The Filipinos, however, felt very differently about their soldiers, and it is only fair to give their side too, especially as it may throw some light on the Mexican situation. Even the richest and most highly educated men found nothing to laugh at in these poor bands which were after all composed of their own people fighting and suffering for a cause which they could at least understand, whether or not they sympathized with it. They did not regard the pillaging, tortures, and murders to which the Filipinos subjected their own people as we did. They called the robbery "collecting contributions for the support of the war." As for the murders--in the Orient to kill is an immemorial right of the rulers of men. What if they did fight disguised as peaceful country folk? They were a weak people fighting against a strong. They were naked and they were hungry, and they were fighting for a cause. Their arms were often of little use, and they made powder out of match heads and cartridge shells out of the zinc roofs of parish buildings, and even then they had only ammunition enough to fire a few volleys and then run. But men so armed had forced the United States to send out nearly seventy thousand well equipped soldiers to subdue them. To the native Filipino, as perhaps to the Mexican to-day, the ragged and half savage figures of the guerillas stood for their vision of a united race. But it was natural that our troops could not understand this, and that they should gradually become embittered against their antagonists. The officers, by the necessary division of our forces, found themselves confronted with conditions utterly alien to their experience. They had to live in native houses or churches, in the midst of four or five thousand people whose language they did not speak, and whose thoughts were not their thoughts. Most of them were young men. They came from all over the United States, and were neither monsters nor saints, but good examples of their time and country.