Filipinos hate and
fear the sun just as they hate the visible tokens of toil on their
persons. Where they know the genteel trades such as hat weaving,
dressmaking, embroidering, tailoring, and silversmithing, there
is relatively a fair industrial willingness. Men are willing to be
cooks and house servants, but they do not want to learn carpentry or
blacksmithing or gardening, all of which mean soiled clothes and hot
work; and women are unwilling to work in the kitchen. From the poor
Filipinos' standpoint, the Americans do not work--they rule. It would
be difficult to make a Filipino of the laboring class believe that
a teacher or a provincial treasurer had done a day's work. Loving,
as all Filipinos do, to give orders to others, ignorant as they are
of the responsibilities which press upon those who direct, they see
merely that we do not soil our hands, and they envy us without giving
us credit for the really hard work that we do.
Meanwhile there pours in upon the country a stream of modern mechanism
and of modern formulated thought, and the laborer has just as little
real interest in knowing what is inside the machine as his slightly
more intelligent neighbor has in examining the thought and in accepting
or rejecting it on its merits. Some accept all that we offer them,
doing so in a spirit of real loyalty, on the assumption that we know
more than they do, and that our advice is to be accepted.
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