up so much trouble among the natives, and cause the provincial chiefs so great inconvenience. Although not much attention is paid to this class they are the most vicious and worthless in the islands."25

In the place of these colleges, agricultural, commercial and trade schools should be established.

The residencia should be abolished, as it had done much harm and no good. Agriculture must be developed by whites, mestizos and Chinese who will be loyal to the government. There should be extensive military and police reforms. Schools should be established where the Spanish officers could learn the native dialects. Peninsular- and Filipino-born Spaniards should be conciliated so they would work together. Merit only should determine advancement in the public service.

25 Lawyers seem always to have been unpopular with persons officially responsible for the government of colonics. Sir John Bowring after visiting Manila wrote: "As far as my experience goes lawyers are the curse of colonies. I remember one of the most intelligent of the Chinese merchants, who had settled at Singapore, after having been long established at Hong Kong, telling me that all the disadvantages of Singapore were more than compensated by the absence of the profession, and all the recommendations of Hong Kong more than counterbalanced by the presence of gentlemen occupied in fomenting and recompensed for fomenting litigation and quarrels. Many of them make large fortunes, not unfrequently at the expense of substantial justice. A sound observer says that in the Philippines truth is swamped by the superfluity of law documents. The doors opened for the protection of innocence are made for chicanery, and discussions are carried on without any regard for the decorum which prevails in European courts." Bowring's A Visit to the Philippine Islands (1859), p. 187.

It is interesting to note the efforts which have been made to exclude lawyers from colonies. Heaps (The Spanish Conquest of America, III, p. 17) says that as soon as any colony was in the least degree established in the new world, the colonists almost in their first communication with the sovereign were sure to entreat him "to prohibit lawyers from coming out." He cites numerous illustrations from the history of the Spanish-American colonies and adds: "It would almost seem as if each colonist had undergone some dreadful experience with the law and felt it was too much for

a man who had to fight against new diseases, noxious animals, a trying climate, and surrounding barbarians, to be also molested by the cruel frivolities, the fatal forms, the needless precautions which soon became snares, the subtlety applied to verbiage and to dialects which no skill can securely arrange and no dialectics can disentangle, and all the vast delay which belongs to great lawsuits in highly civilized communities. These things can only be borne when the rest of life is smooth."

The unfortunate Jews were generally classed with the lawyers and also excluded. Both were excluded from certain of the New England colonies, and to-day no lawyer or Jew is permitted to live in Sarawak, the land of the white Rajah.

These two reports convey a clear idea of conditions in the Philippines about the end of the first half of the nineteenth century.20 The removal of trade restrictions, the free admission of foreigners, and the gradual introduction of modern liberal ideas rendered reforms inevitable and the blind resistance of the authorities led to insurrection and the downfall of Spanish power.

26 When Lord Elgin, returning from his second mission to China, in 1861, visited Manila, he found conditions very satisfactory. "They (rulers and natives) are not separated from each other by that unpassable barrier of mutual contempt, suspicion, and antipathy which alienates us (the British) from the unhappy natives in those lands where we settle ourselves among inferior orders of men. One feels a little softened and sublimated when one passes from Hong Kong, where the devil is worshiped in his naked deformity, to this place, where he displays at least some of the feathers which he wore before he fell.' The natives seem to have a great deal of our dear old French Canadian habitans about them, only in a more sublime stage of infantile simplicity." Wrong, The Earl of Elgin, p. 279.

CHAPTER VII

The Awakening and Revolt

A New Era-Changing Conditions-Attack on Monastic Orders-Revolts and Insurrections-The Cavite Revolt-Execution of Native Priests-The Movement for Reforms-The Propaganda Abroad-José Rizal-The Idea of Independence Insurrection of 1896-The Katipunan-Execution of Rizal-The Pact of Biak-na-bató-Departure of the Leaders.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought the Philippines into more direct relations with Europe. Thereafter they faced toward Spain instead of Mexico. After the early adventurers and encomenderos had disappeared, the Spanish in the islands other than the officials and soldiers, were limited to the favored merchants of Manila, who were allowed to participate in the galleon trade, and an occasional planter in the provinces. The small army was composed of Mexicans and Filipinos and the officers were mostly half-castes. The members of the religious orders constituted the largest and most influential element in the community. Comyn says that in 1810, including the mestizos, there were not more than four thousand Spaniards of all classes in the Philippines. The loss of the American colonies brought many of the Spanish officials and a few planters from America to the Philippines, but with certain notable exceptions this immigration was of no particular benefit to the community. In 1848 there were seven thousand five hundred forty-four Spaniards and mestizos in Manila and Tondo and two hundred forty-two in the provinces. Of these probably two thousand were officers and soldiers.

