The people of the Philippines, their religious progress and preparation for spiritual leadership in the Far East,

120 THE PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES

must be inconsequential savages, or America would have
known all about them. The history which we have related in the
chapters preceding this was as a blank page to nearly every
man in the United States.
The Filipinos knew just as little about America. Some of
them had traveled through the United States on the way to
Europe but none of them knew enough to believe her different
in real spirit from the land-greedy nations across the Atlantic.
To half of the Filipinos the United States came on the map
on May i, I898.
What they heard from the Spaniards was what one might
expect to hear from any maddened enemy. General Basilio
Augusti y Davila, in a proclamation issued in Manila two
days after war was declared, warned the Filipinos against
"The North American people, composed of all social excrescences... without cohesion and without a history...
only infamous traditions... with the blackguard intention
of robbing us of all that means life, honor and liberty....
The North American seamen undertake...the substitution
of Protestantism for the Catholic religion which you profess,
to treat you as tribes refractory to civilization, to take possession of your riches... to kidnap those persons whom
they consider useful... They shall not gratify their lustful
passions at the cost of your wives' and daughters' honor...
they shall not perpetrate any of the crimes inspired by their
wickedness and covetousness... "
The Archbishop Nozaleda added the prophecy that, if victorious, this "heterodox people, possessed by the blackest
rancor and all the abject passions which heresy engenders"
would raze their temples, profane the altar of the true God,
rob them of their religion, and treat them as slaves.
AGUINALDO
The Spaniards were equally bitter against Aguinaldo, whom
they had betrayed and whom they now feared. They tried to
make the Filipinos believe that he had carried to Hongkong
and used for himself, the money which was to have been given