CHAPTER I. 
PITFALLS OF THE VOCABULIST. 
The material upon which has been based this study of the Subanu 
speech was collected partly by Colonel Finley himself during the active 
and somewhat militant years of his term as governor of Zamboanga and 
partly at his order and under his direction by such assistants as he 
could spare from the exacting details of his administration. The exten- 
sion of the American system to dominions oversea, the adjustment of 
American polity to the at present unassimilable and non-homogeneous 
peoples of a distinctly lower culture plane, the inopine and lightly 
assumed administration of an empire through the machinery of a loqua- 
cious democracy—all these things at the beginning of but their second 
decade are yet so new that our people who stay at home in ease have no 
slightest conception of the character and the mass of administrative 
details which are laid upon our new proconsulars. 
It so happens that I know, because it has been given to me to pass 
through the experience. Designated to the administration of one of the 
weak kingdoms of the Pacific, primus inter pares in a board of three 
consulars, each of whom had the absolute right of veto, sworn to admin- 
ister the Berlin General Act, which was fatally defective from the very 
beginning, I have known the trials of ruling the kingdom of Samoa. It 
has fallen to my lot to face the hostile front of war with no greater show 
of force than the American ensign hoisted aboard a 21-foot rowboat, 
where my British and German colleagues could back their authority 
with steel cruisers. I know through experience the hours and days of 
talk, the tangle of plot and counterplot, the reams of paper covered 
with reports never to be comprehended in Washington, time working 
into overtime just to keep the peace. I can sympathize with the effort 
which it has cost my collaborator, the sacrifice which it has meant to 
him of rest and relaxation, to compile this material which he has put 
into my hands for study. Better than others, I can count the cost of 
such work as this, done under trying military and civil conditions, work 
in a field which lies wholly outside his professional duty. ‘Therefore I, 
at least, know that such material must be approached with sympathy 
as well as reverence. It is only after full and cordial conference with 
him upon the subject that I venture upon the criticism of the material. 
I found my collaborator anxious that the data-should be discussed 
solely upon their own showing and without consideration of the circum- 
stances under which they had been collected. When I pointed out to 
him that other vocabulists had been confronted with the same unrecog- 
nized difficulties, I found him not only willing but enthusiastic that, in 
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