In 1852 a direct line of steamers was established between Barcelona and Manila, and in the same year the first regular

bank was opened in the islands. "The old situation," wrote Jagor, "is no longer possible of maintenance, with the changed conditions of the present time. The colony can no longer be shut off from the outside. Every facility in communication opens a breach in the ancient system and necessarily leads to reforms of a liberal character. The more that foreign capital and foreign ideas penetrate there, the more they increase prosperity, intelligence, and self-esteem, making the existing evils more intolerable."

The general restlessness began to find expression in political activity which in part was a reflection of the revolutionary movement in Spain that was to lead to the esablishment of the shortlived republic. A new governor-general who represented Spanish liberalism was sent out, but the doctrine that the victors have a legitimate claim to the spoils and perquisites of office which had always been accepted in Spain, was now applied with great thoroughness in the Philippines. The change of administration brought some hope of better things and some reforms were effected, but the Filipinos were impressed principally by the fact that the new supply of officials would require new taxes for their support.

The friars had few friends left among the Filipinos, whom they had given up as ungrateful and hopeless, thus completely stultifying their claim to great accomplishments in the islands. Of the old missionary spirit only the dregs of bitter controversies remained. All sympathy and kindliness had disappeared. The Dominican newspaper in Manila continually referred to the Filipinos as monkeys. At the public exercises of the University of Santo Tomas, an official, before two thousand students, recited a poem which represented the native people as mere animals who lived like the beasts of the field. "These verses," wrote a prominent friar to Minister Monet, in 1897, "brilliantly set forth the savage instincts and the bestial inclinations of those faithful imitators of apes. . . . As neither Spain nor the friars can change the ethnological character of the race, so inferior to ours, 1 The Spanish Filipino Bank, known as the Bank of the Philippines.

it will be idle to apply to them the same laws as to us. The only liberty the Indians want is the liberty of savages. Leave them to their cockfighting and their indolence, and they will thank you more than if you load them down with old and new rights."

Many of the liberal officials who came out from Spain brought with them the anticlerical feeling which so embittered the home politics. They became temporarily popular with the Filipinos and aided in destroying what remained of Spanish prestige by weakening the racial unity upon which it largely depended. The people, including the Spaniards born on the islands and the halfcastes, had begun to feel conscious of a common race interest. A sentiment of nationality was developing. The friars were considered as foreigners and their expulsion was demanded on the grounds that they were absorbing the wealth of the land, stifling the intellectual freedom of the people, and excluding the Filipino priests from the parishes. The friars in their defense struck savagely and for the time effectively at their enemies.

3

During the long years of Spanish rule there had been many insurrections and local uprisings against the authorities, but with few exceptions they had been caused by the oppressive acts of local authorities. Two revolts in the early part of the nineteenth century probably resulted from discontent with general political and social conditions. The Liberal Spanish Cortes of 1810 declared that "the kingdoms and provinces of America and Asia are and ought to have always been reputed an integral part of the Spanish monarchy, and for that reason their natives and free inhabitants are equal in rights and privileges to those of the Peninsula." This declaration was received by the Filipinos with much satisfaction, particularly as it would, if made effective, relieve them from the burden of forced labor on public works. The return of Ferdinand in 1813 crushed all these hopes, and the people of some of the provinces in their anger

2 Le Roy, I, p. 62, quoting from the letter in La Politica de España en Filipinas, VII, pp. 35–37.

For an account of the early insurrections, see B. & R., XXXVIII, p. 87.