In my husband’s earliest letters he characterised the Filipino people much as he did after years of experience with them. He wrote me that of the six or seven millions of Christian Filipinos about two percent were fairly well educated, while all the rest were ignorant, quiet, polite people, ordinarily inoffensive and lighthearted, of an artistic temperament, easily subject to immoral influences, quite superstitious and inclined, under the direction of others, to great cruelty. He thought them quite capable of becoming educated and that they could be trained to self-government. He was inclined to think that they had, because of their environment and experience under Spanish rule, capacity for duplicity, but he did not think they had the Machiavellian natures which people attributed to them. Some of those who call themselves “ illustrados ”⁠—the higher class⁠—took to political intrigue with great gusto.