until a majority of the Philippine people sought peace. Then the
President of the United States outlined a policy, and the history
and constitution of his government was an assurance that this policy
would be followed; the American government then began to do what it
had not been able to promise.

The forerunner and the founder of the present regime in these Islands,
by a strange coincidence, were as alike in being cruelly misunderstood
in their lifetimes by those whom they sought to benefit as they were
in the tragedy of their deaths, and both were unjustly judged by many,
probably well-meaning, countrymen.

Magellan, Legaspi, Carriedo, Rizal and McKinley, heroes of the free
Philippines, belonged to different times and were of different types,
but their work combined to make possible the growing democracy of
to-day. The diversity of nationalities among these heroes is an added
advantage, for it recalls that mingling of blood which has developed
the Filipinos into a strong people.

England, the United States and the Philippines are each composed
of widely diverse elements. They have each been developed by
adversity. They have each honored their severest critics while yet
those critics lived. Their common literature, which tells the story
of human liberty in its own tongue, is the richest, most practical
and most accessible of all literature, and the popular education upon
which rests the freedom of all three is in the same democratic tongue,
which is the most widely known of civilized languages and the only
unsycophantic speech, for it stands alone in not distinguishing by
its use of pronouns in the second person the social grade of the
individual addressed.