and at such times, hiding their ill-will under the veil of a deceitful
humility, they await the opportunity for satisfying it, and generally
give rein suddenly to their ill-will with perfidy and ferocity.

[The contradictory character of the Filipino native explains the ease
with which a large province can be governed by one official with the
aid of the parish priests and two or three dozen soldiers; while, on
the other hand, the insurance companies of India refuse to stand the
risks of mutiny in a vessel employing half a dozen natives from Manila
in its crew. The natives know no middle path between abject respect
and insolent contempt, in their attitude toward the whites. In case
of a foreign or internal war the governors or alcaldes-mayor of the
provinces would be the least capable of directing affairs, because
of their ignorance of the native languages and customs, and because
they are in continual conflict with the natives over the collection of
the tribute, while at the same time they exercise a monopoly in trade.]

For a very long period the elements of discord among the authorities
have been numerous for lack of a special and analogous legislation,
enacted with regard to the genius and circumstances of the various
peoples inhabiting these islands and the enormous distance separating
them from the mother-country. During these latter years, there have
been heaped up on this unfavorable foundation the elements emanating
from the civil war which has covered the mother-country with mourning,
and those of our own political dissensions; the development and
tendencies of the revolutionary principles common to all the colonial
possessions of the world, and which only force, supported by the
interest of self-preservation, is capable of restraining; and lastly
the impressions which it has been impossible to keep from transmission
to the natives and other races, in proportion as the knowledge of our
language becomes general to them, and as they become civilized, and
contract our tastes and necessities through the increase of commerce
and industry, and observe from anear the confusion resulting from
our lack of harmony. This is, in my opinion, the chief cancer of this
body politic, and will finish it very speedily unless your Excellency,
acting with the discretion and the energy so strongly charged in the
laws, and especially in the royal order of April 25, 1837, apply the
remedy peremptorily demanded by our situation.

[Discord and confusion and the spirit of resistance are rife throughout
the provinces. The events of 1820 and 1823, the sedition of Apolinario
in October, 1841, and the mutiny of the troops, although different
in their origin, all exhibit the "perfidy and ferocity that always
accompany movements of color in Ultramar." The prestige of the
government is weakened, which formerly was, with religion, the chief
foundation of Spanish domination. The political factions that have
arisen in the last six years, and which are now perfectly organized,
are greatly to blame. The Peninsulars and Spanish Filipinos will
end by destroying each other if the fitting remedy is not speedily
applied. In a report made to the government after the sedition of
Apolinario had been put down, Matta said that the origin of the
confraternity consisted "only in the character of the superstition
which distinguishes these natives, who most readily believe whatever
is presented to them under the veil of religion and of the marvellous;
asserted that it became fanaticism as soon as measures were taken
against Apolinario and his confreres, and that it became a declared
sedition when the unfortunate Ortega attacked them in Ygsaban with more
valor than prudence; and that from that time presenting the appearance
of a near insurrection in the neighboring provinces, it is to be
feared that it would have been converted into a revolution capable
of compromising the conservation of these important possessions had
not the seditious ones been promptly defeated and severely punished
in Alitao." Matta's report also said that probably Apolinario's
expulsion from the hospital of San Juan de Dios in Manila, and the
measures taken against his associates, together with the suggestions
of the adherents of independence, contributed to the holding of the
novena in Tayabas in spite of the precautions taken by the military
and ecclesiastical authorities. These occurrences were principally
the effect of superstition and fanaticism; and although the ideas of
emancipation have been present in the Philippines, as in all colonies
since the Spanish-American revolution, yet ideas of emancipation
are limited in the islands to a few Spaniards who do not even form a
political party, but only a crowd of complainers who are either not
government employees, or are employees who take it ill that Spaniards
are sent from the Peninsula to fill offices that they believe belong
properly to themselves. [40] The ideas of emancipation have not yet
contaminated, nor will they in a long time contaminate the Chinese, the
Chinese mestizos, Spanish mestizos, or the natives, with the exception
of a few of the "secular clergy, as insignificant because of their
ignorance and few resources as by their lack of influence among their
countrymen." Whatever be the opinions of the influential Spaniards
born in the islands, they recognise that political upheavals would be
as fatal to themselves as to the Peninsulars. In the insurrection of
last January, among the six white officers assassinated or wounded,
three of those killed and one wounded belonged to the revolting
regiment, while the two remaining who were wounded were Europeans. The
safety of all lies in the stability of the government; but it must
be noted that events are daily more serious and that the discontent
is spreading. Important reforms are necessary, but matters must be
viewed only in the light of the public cause. "Without virtues there
can be no prestige; and, without prestige, it will also be impossible
for the lesser part to dominate the great whole." The conservation
of the islands depends on "radical reforms in their legislation,
and peremptory measures of precaution and security." Such reforms are:]

