Show FILIPINO SELFGOVERNMENT I One of the Supreme court Judges at F ji New York city who prefers not to have t i his name mentioned has a son who lb serving his country In the army of tho E Philippines Recently says the Nova j York Sun one of the family asked the opinion from young man to express an 1 actual observation as to the capacity oc the Filipinosfor selfgovernment 1 A lx 1 the rf ply the name of tho writer being 0 Ji4 be-ing omitted by request J You have asked mo to give you my opinion as to the capabilities of theso g people to govern themselves I Is that they are no more fit to do so than any I other race of semlclvlllzed people l One strong reason against the Filipinos undertaking un-dertaking to govern themselves at present at least Is that they are thoroughly thor-oughly Imbued with Spanish methods and so would not know hour to conduct jan j-an honest government Every man placed In 0 responsible position would use his power solely for his own ends f will give you the statement of a native of one of the better lower class That is the man works in some capacity capa-city at the Captain of the Ports while lila wife with whom I talked has a small stand where she sells fruit cigars I cigarettes and native eatables of different differ-ent kinds 1 happened to know them I pretty well as we did guard on the river front near their shack and the woman struck me as being very much I superior to most of those of her class whom I had seen I Is hard to explain In what way as I t Is necessary to see and know the natives to understand what I mean but what first attracted my attention was her great affection for her children I was talking to her one day and In some way we began to Speak of the Independence of the Filipinos I Fili-pinos She said that if such a thing should ever happen she and her husband hus-band and children would go to Hong kong where according to her there must be quite a colony of Filipinos I asked her why she would do this and she expressed herself In this wayS way-S No matter who is In power here a man must still work to earn his chowchow chow-chow food Whether Spaniards or Americans makes no difference to this fact But the natives think that 1C they could gain Independence they could live by some means not evident at present without doing anything to earn that living Of course I have not attempted to give her language only her Idea but she went on to say that holding that idea those who had power or weapons would simply lake what they chose from those weaker than themselves which would mean ruin for my husband and myself besides hundreds of others In the same position As an example of this she pointed out that the native polico would come to her stand and help themselves to J themselCf whatever they wanted telling her to charge It to them but when payday came they never thought of giving her what they owed her I must confess this struck me as rather like our own cops and the peanut pea-nut stands This seems to me as coming from one of the very class who think to derive de-rive the greatest benefits from self government to be very nearly an unanswerable unan-swerable argument against any such nonsense for who should know the natives na-tives and the capabilities of the people better than one of themselves Now I do not know whether this view of the question coming from one of the people as It does and I can vouch for Its truthfulness has been put before you yet but to mo it Is conclusive conclu-sive and dispels any doubt I may have had upon the subject although there hae never been many |