Found an extensive snippet from my book that some of you might appreciate:
As early as 1898, the inimitable Philippine Commissioner Dean Conant Worcester, then still assistant professor of zoology at the University of Michigan, was already asking: "Can we refuse to accept the responsibility which the logic of events has thrust upon us?... Can we not withdraw and leave the civilized natives to work out their own salvation? There can hardly be two answers to this... for their utter unfitness for self-government at the present time is self-evident." Three months later, he was summoned by President William McKinley to join the first Philippine Commission, where they wrote, in their first conclusion regarding government:Speaking of people unfit to rule, President Smirk is going around again pretending he's the "Education President," promising "an extra $33 million in the approximately $12 billion Pell Grant program to give $1,000 more per year to low-income students who complete a rigorous high school curriculum."The United States can not withdraw from the Philippines. We are there and duty binds us to remain. There is no escape from our responsibility to the Filipino and to mankind for the government of the archipelago and the amelioration of the condition of its inhabitants.The Commission also underscored the eventual granting of "independence after an undefined period of American training," but the impossibility of self-rule at that time had already been established. Less than a month after arriving in the islands as part of the Second Philippine Commission, then-Commissioner Taft would write a friend: "The great mass of them are superstitious and ignorant.... They are cruel to animals and cruel to their fellows when occasion arises. They need the training of fifty or a hundred years before they shall even realize what Anglo-Saxon liberty is."
Considering the fact that he actually froze the maximum award last year -- after promising a raise during his past presidential campaign -- makes this new "promise" even more brazen.
Posted by the wily filipino at January 21, 2004 10:24 AM