1st. The formation of a special law for these islands, analogous
and framed with reference to the genius and circumstances of the
various peoples inhabiting them, and to their great distance from
the mother-country. [Matta believes in a law that will outline
the duties of the governor and captain-general, and place under
his general supervision real heads of the various departments of
government, who shall be responsible. A Colonial Council or Cabinet
for consultation on affairs of general public interest should also be
formed. This separation of duties into specific classes, the heads
of each department to be subordinate to the governor, in accordance
with law ii, título ii, book iii, will ensure the right use of the
governing functions. To continue so many unconnected duties under
the governor will only add to the confusion.]

2d. The improvement of the government and administration of the
provinces by organizing them with reference to their present state
of civilization and wealth. For they cannot now, without serious
inconveniences, without transcendental harm, have the government,
judicial, military and revenue functions, together with commercial
occupations and cares, united under one person alone. [The system of
placing one person in command of all these departments is opposed to
civilization and to the mercantile spirit that has penetrated into
the provinces. Civil governors should be appointed who should have
charge of the government, administration of justice, and the promotion
of the welfare of the inhabitants. Such governors should have learned
the native tongue and should know something of the native manners and
customs. The collection of tributes should not be entrusted to them,
and their posts should be permanent, except for transfers, promotions,
and suspension by the governor and captain-general, or sentence by
the suitable tribunal. This will give such provincial chiefs the
necessary prestige, in accordance with the royal order of December
10, 1839. In the provinces, passion often takes the place of reason,
and anything at all can be justified because of the facility with
which the natives contradict and perjure themselves. The position of
the provincial chief demands that his authority be very vigorous and
held in respect. The native must be kept respectful by tact, justice,
punishment, and energy. Jueces pesquisidores [41] and judges to take
the residencia should not be sent to the provinces, as that tends to
weaken the authority of the provincial chief. Easy recourse can be
had in the provinces to the tribunals and superior authorities of the
islands, while the natives and Chinese can appeal to their protectors,
who are generally very zealous in their behalf.]

3rd. The suppression of the colleges of Santo Tomas, San Jose, [42]
and San Juan de Letran of this capital, and the conciliar seminaries
of the bishoprics, as perpetual nurseries of corruption, laziness, or
subversive ideas, as contrary to the quiet and welfare of the villages
as to peninsular interests. [The suppression of the last three can be
made at once, and they should be replaced with schools of agriculture,
[43] arts, [44] and commerce, which will conduce to the prosperity of
the colony. As regards Santo Tomas, inasmuch as immediate suppression
would anger the Spaniards and Chinese mestizos who have control of
almost all the capital of the islands, a new plan should be adopted by
which desire to attend it would be gradually decreased until it can be
suppressed without any trouble. Sensible Spaniards generally believe
that the suppression of these institutions would conduce to the good
of the islands and of Spain. From them come the swarms of ignorant
and vicious secular priests, and the pettifogging lawyers, who stir
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. Public
convenience demands the teaching of agriculture, the arts, and
commerce, instead of the theology and law to which the institutions
above mentioned are devoted. It should not be forgotten that the
Spanish-American revolutions were fostered by curas and lawyers,
who since they know both the native language and Spanish, have great
influence with the masses. The influence of the friar parish priests
is now very much weakened, for they have almost entirely abandoned the
spiritual administration to their native assistants. These assistants,
by working on the superstitious character of the natives, can rouse
them to any act that will satisfy their own desires for vengeance.]

