As close as ten thousand people could get to a speakers’ stand ten thousand people massed themselves, and they listened in respectful silence to the words of both the American and Filipino speakers, each one of whom made a spirited appeal for peaceful cooperation in the solution of the problem which America had acquired through no fault or desire of her own and which she could not, in honour, abandon. General Wright was the American speaker of the day and the frank friendliness of his speech was translated, paragraph by paragraph as he delivered it, by Mr. Arthur Fergusson, the Secretary-interpreter for the Commission, whose extraordinary command of Spanish made it possible for him not only to translate the words themselves, but to infuse into them the poetic fervour of the Spanish tongue. Never was Washington’s birthday so celebrated, and it marked a new era of mutual toleration which was to grow into sympathetic understanding disturbed only by the agitation of the few whose aspirations were in no way in those days shared or condoned by the many.