Mohammedan Mindanao is always dealt with in this book as a separate and distinct problem." [330] But it was hardly possible for him to dismiss this great island, which is a little continent by itself, quite so cavalierly and I will quote the more important of his further and later statements regarding it:-- "While the great Mohammedan island of Mindanao, near Borneo, with its 36,000 square miles of area, requires that the Philippine archipelago be described as stretching over more than one thousand miles from north to south, still, inasmuch as Mindanao only contains about 500,000 people all told, half of them semi-civilized, the governmental problem it presents has no more to do with the main problem of whether, if ever, we are to grant independence to the 7,000,000 Christians of the other islands, than the questions that have to be passed on by our Commissioner of Indian Affairs have to do with the tariff.

Mindanao's 36,000 square miles constitute nearly a third of the total area of the Philippine archipelago, and more than that fraction of the 97,500 square miles of territory to a consideration of which our attention is reduced by the process of elimination above indicated.

Turning over Mindanao to those crudely Mohammedan semi-civilized Moros would indeed be 'like granting self-government to an Apache reservation under some local chief,' as Mr.Roosevelt, in the campaign of 1900, ignorantly declared it would be to grant self-government to Luzon under Aguinaldo.

Furthermore, the Moros, so far as they can think, would prefer to owe allegiance to, and be entitled to recognition as subjects of, some great nation.

Again, because the Filipinos have no moral right to control the Moros, and could not if they would, the latter being fierce fighters and bitterly opposed to the thought of possible ultimate domination by the Filipinos, the most uncompromising advocate of the consent of the governed principles has not a leg to stand on with regard to Mohammedan Mindanao.