4th. The eternal abolition of the sentences of residencia, to which,
as governors, the captains-general of the provinces of Ultramar are
still subject. [These sentences have been of no use to the inhabitants
of the islands, but on the contrary of great harm. Appeal lies to
the Audiencia from the judicial acts of the governor, and to the
Spanish court from his purely administrational acts. The free press,
in which all things are bruited, is also of great use. Communication
with Spain is now frequent. The governor and the chief of the treasury
have been divested of almost all governmental authority through the
residencia. The judicial and contentious have invaded everything
and obscured the action of the provincial chiefs as well as the
superintendent and intendant and the governor. The chief authorities
of the islands need more energy and freer action.]

5th. [The adoption of various other legislative and economic measures
which Matta has before proposed to the government.]

[Capitalists and workers are needed in the islands, but, in order
to attract them, there must be governmental and administrational
reforms. The natives must be considered and various reforms made
concerning them, and the heavy tribute on the Chinese must be
reduced to not more than the twelve reals per annum for those
engaging in agriculture. The public wealth of the islands must be
increased. Whites, Chinese, and mestizos must be encouraged to go
to the islands in greater numbers, in order to correct the laziness
of the natives, and, by their wealth and prestige, to offset the
numerical majority of the natives. The increase of consumers in
the islands will give a greater outlet to Spanish products from the
Peninsula. The revenues must be increased in proportion to the public
wealth, in order to sustain the increase of necessary forces.]

[The reforms looking toward security and conservation which are
urgently demanded by the moral condition of the country are as
follows:]

1st. The reëstablishment of the well-organized military commission of
police, vigilance, and public safety. [This would be able to check
all sorts of disorder and conspiracy. Its members should be paid by
the state, such pay to come from the licenses issued to travelers
going to the interior, from licenses to carry arms, from fines,
and from the fourth part of all contraband goods confiscated.]

2d. The institution of night-watches in the city and villages outside
its walls, which require them, as almost all the traders and a
considerable portion of the white population live therein. [These
night-watches would relieve the troops of patrol duty in many
instances. They would be under the alcaldes-in-ordinary, and paid
from the municipal funds.]

3rd. The constant maintenance of a guard of at least one thousand
European troops. [These are necessary for the garrisoning of
the fort at Santiago, the palace, the Parián gate, and the other
necessary points. Matta's plan also calls for the reëstablishment
of the Spanish guard of halberdiers of one hundred men, to act as
interior palace guard, and serve as a source of supply for sergeants
for the native regiments. He recommends the establishment of Tagálog
academies in order that the Spanish officers and sergeants may learn
the native language. [45] Certain privileges are proposed for the
European soldiers, whereby their pay may be greater than that of
the native soldiers, for their necessities are greater. The term
of service in the Philippines ought to be eight years, as provided
by royal order of July 26, 1836; but those who are fit ought to be
allowed to reënlist and be transferred to the revenue guard [cuerpo
del resguardo], in order to save cost on transportation. Matta is
against having fewer Europeans in the service as has been urged by
many persons of experience in the Philippines. The system outlined by
him is not one merely of military occupation, but looks to a close
bond with the mother-country and to the industrial development of
the islands. Agriculture is the best occupation for the whites, and
is in fact the only one that will give a good comfortable living. A
greater number of Europeans will mean a greater proportion of mestizos;
[46] and if these, together with the Chinese and some of the whites,
engage in agriculture they will throw their influence on the side
of the government, because of self-interest. Exaggerated ideas are
voiced regarding the Peninsulars. They are never more dangerous
than during the first few years in the islands; but, as they become
accustomed to the climate and learn to know the inhabitants, their
ideas moderate. Consequently, for this reason, and because of the
expense, Matta is against frequent reliefs of soldiers. Vacancies in
the ranks should always be filled with recruits from Spain, and never
with natives. Discipline must not be relaxed on the voyage from Spain;
and the soldiers must be kept in good form physically. A special
boat is recommended for the transport of soldiers to and from Spain;
and cost of transport can be reduced.]

