The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-02-04

Copyright, 1912. by Frank c. Carpen-
 ter) Washington, D. C. XUyAKING up a nation!
 A That is what Uncle Sam is
 w doing in the Philippines He has started s,oooOoo people to thinking, and both the wild man and the civilized are using their brains. The ladies with which he Is stirring this mighty in- telectural pot are of many kinds. One Is the new government, another the roads and public works that are be- ing made everywhere, a third is the chances for money making which he has opened up to the people, and most important of all is the schools.
 When I visited the islands in 1900 education was almost unknown. The great ma jority of the people had no schooling watever. Eighty per cent of them were densely ignorant. and not one man in 10 could read or write. The few schools, such they were, had been broken up by the war, and about the only teaching was that of the friars, who were intoxicating the knowl- edge of the middle al ges. and that large ly religious.
 During my stay some schools were organized by the army. and an ex- soldier was put a the head of the
 
 began to bring in the American school maam and to teach the children in English.
 What a job this was Americans who have not been to the Philippines will never know. Only about [ per cent of fhe population of the island could speak Spanish and the people carried on their work in a polyglot of languages. Even the Christian Fipinos had IS different dialects and these were so varied that the better class man from Mindanao or Negros could hardly make himself un- derstood to the man of Luzon. There was no common language and English was comparatively unknown.
 Giving the FilipinOs Language
 Today the Filipinos have one tongue, which can be understood anywhere in the islands an dwhich will carry the traveller through them from Borneo to Formosa This is the English. Thou sands of teachers have been teaching il during the past 15 years. and hun dreds of thousands of children are now practicing it in every city and village. Today there ase more than 5000 Filipino school teachers, all of whim read Eng fish we'll and most of whom speak IL | fairly well. There are also about S" l American teachers who are working here and there throughout the archlpeiago. and the younger generation is growing l lir with English as it's thought language
 
 and book language
 This means much to the Philippines. IL is unifying the people and making them one nation In the past the Fiipinos, or the Christian natives as distinguished from the wild tribes and the Moros, had eight different types of languages The | natives of one province could not under stand those of the ones adjoining tnem In Luzon they spoke seven different tongues. and throughout the archipelago there were numerous dialects
 There were about 100000 who used the Tagalog, s00.0D who conversed in the loco, and more than 500,0O who spoke Bico There were 3o0.00o or 10000 who had the Pangasinam and more than 250,O00 whd had the Pampanga Still different tongues were spoken by the 100000 of the Nisayan islands further south and these had their dialects.
 The Moros of Mindanao and Sulu had their own language. but it was different In different places. The whole archipel- 7so in short was Babel with such a honfusion of tongues that it would have yoeen impossible 10 have introduced mod Prn civilization without a new language.