“Madam, I understand you are going to the Philippine Islands. Now I want to know if you are going to take that great, big, beautiful boy out to that pest-ridden hole and expose him to certain destruction.”

I grabbed my great, big, beautiful boy and rushed off to my room, and it was a relief eventually to learn that the awful Philippine climate, at least so far as children were concerned, existed, largely, in people’s minds.

We found intense interest in our mission in California and San Francisco. If there were any anti-imperialists there, they successfully concealed themselves. The East was uncomfortably crowded with them in those days, but the evident interest and profit that the West coast would derive from a large Philippine trade may have been responsible for the favourable attitude of the Californians. However, we must not impeach their patriotism, and we ought to attribute some of their enthusiasm in reference to the Philippines, and our assuming control over them, to the natural enterprise of a people who had themselves gone so far in a land of development and hope.