4th. The completion of the organization of the valuable corps of
the revenue guards [cuerpo del resguardo]. [This can be done by
carrying out the royal order of October 18, 1837, and the three
parts of the regulations drawn up by Matta's predecessor June 4,
1841, the first two parts of which have already been approved. Matta
has endeavored without avail, and supported by various officials,
to gain the governor's approval to the third part. The corps of the
revenue guards is always loyal to the governor. With the increase
provided in the plan for organization, this corps will be the most
suitable to defend the country either against foreign or internal
foes. Since the immediate object of the revenue guards is the custody,
defense, and guard of the revenues, they ought to depend immediately
on the treasury department, although they may be available when the
public safety demands it for any other duty. By a decree of Matta's
predecessor, of April 25, 1839, the revenue guards of the various
departments--those of the Bay, and of the tobacco and wine and liquor
monopoly revenues--were united into one corps. This extensive corps,
which absorbs annually the sum of 191,589 pesos, has no adequate
organization, a matter to which immediate attention should be given.]

5th and last. That the attempt be made, in a truly impartial and
foresighted system, to conciliate the minds of people, and to put
an end to that pernicious mistrust that has been introduced between
the peninsular Spaniards and the sons of the country [i.e., the
Spaniards born in the Philippines], which is so contrary to the common
interest. [The government must not be partial to any one class of men,
for each class contains good men who should be rewarded and advanced,
and bad men who should be closely watched and punished. Merit should
be the only cause for advancement. In closing Matta says that his
private life in the islands and his long public service have given him
abundant opportunity to observe and study people and conditions. This
memorial is dated Manila, February 25, 1843.] [47]

THE PHILIPPINES, 1860-1898--SOME COMMENT AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

BY JAMES A. LEROY

The "modern era" in the Philippine Islands--which indeed, in certain
respects, did not really begin until after the establishment of
American rule--coincides roughly with the last half of the nineteenth
century. It is impossible to assign arbitrarily any date as precisely
that of its commencement. One will be inclined to lay stress upon this
or that circumstance, and to choose this or that date, as he places
importance mostly upon matters connected with economic development,
or with social progress, or with political reforms. The truth is that
there was advancement in all these lines, as also there were hindrances
to progress in each of them, and that only by surveying it in each
of these phases of its development can we come to understand in how
considerable a degree Philippine society was remade during this period.

Looking primarily at the expansion of trade and foreign relations,
we might date the new era in the Philippines from the opening of the
Suez Canal in 1869. Yet that event, while greatly stimulating trade and
agricultural development, did not inaugurate the modern era in that
respect. The presence of foreign traders, introducing agricultural
machinery and advancing money on crops, was the chief stimulus to
the opening of new areas of cultivation, the betterment of methods of
tilling and preparing crops for the market, and the consequent growth
of exports; indeed, one may almost say that certain American (United
States) and English trading houses nurtured the sugar and hemp crops of
the Philippines into existence. And their pioneer work in this respect
was done before the opening of the Suez Canal brought the Philippines
into vital touch with Europe by means of steam navigation--American
influence being then, in fact, already on the wane. One might more
readily, from this point of view, assign importance as a date to 1856,
when Iloilo (and soon after Sebú) was opened to foreign trade (hitherto
confined to one port of entry, Manila) and foreigners were permitted
to open business houses outside of Manila and to trade and traffic
in the provinces; or, even, to 1859, when the first steam sugar-mill
was set up in Negros island. But the entering wedge had been driven
by foreign traders into Spain's policy of exclusion even before the
cessation of the galleon-trade, the monopoly which confined Manila's
trade to a few Spaniards resident there and their backers in Mexico,
who saw in Manila only a depot of exchange for Chinese and other
Oriental commodities, and commonly despised the idea of giving any
attention to the crude products of the Philippines or endeavoring
to stimulate Philippine agriculture and exportation properly so
called. From the date when this ruinous monopoly expired with the
occupation by Mexican insurgents of Acapulco, the port to which the
galleons brought their silks, cottons, etc., attention was perforce
turned upon Philippine products as a source of trade, and Philippine
exports began to grow. [48] Spanish traders being too few, and utterly
untrained in the ways of competition, and Spanish ships being scarce in
the Orient, foreign traders and foreign ships gathered the bulk of the
business even in the face of useless and annoying restrictions, until
finally these foreigners had broken down the barriers sufficiently to
enter and take a hand in actively fostering agricultural development
in the Philippines. Hence, the opening of the Suez Canal only gave
a new turn and a great acceleration to a movement that, as regards
Philippine internal development, may more logically be dated from 1815,
the year of the last voyage of the galleon.

