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The Visayas Feeling between Tagálog soldiers and Visayan people grew constantly more bitter, and before many months had passed they fell to killing each other. The highest officers of the "Regional Revolutionary Government of the Visayas" protested vigorously to Aguinaldo, but without result. The situation was entirely beyond his control.
The language used in Luzon and other northern islands is different from that of the Visayas; but all the natives write, expressing themselves fluently and correctly, and using a simple alphabet which resembles the Arabic. Their houses, and their mode of life therein, are fully described; also their government, social organization, and administration of justice.
The Visayas, for example, would refuse sooner or later to acknowledge the Tagalog supremacy of Luzon. If we proceed farther south still, what practicable bond can be found to exist between Mindanao, peopled by Mohammedans and savages, and Luzon or Panay or Negros? The consequences of such a disruption as is here predicted must occur to everyone.
There are upwards of thirty races in the Philippines, each speaking a different dialect, but five-sixths of the entire Christian population is composed of the Tagalos and Visayas. The former live in Mindoro and the southern half of Luzon, and the latter in Cebu, Iloilo and other islands in the center of the group.
The important islands are less than a dozen in number, and 90 per cent. of the Christian population live on Luzon and the five principal islands of the Visayas group. The total population is somewhere between 7,000,000 and 9,000,000. This includes the wild tribes of the mountains of Luzon and of the islands in the extreme south.
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