An Analysis of Filipino Character
American Pupils and Filipino Pupils Contrasted--The Filipinos' Belief
That They Are Highly Developed Musicians--Their Morbid Sensitiveness
to Criticism--Explanation of Their Desire for Education--Their
Belief That They Could Achieve Great Success in Manufactures, Arts,
and Literature If Left to Govern Themselves--Their Lack of Creative
Ability--Dillettanteism of Leading Filipinos--Manual Jealousies of
the People--Lack of Real Democratic Spirit in America--The Pride of
Filipino Men Compared to That of American Women.
So long as they find firmness and justice in the teacher, Filipino
children are far easier to discipline than are American children. At
the first sign of weakness in the teacher or in the Government which
is behind him, they are infinitely more unruly and arrogant than are
the children of our own race. There is, in even the most truculent
American child, a sense of the eternal fitness of things which the
Filipino lacks. American children are restless and mischievous. They
are on the alert for any sign of overstepping the limits of lawful
authority on the part of the teacher, and they have no compunctions
about forcing him to recognize that he rules by the consent of
the governed, and that he must not mistake their complaisance for
servility. On the other hand, they have, with rare exceptions, a
respect for the value of a teacher's opinion in the subjects which
he teaches, and will seldom contradict or oppose him in matters
that pertain wholly to learning. A class of American children which
would support in every possible way one of their number in defying
authority would not hesitate to make that same companion's life a
burden to him if he should set up his own opinion on abstract matters
in contradiction to his teacher's. Except when a teacher signally
proves his incapacity, American children are willing to grant the
broad premise that he knows more than they do, and that, if he does
not, he at least ought to know more. Filipino children reverse this
attitude. They are quite docile, seldom think of disputing authority
as applied to discipline, but they will naively cling to a position
and dispute both fact and philosophy in the face of quoted authority,
or explanation, or even of sarcasm. The following anecdote illustrates
this peculiarity. It happened in my own school and is at first hand.
One of the American teachers was training a Filipino boy to make
a recitation. The boy had adopted a plan of lifting one hand in an
impassioned gesture, holding it a moment, and of letting it drop, only
to repeat the movement with the other hand. After he had prolonged
this action, in spite of frequent criticism, till he looked like a
fragment of the ballet of "La Poupée," the teacher lost patience.
"Domingo," she said, "I have told you again and again not to make
those pointless, mechanical gestures. Why do you do it? They are
inappropriate and artificial, and they make you look like a fool."
Domingo paused and contemplated her with the pity which Filipinos
often display for our artistic inappreciativeness.
"Madame," he replied in a pained voice, "you surprise me. Those
gestures are not foolishness. They are talent. I thought they would
please you."
In my own early days I was once criticised by one of the young ladies
of Capiz for my pronunciation of the letter _c_ in the Spanish word
_ciudad_. I replied that my giving the sound of _th_ to the letter was
correct Spanish, whereupon she advised me to pay no attention to the
Spanish pronunciation, as the Filipinos speak better Spanish than do
the Spanish themselves. What she meant was that the avoidance of _th_
sounds in _c_ and _z_, which the Filipinos invariably pronounce like
_s_, is an improvement to the Spanish language. I imagined some of
that young lady's kindred ten years later arguing to prove that the
Filipino corruption of _th_ in English words--pronouncing "thirty" as
"sirty," and "thick" as "sick"--arguing that such English is superior
to English as we speak it. Here are some typically mispronounced
English sentences: "If Maria has seben fencils and see loses sree, see
will hab four fencils left, and if her moser gibs her eight fencils,
see will hab twel' fencils in all." Here is another: "Pedro has a new
fair of voots." Another: "If one fint ob binegar costs fi' cents,
sree fints will cost sree times fi' cents, or fikteen cents." It
would, I think, be hard to convince us that the euphonic changes in
these words are an improvement to our language.
Some four years ago, I was teaching a class in the Manila School of
Arts and Trades, and was giving some directions about the word form
of English sentences. I advised the class to stick to simple direct
sentences, since they would never have any use for a literary style
in English. Some six or eight young men instantly dissented from this
proposition, and insisted that they were capable of acquiring the best
literary style. Not one of them could have written a page of clear,
grammatical, idiomatic English. I tried to make it clear to them that
literary English and colloquial English are two different things,
and that what they needed was plain, precise English as a medium of
exchange in business, and I said, incidentally, that such was the
English possessed by the major portion of the English-speaking race. I
said that although the American nation numbered eighty millions,
most of whom were educated and able to make an intelligent use of
their language in conversation or in writing, the percentage of great
writers and speakers always had been small and always would be so.
