The Outlook for the Philippines Author:Charles Edward Russell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III FILIPINO TRAITS LOGICALLY, if we require all men in all regions to be exactly alike in their thinkings, alike in their notions, plans and ways ... more »of life, we should begin by going back ten thousand years and abolishing the equator. If the Malay is to be viewed as the American, and the Hindoo as the Briton, climates must belie themselves, and there is no more of the suns, seas and winds that Landor declared to have made us what we are. The bare essentials of man's nature remain, no doubt, the same under whatsoever skies; if you prick us do we not bleed, and if you tickle us do we not laugh? But his psychology is a matter of his environment, traditions, economics and institutions; the sun not more surely tanning his hide than these things influence and finally settle his mental processes; one of which, by the way, is about as good as another. By the traditions of the East, being chiefly transcriptions of the minds of early masters of European merchantmen, the Malay was held to be secretive, sinister, unfathomable, revengeful, untrustworthy and over-given to knife-play; this by the order of legend that makes a Hollander fat and phlegmatic, a Frenchman thin and irresponsible, an Englishman stout and impassive, and an American always madly grubbing dollars. Each of these fictions doubtless serves as a handy missile in the Donnybrooks of international jealousy or international competition, but generations ago truthful travelers relieved all reasoning persons of any need of thinking of them as facts. And asTicTthe Malay, he has suffered in the sameway by the same easy process; for the truth is, he is no more conspicuously deceitful, secretive, sinister and the rest of it than the Hollander is conspicuously fat.1 Gironiere, who lived many years in intimate associat...« less