Taft had succeeded so well in the Philippines, as diplomat and executive, that his conversion to imperialism passed almost unnoticed. Only recipients of his classified dispatches understood how deeply he despised the people he governed. Filipinos, Taft wrote, were “the greatest liars it has ever been my fortune to meet.” The educated minority were “ambitious as Satan and quite as unscrupulous.” The rest—some six and a half million peasants and jungle tribesmen—were inferior to “the most ignorant negro,” and “utterly unfit” for self-government. “They need the training of fifty or a hundred
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