the highest stage of civilization to which Malays have ever attained unaided. They are the descendants of the latest Malay invaders and were, at the time of the discovery of the islands, rapidly prosecuting an effective campaign for their mohammedanization. At the outset the Spaniards made extraordinary progress in subduing, with comparatively little bloodshed, many of these different peoples, but the Moros at first successfully resisted them, were not brought under anything approaching control until the day of steam gun-boats and modern firearms, and were still causing serious trouble when Spanish sovereignty ended. As time elapsed the political and military establishments of Spain in the Philippines seem to have lost much of their virility. At all events the campaign for the control and advancement of even the non-Mohammedan wild peoples was never pushed to a successful termination, and there to-day remains a very extensive territory, amounting to about one-half of the total land area, which is populated by non-Christian peoples so far as it is populated at all. Such peoples make up approximately an eighth of the entire population.