When I had finished, the son of a local editor, arose and replied
as follows: "Yes, madame, what you say of Americans is true. But we
are different. We are a literary people. We are only eight millions,
but we have hundreds and thousands of orators. We have the literary
sense for all languages."
Nearly thirty years ago, when I was a pupil in the Kansas City,
Missouri, High School, the stepson of a United States Circuit judge
made a brutally rude and insubordinate reply to a woman teacher
who said to him, in reference to an excuse which he had given for
tardiness, "That is not a good excuse." The young man turned an
insolent eye upon the teacher--a gray-haired woman--and replied,
"It's good enough for me. What are you going to do about it?"
I cannot conceive that a Filipino child would be guilty of such
insolence, such defiance of decency and order. But never have I met
an American child who would have the artless indiscretion to put
himself in the position of Domingo. The American child does not mind
violating a rule. He is chary of criticising its propriety or its
value. In other words, the American child does not mind doing wrong,
but he is wary of making a fool of himself; and I have yet to meet
the Filipino child who entertained the faintest suspicion that it was
possible for him to make a fool of himself. Nor is the attitude of
dissent among Filipinos limited to those who express themselves. It
is sometimes very trying to feel that after long-winded eloquence,
after citation and demonstration, you have made no more real impression
upon the silent than upon the talkative, and that, indeed, the gentle
reserve of some of your auditors is based upon the conviction that
your own position is the result of indomitable ignorance. One of my
friends has met this spirit in a class in the Manila High School. A
certain boy insists that he has seen the iron head of a thunderbolt,
and although he makes "passing grades" in physics, he does not
believe in physics. He regards our explanations of the phenomena of
lightning as a parcel of foolishness in no wise to stand the test of
his own experience, and nothing can silence him. "But, ma'am," he says,
when electricity is under discussion, "I am see the head of a thunder
under our house." This young gentleman will graduate in a year or two,
and the tourist from the States will look over the course of study
of the Manila High School and go home telling his brethren that the
Filipino children are able to compete successfully with American youth
in the studies of a secondary education. I myself had a heart-breaking
time with a sixth-grade class in one of the intermediate schools of
Manila. The children had been studying animal life and plant life,
and could talk most learnedly about anthropoid apes, and "habitats"
and other things; but they undertook to convince me that Filipino
divers can stay under water an hour without any diving apparatus,
and that the reason for this power is that the diver is "brother to
a snake"--that is, that when the mother gave birth to the child, she
gave birth to a snake also, and that some mysterious power remains
in persons so born.
Filipino children are not restless and have no tradition of enmity
between teacher and pupil to urge them into petty wrong-doing. Their
attitude toward the teacher is a very kindly one, and they are
almost uniformly courteous. Their powers of concentration are not
equal to those of American children, and they cannot be forced
into a temporarily heavy grind, but neither do they suffer from the
extremes of indolence and application which are the penalty of the
nervous energy of our own race. They are attentive (which the American
child is not) but not retentive, and they can keep up a steady, even
pull at regular tasks, especially in routine work, at which American
children usually rebel. In fact, they prefer routine work to variety,
and grow discouraged quickly when they have to puzzle out things for
themselves. They will faithfully memorize pages and pages of matter
which they do not understand, a task at which our nervous American
children would completely fail. They are exceedingly sensitive to
criticism, and respond quickly to praise. Unfortunately the narrow
experience of the race, and the isolation and the general ignorance of
the country, make praise a dangerous weapon in the hands of a teacher;
for a child is apt to educe a positive and not a relative meaning from
the compliment. Filipino children have not attained the mental state
of being able to qualify in innumerable degrees. If a teacher hands
back a composition to an American boy with the words "Well done,"
the child understands perfectly that his instructor means well as
compared with the work of his classmates. The Filipino is inclined
to think that she means positively well done--above the average for
all the world. I once complimented a class in Capiz on the ease with
which they sang four-part music, and said, what I truly feel, that
the Filipinos are a people of unusual musical ability. They managed
to extract from the compliment the idea that the musical development
of the Filipinos is far in advance of that of the Americans.
