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

MORAL REFORMS

411

ishing facts in the Philippines is how relatively few of the
student class are ever seen smoking. These tremendously
earnest young people seem determined to do nothing that will
injure their bodies or minds. All they need is a hint that
tobacco is injurious and they will have none of it. This
abstinence on the part of the students indicates that the fight
against tobacco may not be as hopeless as it seems. In the
meantime everything possible ought to be done to make the
working conditions of tobacco factories as healthful and as
wholesome as possible.
While problems connected with factories are not yet serious
outside of Manila, great injustice has been done in all parts
of the Islands to agricultural laborers and to house servants.
The public conscience has not yet become awakened to this
injustice. Matters are so infinitely much better than they
were in Spanish times that people are inclined to regard
them as ideal. In truth the ancient feudal system, known in
Spanish as casiquism, still exists in modified form among
ignorant people in all the provinces. The so-called tao class
are so accustomed to it that they want nothing else-they
feel unsafe unless thay may throw the responsibility for their
economic welfare on the shoulders of some man whom they
regard as more intelligent than they are. Where laborers are
too ignorant to check up their own accounts, the owner keeps
all the books and gets rich, while his laborers get only a bare
subsistence-they expect no more. Agitation can do little
to remedy this condition. Universal education is the only
cure. As education progresses the last vestiges of casiquism
will fade away. Meanwhile the Church can champion the
victims of unusual hardship, and can demand the best possible
educational and religious training for the children of those
who toil. Innumerable house servants, men as well as women,
are being held to their tasks by the fact that their employers
have loaned them money, and the servants imagine that they
are legally bound to work off the debt or go to jail, just as
they had to do in Spanish times. Christians must become
sensitive to the essential immorality of making virtual slaves