The Philippines is our country. Its boon and beauty belong to us first - before to anybody else.

The Philippines is our country. It is made up of an impoverished mass - farmers, laborers, workers - with a capacity, however, for great purpose and great achievement.

It is to the uplift of their lot that we must dedicate ourselves and commit our energies - to make the good life available to all of them, not limit the good life to the exploitative, self-perpetuating ruling class.

The Philippines is our country. Out of this recognition, we shall endow our people with new creed and a new spirit, translating our people’s sentiments into one binding national ideology - Filipinismo, the true Filipino ideology.

To our present friends, we say: where our interests get into confluence, as they have done in the past, we shall share our identity of interests. Where we become divergent, however, we shall pursue our self-interest, like they shall pursue their.

But let us tell these same friends: we can not accept the notion that their vital self-interests - diverse, varied, more complex - are automatically our own vital self-interests.

To accept, for example, the U.S. line that the U.S. military bases have been built, kept and maintained on our islands - at a cost of billions of U.S. dollars - in keeping with a U.S. commitment to safeguard us against some future enemy is to give validity to a myth and a lie.

The U.S. bases, by candid affirmation of America’s leaders in their innermost chambers, are on our islands to meet America’s need to have forward defense bases - against People’s China, against Soviet Russia.

It is time, I say, that we cast our fledgling innocence away and chart our path by what is good for us.

The call upon us is clear.

We are called upon to a task just as heroic as going to battle, which our forebears did.

We are called upon: to reform our government, to remake our policies, to recast our society.

It is, I know, a towering job. But this - precisely - is the challenge to us.

Let us not be overwhelmed. Let us fight.

Let us not abdicate. Let us strive.

Let us not yield to despair. Let us keep our hopes alive.

Let us not be cowed by the tyrants who rule us. Let us stand up to them - and drive them out.

Let us not, in Rizal’s words, be strangers in our own land.

Let us - I ask, I implore - make ourselves the draftsmen of our destiny, the masters of our house.

It is, in the end, I assure you, the good fight, the best fight we, as a people, shall have fought in many a year. Together, we shall prevail.