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. The
Mohammedan Malays, called Moros, are found here and there along the
western coast of the Zamboanga peninsula and along the southern coast
of the island as far as Davao.
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