The most reverend pandita of them all, a shrewd old man, came to visit the governor and was treated with such extreme dignity, that he came again and talked about the Koran to his heart's content. Moreover, he was consulted about matters pertaining to the government and was thanked for his wisdom. Finally this old priest arose in a grand Moro assembly and solemnly announced that it was the will of "Allah ta Allah" that the Americans should rule over the Moro people and tax them to the fifth of all their goods. Taxes to foreigners-the proof of slavery! Never before had Lanao Moros paid a centavo to anybody. The triumph of American diplomacy was complete.

The governors of the Moros have been racking their brains to invent new activities for the superabundant energy of these virile people. Governor Frank Carpenter is generally conceded to have been most fertile in original ideas. He secured a landscape gardener from Washington city, and set him at work beautifying the capital city of the Moros, Zamboanga. The gardener was given plenty of money and told to work a miracle. Delightful little parks began to appear like magic. Fountains, charming waterfalls, and glorious flower gardens began to attract the admiration of the Moros. Numerous canals that had once been ugly holes began to shimmer with exquisite water lilies. That human beings could achieve such wonders was a new idea in Moroland. It became the gossip of the entire province.

Then there arose splendid concrete buildings. The architects were told to put art into their designs. There crept out into the bay a great beautiful pier brilliantly lighted by dozens of gilded electric lamps. To-day Zamboanga is being advertised by tourist companies as "the most beautiful city in the entire Orient."

This same landscape genius went to the other cities and towns of the Moro province, establishing a beautiful little park in the center of each. The only school the older Moros know anything about is experience, but they learn in that school very quickly. The result of this demonstration in beauty was that presently one of the dirtiest people one could find any

where was hard at work planting flowers, and occasionally trying their hand at making rustic paths and fountains! If they had not yet been converted to godliness, they were at least converted to cleanliness. They had something to do to take the place of killing one another.

Governor Carpenter scoured the world for new ideas in agriculture and industry. Plots of ground were selected where the Moros could not help seeing what was going on, and here commercial plants of all kinds were raised. When a plant proved adaptable to Mindanao, it was raised in quantity and distributed free of charge, and a man went along with the Moros to show them how to plant and care for the new crop.

One cannot to-day pass through that country without feeling the keenest enthusiasm. With rich soil, abundant rainfall, wonderful climate, virile, teachable, hard-working people, there' are all the elements necessary for a paradise. During the past four or five years the Moros of the Lanao region have been as prosperous as any people in the Philippines, and some of them have been buying auto-trucks-for an ordinary seven passenger car will not hold a family of four wives and forty children. A truck filled with a Moro chieftain, all his wives, children, and movable property, is a strange and significant sight. In all the world there probably has never been such a wide and rapid leap from one civilization to another as these Moros are experiencing-and they like it.

Moroland does not fulfill all the requirements for a paradise yet, and there are not a few serious hindrances to rapid progress. For example, the Mohammedan religion forbids borrowing money, making the credit system upon which modern business rests an impossibility among the Moros. Everything must be done on a strictly cash basis. Countless disputes arise, and the instinct of the Moros is to resort to direct action, as they have always been accustomed to do.

Where lawlessness has always been an everyday matter, it is unjust to inflict as severe punishment upon those who are convicted of crime as is done in America. At least that is the theory the officials in Moroland have worked on. If one wishes to see a thoroughly modern prison in actual operation,

he can find it at San Ramon, the Moro penitentiary. This is not a prison, but a beautiful farm by the sea. To the Moros it is like sending a man to heaven for being wicked, for it is by all odds the most lovely and lovable spot they ever lived in, or, at least in this generation, will ever live in. San Ramon has but one objective: to cure the patient. The Moro who steals or murders is all too obviously the victim of a past bad environment, and needs to acquire a new set of ideas. He would never get them behind prison walls; he does get them on San Ramon Farm.

Here the prisoners work, but not too hard. They have plenty of good food and grow strong and happy. When their term has expired and they must return to the outside world, many of them weep and beg to be allowed to remain in San Ramon. One might suppose that they would commit other crimes in order to return, but they realize that the reputation of San Ramon and the very principle of the new penology are at stake. San Ramon boasts of a finer record of cured inmates than any other prison in the world.