Middle-class Filipinos have a very inadequate conception of the
tremendous wealth of artistic, literary, and musical talent interwoven
with the world's development, and are especially inclined to pride
themselves upon their racial excellence in these lines, where, in
truth, they have achieved almost no development whatever in spite of
the possession of undoubted talent. They do not understand the value
of long training, and are inclined to assume that the mere possession
of a creative instinct is final evidence of excellence in any art.
It will be some time before what real talent they have will make itself
felt in any line, because it will take a great deal of tactful handling
to make them reveal their natural artistic trend instead of falling
into imitation of Europe and America. It is strange that a people so
tenacious of its opinions with regard to matters of fact should be
so willing to surrender its ideal with regard to the thing of which
a nation has most reason to be tenacious, its natural expression. But
the whole race is so morbidly sensitive to the sneer that everything
Filipino is necessarily crude that the young art student or the young
musical student feels that his only hope of winning commendation is
in painting or playing or composing after European models; while as
for the populace at large it has its own standards in which other
motives than artistic excellence play the largest part.
I had a friend, a young Filipino girl, who has been one of the most
diligent among the pupils of the American schools. She was staying
with me two or three years ago when my publisher sent me a copy of a
primer intended for use in the Philippines, and which had just been
gotten out in the United States. The publisher had spared no expense
in his illustrations, and we were tremendously proud of the artistic
side of the book. This Filipino girl had heard me use the expression
"poor white trash," and I had explained to her how the Southern
negroes use the words as a term of derision of those who fail to
live up to the traditions of race and family. When I took my book
to her in the joy of an author in her first complete production,
she looked at it a minute and burst into tears. "Poor Filipino
trash!" was all she could say for a long time, and I finally pieced
it out that she was enraged because the Filipino boys and girls in
my book were sometimes barefooted, sometimes clad in _chinelas_, and
wore native camisas instead of American suits and dresses. I pointed
out to her that not one Filipino child in a hundred dresses otherwise,
but my argument was of no avail. The children in the American readers
wore natty jackets and hats and high-heeled shoes, and winter wraps,
even at play, and she wanted the Filipino children to look the same.
A great deal has been said in the American press about the eagerness
for education here. The desire for education, however, does not come
from any real dissatisfaction which the Filipinos have with themselves,
but from eagerness to confute the reproach which has been heaped
upon them of being unprogressive and uneducated. It is an abnormal
condition, the result of association of a people naturally proud and
sensitive with a people proud and arrogant. At present the desire for
progress in things educational and even in things material is more
or less ineffective because it is fed from race sensitiveness rather
than from genuine discontent with the existing order of things. The
educated classes of Filipinos are not at all dissatisfied with the
kind and quality of education which they possess; agriculturists are
not dissatisfied with their agricultural implements; the artisans
are not, as a class, dissatisfied with their tools or ashamed of
their labor. If you talk to a Filipino carpenter about the carefully
constructed houses of America, he does not sigh. He merely says, "That
is very good for America, but here different custom," Filipino cooks
are not dissatisfied with the terrible _fugons_ which fill their eyes
with smoke and blacken the cooking utensils, and have to be fanned
and puffed at every few minutes and occasionally set the house on
fire. The natural causes of growth are not widely existent, and it is
still problematic if they will ever come into being. Meanwhile growth
goes on stimulated by the eternal criticism, the sting of which the
Filipinos would move heaven and earth to escape.
Our own national progress and that of the European nations from whom
we are descended have been so differently conceived and developed that
we can hardly realize the peculiar process through which Filipinos
are passing. We cannot conceive of Robert Fulton tearing his hair
and undertaking a course in mechanics with the ulterior view of
inventing something to prove that the American race is an inventive
one. We cannot imagine Eli Whitney buried in thought, wondering how he
could make a cotton gin to disprove the statement that the Americans
are an unprogressive people. Cyrus Hall McCormick did not go out and
manufacture a reaper because he was infuriated by a German newspaper
taunt that the Americans were backward in agriculture. Nor can we
fancy that John Hay while dealing with the Chinese crisis in 1900 was
continually distracting his mind from the tremendously grave points
at issue by wondering if he could not do something a little cleverer
than the other diplomats would do.