In one sense, indeed, the opening of the Suez Canal tended to lessen,
relatively, the influence of foreign business and banking houses in
the development of the Philippines, in that it led to direct steamship
connection with Spain, awakening interest at home in this hitherto
neglected colony and bringing to the Philippines for the first time
in three hundred years more than a mere handful of Spaniards. After
the early adventurers and encomenderos had disappeared, the number
of Spanish civilians in private life was few indeed, numbering the
favored merchants who had shares in the galleon trade-monopoly, and an
occasional planter, descended perhaps from a family of encomenderos
rooted in the Philippines, or being an ex-army officer who had
remained in the islands. Moreover, the small army maintained in the
islands was to a considerable extent officered by Mexican creoles or
half-castes, its soldiers being mostly Filipinos and Mexicans. The list
of civilian officials was itself small, the governor (alcalde mayor) of
a province combining with his executive functions and (very commonly)
his command of the troops garrisoned therein, the powers of a superior
judge for both civil and criminal jurisdictions. The members of the
religious orders constituted the largest numerically, as well as the
most influential, element of Spaniards in the Philippines. Outside
of this class, the Spanish population of the archipelago, always
very small even in its total, was mostly gathered in a few places,
Manila containing by far the greater proportion. The general rule in
the provinces was that only one white man, the friar-curate, was to be
found in a town, a number of the smaller towns, moreover, not having
a friar-curate, but a Filipino secular priest. [49] The movement of
Spaniards to the Philippines had, indeed, begun before the opening
of the Suez Canal. The inauguration of the Spanish-Philippine Bank in
Manila in 1852 afforded evidence much less, however, of the growth of
Spanish commercial interests than of a desire to foster the growth of
such interests by supplying credit facilities more nearly up to date
than those hitherto available (at ruinous rates of interest) from the
old "pious funds" [obras pías] of various sorts, especially since the
foreign trading houses were virtually performing the functions of
banks in their ways of extending credit to agriculturists, or were
being aided by private bankers associated with them. [50] The loss
of Spain's colonies on the mainland, besides turning many loyal or
proscribed Spaniards toward Cuba and the Peninsula, had in a small
degree encouraged such emigration to the more distant Philippines, and
the history of certain of the most prominent Spanish families in the
Philippines dates from the decades immediately following the political
upheavals in Spanish-America. In the main, however, such immigrants
as came to the Philippines in this way were government employees who,
being ousted from the American continent, must rest as pensioners on
the home government if the latter could not find them places in the
Spanish Antilles or the Philippines. Such immigration, it need not
be said, was not altogether an unmixed good; and some of the various
"administrative reforms" designed for the Philippines in the fifties
and sixties showed the influence of this pressure to provide places for
officeholders with a claim on the government. The number of Spaniards
who came to the Philippines on their private initiative was very small
until direct steam communication with the Peninsula was opened, and
though it never became large during the last thirty years of Spanish
rule, Spanish commercial interests in the islands gained relatively
on those of foreigners after the opening of the canal. A direct
steamship line from Barcelona was soon established under subsidy. The
domestic shipping laws of Spain were even more fully extended over
the Philippine archipelago, and the already existing preferential
customs duties and regulations aided the growth of Spanish trade in
the islands thereafter more than they had done before. [51]