MORO PASSION FOR EDUCATION

The most wonderful aspect of the transformation in Moroland is the new passion for education. For the first time in all the history of that fanatical religion, a Mohammedan nation is going to school-and the teachers are nearly all Christians! In Lanao, for example, 6000 Moro children were enrolled in 1922, or 35 per cent of the school population. The superintendent reports that the children are rushing to school despite the suspicion of their parents. But there is something still more marvelous-they are sending girls to school, though women among Mohammedans are slaves. It is contrary to Moslem custom for them to be educated. As an Indian Moslem visiting the Moros explained, "The place of woman is to be subservient to man, but if she becomes a little educated, she talks back and you cannot keep her in her place." But the Moros are educating their girls, regardless of Moslem custom. All who know the Moros, their wonderful progress in the past

twenty years, their intense admiration for Americans, believe that here as never before in the history of Mohammedanism is a people ready to be Christianized. The government has gone more than half the way already. There are in America strong men and women who could become worthy successors of the great administrators who have pacified Mindanao, who could command the admiration of the Moros, and could lead them to Christ.

This is not a task for either timid souls or snobs. Men of great human love and dauntless courage, men who have no race prejudice, but can see the manhood in the Moros and bring it to the surface, real men who draw other men to themselves, have got to undertake this task.

Bishop Brent, while he was in the Philippines, became so enthusiastic about the Moros, that three society women of large means, infected by his zeal, went to Jolo and did remarkable deeds of mercy for nearly a year. The best known of these is Mrs. Lorillard Spencer. "The world can never know," says Bishop Brent, "the purity and motive and spaciousness of vision that actuated and sustained the three ladies who volunteered to spend a year of work in Christ's name in Jolo amid conditions that defied the centuries and discouraged the bravest. They have won a name and place among the Moros of the Island of Jolo, that no Christians in history, men or women, have ever held. Our little band of women have created an opportunity for permanent work, which, but for them, would have been many years in coming."

Rev. and Mrs. John Lund of the Christian Missionary Alliance in Zamboanga have gotten hold of several strong young Moro men. A Moro named Matias Cuadra, one of the most intense and beautiful Christians in all the Islands, graduated from Union Seminary in Manila in 1919, was ordained as a Christian minister, and has been doing a wonderful work in Siasi and Jolo, with little or no open opposition. Scores of Moslem boys have been baptized and Cuadra has been invited to preach about Christ in the very mosques. The young men in the public schools are apparently as open to the Gospel as any young men in the Islands.

Most of the younger Moros are eager to discover a way in which they may be Christians and Moslems at the same time. They are quick to explain that a Moslem believes in both the Bible and Jesus Christ. The son of a hadji, after attending the Baguio Student Conference of the Young Men's Christian Association, wrote to a missionary:

"Really, doctor, that conference has made me understand the mighty will of God. You know, I am sure, that I am a Mohammedan, and you can not mistake that, but being a boy, I fully understand that we have but one supreme God. I wish you to help me, that is to pray for me, that I may not stumble or go wrong on my way to the road to success."

Rev. Mr. Lund, after years of experience among the Moros, declares that there is positively no reason in the world why they should not be brought to Christ in great numbers. Even panditas (priests) have more than once asked him to teach them the Bible, saying that their people want to know it as well as the Koran.

Mr. William Ghent (whose remarkable conversion is related elsewhere), has found the younger generation of Moros more willing to listen to his message of Christ and to pray with him than his own countrymen, and quite as willing as Filipino young men. They came to his house inquiring about religion, and he has had as many as fifteen of them on their knees with him in prayer.

It

Now is the flood tide for the Christianization of the Moros. may be a case of now or never. The Moros, like all Mohammedans, are fatalists. "It is the will of Allah that they should listen to Americans," while America exercises control over them. When the Philippines become independent, it will be another story. There may be no chance later.

We have seen enough of Christianized Moros to know the mighty zeal they have. It is perfectly evident that a Christianized Moro nation would turn southward toward the fifty millions of Mohammedans in Borneo, Java, Sumatra, and the Straits, and begin to storm those islands for Christianity. The experience of a century ought to have taught us that no white man or thousand white men are going to convert Mo