All the natural laws of development are turned around in the
Philippines, and motives which should belong to the crowning years
of a nation's life seem to have become mixed in at the beginning--a
condition, due, of course, to the fact that the Filipinos began
the march of progress at a time when the telegraph and the cable
and books and newspapers and globe-trotters submitted their early
development to a harrowing comparison and observation. The Filipino
is like an orphan baby, not allowed to have his cramps and colic and
to cut his teeth in the decent retirement of the parental nursery,
but dragged out instead into distressing publicity, told that his
wails are louder, his digestive habits more uncertain, his milk teeth
more unsatisfactory, than the wails or the digestive habits or the
milk teeth of any other baby that ever went through the developing
process. Naturally he is self-conscious, and--let us be truthful--not
having been a very promising baby from the beginning, both he and
his nurses have had a hard time.
However, turned around or not, we are not responsible for the
condition. The Filipinos had arrived at the self-conscious stage
before we came here, and we have had to accept the situation and make
the best of it.
The American press of Manila, with the very best of intentions, has
indulged itself in much editorial comment, and the more the condition
of things is discussed, the more the native press strengthens in its
quick sensitiveness. The present attitude of the upper, or governing,
class of Filipinos is this: "We want the best of everything in the
world--of education, of morals, of business methods, of social polish,
of literature, art, and music, of roads and bridges, of agricultural
machinery, and of local transportation, and we can attain these
things." They have laid down in the beginning a premise for which no
inductive process can be found as justification,--that the Filipino
people is capable of doing anything which any other nation has done;
and that, given time and opportunity--especially the opportunity of
managing their own process of development--they will demonstrate
their capacity. The flat contradiction of this position which is
not infrequently taken by Americans in discussing Filipinos is,
of course, as extreme as the Filipino position itself, and, as an
observer, I have little to do with either. But at the present time I
do feel warranted in stating that the mass of intelligent Filipinos
fail to distinguish between critical or appreciative ability and real
creative ability, and that what they are acquiring in huge doses just
now is the critical and not the creative. Moreover, of the great body
of persons who make the demand for the best, only a very few have any
idea of what is the best except in book learning and social polish. The
prominent men among the Filipinos to-day are those who were educated
in Europe or in Filipino schools modelled on European patterns. Their
idea of education is a social one--an education which fits a man to
be considered a gentleman and to be an adornment to the society of
his peers. They have no conception of the American specialization
idea in education which grants a doctor's degree to a man who says
"would have went" and "He come to my house yesterday." The Filipino
leaders have a perfectly clear idea of what they want educationally,
of what they consider the best, and they are jealously watching
the educational department to see that they get it. The American
press urges more and more manual training, and the Filipino press,
because manual training is in the list of things marked "best,"
echoes the general call. But there is no small body of hobbyists in
the Islands keeping a jealous eye on the manual-training department
of education. It could be dropped out of the curriculum by simply
allowing it to become less and less effectual, and so long as no
formal announcement was made the Filipinos would not find out what
was being done. But in Manila and in most provincial towns there are
enough Filipinos who know what musical instruction is to watch that
the musical training be not too badly administered.
There is plenty of complaint about the Sanitary System of Manila,
there are plenty of people to complain about what _is_ being done, but
there is no small organized body of Filipinos whose paramount interest
in life is fixed upon sanitation and health, and who make it their
thankless task to harry the department and to preach ceaselessly at
the unthinking public till they get what they want. The legislators of
the Philippines are gentlemen born, men educated in conformity to the
ideals of education in aristocratic countries, but unfortunately they
have not had, owing to the political conditions which have prevailed
here, the practical experience of an aristocratic body in other
lands. In Mrs. Ward's "William Ashe" there is an analysis of a gouty
and rather stupid old statesman, who is so exactly a summary of what
a Filipino statesman is _not_ that I cannot forbear quoting it here:
"He possessed that narrow, but still most serviceable fund of human
experience which the English land-owner, while our English tradition
subsists, can hardly escape if he will. As guardsman, volunteer,
magistrate, lord lieutenant, member (for the sake of his name and
his acres) of various important commissions, as military _attaché_
even for a short time to an important embassy, he had acquired, by mere
living, that for which his intellectual betters had often envied him--a
certain shrewdness, a certain instinct both for men and affairs which
were often of more service to him than finer brains to other persons."
The only large practical experience which Filipino leaders have enjoyed
has come through their being land-owners and agriculturists. But
agriculture has not been competitive; and when the land-owning class
travelled, it was chiefly in Spain, which can hardly be called a
progressive agricultural country. Of men of the artisan class who
have worked their way up by their own efforts from ignorance to
education, from poverty to riches; of men who have had any large
available experience in manual labor or in specialised industries,
the present Assembly feels the lack. The Filipino leaders are a body
of polished gentlemen, more versed in law than in anything else,
with varying side lines of dilettante tastes in numerous directions.
