They have usually married Filipino women of good families, so
their offspring had exceptional advantages, and stand high in the
estimation of the community. The requirement of the Spanish government
was that a Chinese must embrace Christianity and become a citizen,
before he could marry a Filipino. Usually he assumed his wife's name, so
the children were brought up wholly as Filipinos, and considered
themselves such, without cherishing any particular sentiment for the
Flowery Kingdom.
The biologist who studies impartially the Filipino peoples may easily
conclude that the American government is making a mistake in excluding
the Chinese; that the infiltration of intelligent Chinese and their
intermixture with the native population would do more to raise the level
of ability of the latter than a dozen generations of that compulsory
education on which the government has built such high hopes.
And this conclusion leads to the question whether much of the surplus
population of the Orient could not profitably be diverted to regions
occupied by savage and barbarian people. Chinese immigrants, mostly
traders, have long been going in small numbers to many such regions and
have freely intermarried with native women.
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