The opening of the Suez Canal and the entry of Spaniards into the
archipelago in greater numbers marks an epoch even more in a social
way than as respects trade and commerce. And the new social era then
inaugurated was closely allied thenceforward with the discussion of
political reforms, with the essay of some such reforms on the part
of government, and finally with an organized Filipino propaganda for
greater social and political freedom. When the Spanish revolution
of 1868 occurred the Philippines were still far remote from the
mother-country, with its disturbing agitations, wherein violence and
utopianism were destined to prepare the way for the reaction; the new
governor-general sent out by the reformers who expelled Isabel II
came to Manila by the Cape of Good Hope, the old voyage which took
four months or more to bring even the news of what was going on in
Spain. The Constitution of 1868 had been proclaimed in the Philippines
but a few months back when, early in 1870, the first steamer arrived
direct from Barcelona via Suez. Thenceforward, the capital of this
remote Spanish outpost in the Orient was but one month distant from
Barcelona for mail and passengers; soon after ocean cables to the
ports of China (eventually extended to Manila) put the Philippines
in daily touch, as it were, with important occurrences in Spain. The
old régime of slumbering exclusion, already breaking down under the
influence of trade, was ended.

The influx of Spaniards from this time forward had in it, from
the first to the last, more of "politics" than of individual
initiative. More of them came out to take governmental positions than
to engage in trade, or, less frequently, in agriculture, though many
who lost their places by changes in administration stayed in the
islands and occupied themselves in private enterprises. It was the
"reformers" of the revolutionary period in Spain who first undertook
to make a "clean sweep" of the offices in the Philippines, putting in
their friends. Administrative reforms, and to a considerable extent
a change of officials, was needed; but a more or less complicated
bureaucracy was introduced along with some laudable reforms, and there
was then inaugurated the pernicious custom of changing the lower
Spanish officials in the Philippines, as well as the higher, with
every change of administration in Spain--the "dance and counter-dance
of employees," as one writer has named it. [52]

There is undoubtedly some truth in the charge made by the defenders
of the Philippine friars that the entry of Spaniards, especially
officeholders, during the latter part of the nineteenth century
lowered the prestige of the Spanish name in the islands, and was
a cause (the friars would make it the chief or sole cause) of the
discontent, eventually the rebellion, of the Filipinos. Administrative
reforms, some of which were highly beneficial, such as the abolition
of the tobacco monopoly [53] and the reorganization of provincial
governments, nevertheless had the chief effect, in the eyes of
the Filipinos, of raising direct taxes and of burdening them with
the support of new sets of officeholders, whose presence was not
infrequently distasteful. By far too large a proportion of these
officeholders, who came out to an unhealthful clime to take places
which were miserably paid and might be taken away from them in two
or three years, were concerned rather with the "pickings" than with
the duties attached to their offices. Some were openly contemptuous
of the natives, and thus helped to destroy the former good feeling
between the races. The grievance of the friars was, however, far
more frequently vented upon a class of Spanish officeholders quite
different from those who gained odium through tyranny or corruption
or both; the special hostility of the friars was visited upon their
countrymen who gained great popularity with the natives, because of
their more democratic beliefs and manners. Such men were commonly of
the anti-clerical party in Spain, and the bitterest element in home
politics was thus transferred to the Philippines. One may recognize
that such men were all too commonly quixotic and indiscreet, as Spanish
Liberals notoriously are. To refuse to kiss the friar's hand, and to
speak contemptuously of him and all his kind (perhaps even to stir up
scandal against them), may have seemed to such men a very natural and
proper method of asserting their political beliefs and their sense of
individual independence; yet the friars have rightly said that such
actions, and the many things growing out of them, struck a blow at
the very foundations of the structure upon which Spanish supremacy
had been built in the islands. Hence it was that not infrequently
a more far-seeing Liberal, after some years of experience in the
islands, would come out as a defender of the Philippine friars and
their views as to the political régime to be maintained there; he
would perhaps explain it by saying that he was "a Liberal at home,
but in the Philippines all ought to be Spaniards and only that."

