The San Francisco call., 1898-08-24
FILIPIN0S BEAVER
 THAN THE SPANlARCS
Fight Like Demons as Long as the Tide of Battle is Not Against
 Them
BY SOL N. SHERIDAN.

CAVITE ARSENAL, July 13.-My opinion of the insurgents, as sol- diers, has changed, as I have seen more and more of their undoubted l bravery, and of the wonderful tenacity of purpose, the relentless ferocity with which they have followed the Span iards step by step, In the long struggle whose result Is now seen to be inevit- able The Filipino, somewhere away back in his ancestry, has the drop of black blood which makes him cover and shrink when a bullet hits him. It is the display of what sporting men call the streak of yellow"
 But so long as he Is a winner. and even for longer .ime than is the case with most dark races after he has be- gun to lose, the Filipino will fight like a demon, and he Is so immeasurably the superior of the Spaniard in fighting ability. his streak of yellow" lies so much further below the surface than the Dons, that the odds are in his fa- yor anyway That he has made good fight goes without saying. The result Is his justification, and although I do not believe he would ever have achieved anything without the aid of DGWey guns cIlu l4lS pun LII American dollar, he has In the past, and would in the future, had Spain's claim been put off, have given the Castilians not little trouble in the matter of the collection of revenues. That, you know, has been always Spain's whole purpose in the planting and holding of colonies, to make them pay as much money to b. sent to the mother country as possible, regardless of their own welfare, and that fact con- tains the story of the downfall of the Spanish empire.
 To return to my friend, the Filipino He is, just now, most enthusiastically in love with the Americana. Gut in the country there is nothing too good for the American. l know, for I have cov- cred a considerable portion of the inte- rior during the three weeks we have been here I have lived with the native in his hut and have had the best the hut contained put freely at my disposi- ton, the best to eat, the best split bam- boo floor, soft and springy. to sleep upon, even the best of his weapons, the pride of his heart, his loved machete, keen enough to shave with and heavy enpugh to cleave mans skull at a blow, offered to me as free gift. And yet there has been always, in my mind a lurking distrust of my host. There is something of a glint-a suggestion of the Malay drop in his mixed ancestry in the soft brown eye, recalling to my mind those old stories of dark men running amuck to kill and kill and kill, until they have themselves been shot in their tracks like dogs as they deserved
 I have recalled, fighting the mosqui- toes, through the night, the fact that no wise sea captain will ship Manila man as one of his crew, and that na- tive Filipinos have been taken, as children, into Spanish families and ten derly reared only, at the last to put poison in the food of the entire family, and to make no excuse for the atro- cious act other than to say they had grown ''hot in the head" And their way of cutting their black hair short all around with kind of roach on the top is suggestive grinly of subjective desire to breed this heat" Whether a people so characterized can ever be trusted to govern themselves-and the Filipinos clearly expect the Americans to trust them after Manila shall have been taken--is a question for statesmen but I would most respectfully sug- gest to the statesmen, before attempt ing it's solution, that they come out here and take a few practical lessons in ethnology.