Such as they are, the schoolboy desires to be. One of the periodic
frenzies of the local American press is an appeal to teachers--why
are they not remodelling character, why do not the aims and ideals
which it is their business to instil make a greater showing after ten
years of American occupation? American teachers have talked themselves
hoarse, and as far as talking can go, they have influenced ideals. The
child's _conscious ideal_ about which he talks in public, and to
which he devotes about one one-thousandth of his thinking time, is
some such person as George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln, or James
A. Garfield, who drove the canal boat and rose to be President of
the United States. But the subconscious ideal which is always in
his mind, upon which he patterns unthinkingly his speech and his
manners and his dreams of success, is--and it would be unnatural if
it were otherwise--some local potentate who will not carry home his
own little bag of Conant currency when he receives his salary at the
end of the month. What are a name and a few moral platitudes about a
dead-and-gone hero? What can they mean to a shirtless urchin with a
hungry stomach, against the patent object-lesson of his own countryman
whom not only his fellow citizens, but the invader, must treat with
consideration? It would be far easier to distract the attention of the
children of the State of Ohio from their distinguished fellow-citizens,
William H. Taft and John D. Rockefeller, to fix it upon the late Lord
Cromer or that Earl of Halifax known as the "Trimmer," than it is to
tell a Filipino child that the way to distinction lies through toil
and sweat. Children are very patient about listening to talk, but
they are going to pattern themselves upon what is obvious. Twenty or
thirty years from now, when the American school system will have aided
certain sons of the people, men of elemental strength, to bully and
fight their way to the front, and they will have become the evidence
that we were telling the truth--then will the results be visible in
more things than in annual school commencements and in an increase
in the output of stenographers and bookkeepers.
The weakest point in a Filipino child's character is his quick jealousy
and his pride. His jealousy is of the sort constitutionally inimical
to solidarity. Paradoxical as the statement may seem, the Filipinos
are more aristocratic in their theories of life than we are, and more
democratic in their individual constitution. Our democracy has always
been tempered by common sense and practicality. We like to say at
church that all men are brothers, and on the Fourth of July to declare
that they are born free and equal; but we do not undertake to put these
theories into practice. Every individual citizen of the United States
is not walking about with a harrowing dread of doing something that
admits a lesser self-esteem than his neighbor may possess. If a fire
breaks out in his neighborhood, and a little action on his part can
stop it before it gets a dangerous start, he does not hesitate to act
for fear doing so will show him possessed of less personal pride than
his neighbor up the street. If he is earning sixty dollars a month, and
learns that some other employee in another house is getting more money
for the same work, he does not take the chances of starvation because
to submit to the condition is to admit that he is less important than
another man. Yet the whole laboring element of the Filipino people
is permeated by just such a spirit. It is practically impossible to
fix a price for labor or for produce by any of the laws of supply and
demand that regulate such things elsewhere. The personal jealousies,
the personal assertions of individuals continually interfere with
the normal conditions of trade. If in the market some American
comes along in a hurry and pays a peso for a fish, the normal price
of which is about thirty-five cents, the price of fish goes up all
through the market--for Americans. You may offer eighty cents and be
refused, and the owner will sell two minutes after to a Filipino for
thirty-five. But in so doing he does not "lose his face." The other
man got a peso from an American, and a man who takes less--from an
American--is owning himself less able than his companions.
We talk of democracy, but we never know how little democratic we are
till we come in contact with the real article. Can you conceive what
would be the commercial chaos of America to-morrow if the humblest
laborer had the quick personal pride of the millionaire? With all
our alleged democracy, we realize the impossibility of ringing
Mrs. Vanderbilt's doorbell and asking her to sell us a few flowers
from her conservatory or to direct us to a good dressmaker, though
we can take just such liberties with houses where the evidences that
money would be welcome are patent.
The American laborer does not mind going to and from his work in
laboring clothes, and he makes no attempt to seem anything but a
laboring man. But you cannot tell in a Manila street car whether
the white-clad man at your side is a government clerk at sixty pesos
a month or a day laborer at fifteen. I once lost a servant because
I commanded him to carry some clothes to my laundress. "Go on the
street with a bundle of clothes, and get into the street car with
them! I would rather die!" he said; and he quitted rather than do it.
