Hence I affirm that as to it, we have a distinct separate problem, which cannot be solved in the lifetime of anybody now living.

But it is a problem which need not in the least delay the advent of independence for the other fourteen fifteenths of the inhabitants of the archipelago--all Christians living on islands north of Mindanao.

It is true that there are some Christian Filipinos on Mindanao, but in policing the Moros, our government would of course protect them from the Moros.

If they did not like our government, they could move to such parts of the islands as we might permit to be incorporated in an ultimate Philippine republic.

Inasmuch as the 300,000 or so Moros of the Mohammedan island of Mindanao and the adjacent islets called Jolo (the 'Sulu archipelago,' so called, 'reigned over' by the sultan of comic opera fame) originally presented, as they will always present, a distinct and separate problem, and never did have anything more to do with the Philippine insurrection against us than their cousins and co-religionists over in near-by Borneo, the task which confronted Mr.Root in the fall of 1899, to wit, the suppression of the Philippine insurrection, meant practically the subjugation of one big island, Luzon, containing half the population and one third of the total area of the archipelago, and six neighbouring small ones, the Visayan Islands." [331] Now as a matter of fact Mindanao is by no means Mohammedan.