Even if we give full faith to the complaints of the friars' defenders
on this score--and their representations of the last half of the
nineteenth century are very one-sided--even if we admire and accept
as truthful the picture they draw of a sort of Eden in the Philippines
back of 1860, and particularly in the two preceding centuries, wherein
the humble Filipino lived practically free of taxation, exempt from
abuses from above, guileless of serious crime, and watched over by a
paternal superior who directed his steps to the eternal bliss of the
other world: still, accepting the friars' case at its face value, it is
plain that they asked for and expected the impossible when they fought
to perpetuate medieval conditions in a country opened to trade and
commerce and to modern thought and contact with the world at large. We
may doubt that ignorance was bliss even in the "good old days;" but it
was certain that those days must come to an end when the Philippines
were awakened by steamships, telegraph lines, newspapers, and books
(even though under clerical and political censorship). Clear-sighted
prophecy was that of Feodor Jagor, the German scientist who traveled
through the Philippines just before 1860, and who, though he found
much to praise in the old paternal régime, said:

"The old situation 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 the more intolerable." [54]

The echoes of Spanish partisanship and the talk of nineteenth-century
reforms had been heard in the Philippines before the revolution of
1868 and the opening of the Suez Canal, though it was only after these
events that the people generally began to be stirred, and then only
in the most populous districts. Because the clerical influence was
all-powerful anyway, and the whole fabric of Philippine government
reposed upon it, Carlism was felt in the islands before 1850 rather
as an influence in certain military mutinies and as a source of
strife between rival sets of civil officials than as involving
primarily a defense of ecclesiastical privilege. Foremost among the
events of the decade preceding the revolution of 1868 may be put the
return of the Jesuits to the islands in 1859 (allowed by decree of
1852) and the beginning of educational reform with the decrees of
1863 ordering the establishment of a normal school and of primary
schools under government control and supported directly by the local
governments. [55] The Jesuits had already opened a secondary school
in Manila, introducing for the first time something besides merely
theoretical instruction in natural sciences, and more modern methods
of instruction generally. Their secondary school was subsidized by
the city government of Manila, their meteorological observatory was
subsidized by the insular government, which also employed them to
inaugurate and conduct the new normal school. [56] From this time
forward the Society was both directly and indirectly a stimulus
to educational progress in the Philippines, was influential both
in diffusing more generally primary instruction and in improving
methods and widening curriculums of higher instruction. In a large
degree, the educational program remained to the end of Spanish rule
a pretentious but most superficial thing, more sounding brass than
solid achievement. But we may fairly date a new epoch in this respect
from the return of the Jesuits and the decrees of 1863.

In another way the return of the Jesuits is to be associated with the
beginning of a new era in the islands. They were not permitted to
resume the parochial benefices which their order had held prior to
their expulsion in 1768, but were to engage in missions in Mindanao
and in educational and scientific work. Their resumption of the old
missions in Mindanao was accomplished at the expense of the order
of Recollects, which was thereupon given the provision of certain
parishes, including several wealthy parishes in Luzon, which had
for greater or less intervals been held by the more prominent and
able of the secular priests, Filipinos of pure native blood or
half-castes. [57] The cabildo of the Manila cathedral, including
the more notable of the secular priests, and the curates of the few
conspicuous parishes (in central Luzon) which it fell to the lot of
the secular clergy to occupy, had come to regard these benefices
as their property, in a "corporate" sense, as it were, quite as
each religious order felt that certain parishes, or whole provinces
"belonged" to it as an order. It is significant that here, for the
first time, one notes a feeling of solidarity among the Filipino
secular clergy--for the demonstration of which feeling one has looked
in vain, except in isolated cases, prior to that time, above all in
connection with the effort (1770) of the Spanish archbishop Santa
Justa y Rufina, to secularize the parishes and displace the friars
with native priests. Only the bolder of the Filipino priests expressed
the complaints of their fellows, even now, and open talk of a campaign
for secularization of all the parishes was scarcely heard until some
courage was infused into these few and the small party of Filipino
Liberals (mostly half-castes or Spaniards of Philippine birth) after
the revolution of 1868 and the arrival of a governor-general who
permitted public demonstrations in behalf of Liberal reforms. From
the time of the execution of three Filipino priests for alleged
complicity in the Cavite mutiny of 1872 [58]--the proofs of whose
guilt the public has not seen, if the military courts which tried them
did--there was added to the campaign for the expulsion of the friars
[59] on account of their landed estates and of their stifling of
intellectual freedom the demand that Philippine parishes be entrusted
to a native priesthood. Only since American occupation has the demand
for a national clergy found full expression, but it had for a quarter
of a century before that been an important phase of the sentiment of
nationality, a sentiment that was growing steadily, though slowly and
in the main secretly until 1896 in the Tagálog provinces and 1898 in
the archipelago at large.