Compare that with the average common-sense attitude of the American
laboring man or even the professional man. Until he becomes really
a great man and lives in the white light of publicity, the American
citizen does not concern himself with his conduct at all as it relates
to his personal importance. He is likely to argue that he cannot do
certain things which violate his ideal of manhood, or other things
which are inconsistent in a member of the church, or other things
which are unworthy of a democrat, or of a member of the school board,
or even of an "all-round sport." Whatever the prohibitive walls which
hedge the freedom of his conduct, each is a perfectly defined one,
a standard of conduct definitely outlined in his mind, to which he has
pledged his allegiance; but he has no large conception that most useful
things are forbidden pleasures to him because of a sense of personal
importance. He has no God of the "I," no feeling that makes him stay
his hand at helping a cochero to free a fallen and injured horse,
while he looks to see that some other man of his class is helping also.
There is a perfectly defined class system in the Philippines, and,
between class and class, feeling is not bitter; but within each
class jealousy is rampant. The Filipino, though greatly influenced
by personality, does not yet conceive of a leadership based upon
personality to which loyalty must be unswervingly paid. He feels the
charm of personality, he yields to it just so long as it falls in
with his own ideas, but the moment it crosses his own assertiveness
he is ready to revolt. Many Americans speak of this characteristic
as if it were a twist in character. My own opinion is that it is a
passing phase, due to the Filipino's lack of the "narrow, but most
serviceable fund of human experience." But no matter to what cause
the condition is due, it makes a great difference in the life of the
individual and of the social body as a whole that each unit has fixed
his ideal of conduct upon an illimitable consciousness of personal
importance, instead of upon perfectly defined ideals in particular
matters. It makes for femininity in the race.
If the reader will meditate a little upon the difference between
masculine pride and feminine pride in America, he will probably
agree with me that masculine pride centres largely in loyalty to
well-defined ideals of what is manly, or honorable, or bold, or just,
or religious--in short, it tries to live up to the requirements of a
hundred separate standards. On the other hand, feminine pride, outside
of its adherence to what is chaste and womanly, consists of pride in
self, a kind of self-estimate, based frequently upon social position,
sometimes on a consciousness of self-importance which comes through the
admiration of men. In either case the pride is likely to show itself
in a jealous exaction of consideration for the individual. Such is
Filipino pride. It is almost wholly concerned in guarding its vested
rights, in demanding and exacting the consideration due the importance
of its possessor.
Filipinos are hard to enlist in any new undertaking until they are
certain that success will bring "consideration." They love newspaper
notices and publicity, they love the centre of the stage, and every
new advance in intelligence is bulwarked by a disproportional demand
for "consideration."
Filipino men are not lacking in manly qualities. They have the stronger
courage, the relatively stronger will and passions which distinguish
the men of our own race. But they are harder to get along with than
are Filipino women, because their sense of sex importance is so much
exaggerated, and because, as Mr. Kipling would put it, they "have too
much ego in their cosmos." The secret consciousness of power is not
enough for them. They must flash it every minute in your eyes, that you
may not forget to yield the adulation due to power. Like women, they
get heady on a small allowance of power; and indeed in both sexes there
are emphasized certain characteristics which we are accustomed to look
upon as feminine. Their pride is feminine as I have analyzed it. They
rely upon intuition to guide them more than upon analysis. In enlisting
coöperation, even in public matters, they are likely to appeal to a
sentiment of friendship for themselves instead of demonstrating the
abstract superiority of their cause. They will make a haughty public
demand, but will not scruple to support it with secret petition and
appeal. They are adepts at playing upon the weakness and petty vanity
of others; and they deal gently with the strong, but boldly with the
weak. Both men and women possess an abundance of sexual jealousy,
and have, in addition, the quick sensitiveness about rank, worldly
possessions, and precedence which with us has become the reproach
of the feminine. Lastly, they have, in its highest development, the
capacity to make a _volte-face_ with grace and equanimity. They are
cunning, but not shrewd; their reasoning is wholly deductive, they
are inclined to an enthusiastic assent to large statements, especially
when these take the form of moral or political truisms; but they do not
submit their convictions to practical working tests. They seem often
inconsistent, but observation will show that, however inconsistent
their practice is with their professions, it is always consistent
with their pride, as I have analyzed it in these pages.