The reactionary party had partially regained the upper hand when
the mutiny occurred in Cavite in 1872. Instead of treating it as
its comparative insignificance demanded, and as prudent statecraft
would have counseled, they employed it as an excuse for vengeful
violence, as a means for resuming full control of Philippine policy,
and continued for twenty-five years thereafter to point to it as their
most useful "horrible example," as an evidence of what must follow
the inauguration, even in the slightest degree, of a liberal policy
in the government of the islands. Rightly or wrongly, the people of
that and the succeeding generation in the Tagálog provinces, and to a
less degree in the others, were schooled in racial resentment through
the belief that the native priests had been done to death, upon a
pretext of manufactured evidence, by the malevolence of the friars. The
proscription of the more conspicuous of the then small Liberal element
among the Filipinos had consequences of no less importance. Those
who were sent into exile for alleged complicity in the Cavite mutiny
were certain conspicuous half-castes and a few Spaniards of Philippine
birth or of long residence in the islands. The native element proper
was for the moment scarcely affected, even in Manila and its environs;
and no one has ever demonstrated that the few more advanced men of
Spanish blood who were moved by the revolution in Spain to take a stand
for Liberal measures in the Philippines were engaged in anything but
legitimate political discussion, or indeed that they talked of going
so far in this direction in the Philippines as had already been done
in the Peninsula. These proscriptions powerfully stimulated the idea
of a "Filipino cause." Some of the exiles escaped to Hongkong, and
there founded a Filipino colony. Others settled eventually in Europe;
the more progressive and ambitious Filipinos began sending their
sons to Madrid and Paris for education in contact with the thought
of modern Europe; and in these capitals, and later in Japan, little
Filipino colonies became centers of discussion of political reforms,
and through letters, publications in the Liberal periodicals of Spain,
and finally through their own books and periodicals of propaganda,
greatly influenced the growth of a public opinion in the backward
society of the Philippines. Spanish Masonry gradually extended the
circle of its initiations and of its secret operations (necessarily
secret to an extraordinary degree) in the islands. At first only
Spaniards had been admitted to a few lodges, then mestizos were
admitted, and finally natives of some degree of education without
regard to race. In the eighties and nineties, there seems to be
no doubt, a sort of independent Grand Lodge in Spain (asserted by
some to be of spurious Masonry), [60] managed by zealous Liberal
propagandists with whom certain of the Filipino propagandists in
Barcelona had associated themselves, directed the active organization
of lodges in as many Filipino towns as contained favorable material,
for the purpose of fostering in the islands a demand for political
reforms, of distributing the literature of the propaganda, and of
collecting funds to support the campaign in Spain for the extension of
greater social, political, and religious freedom to the Filipinos. The
Spaniards associated with this movement were for the most part men
of no standing and quixotic visionaries. Some of the Filipinos who
figured in the propaganda abroad were quite as unpractical, being
inexperienced and excitable youths, full of jealousy of each other,
while some few of them, moreover, misused the funds raised for them
by their fellows at home. The whole program for "assimilation" of the
Philippines to Spain as a province of the Peninsula, giving a distant
archipelago in the Orient with its widely different population, social
status, and economic conditions and needs, a government just like that
of European Spain was manifestly absurd and inimical to the interests
of the Filipinos themselves, not to add that its realization was an
utter impossibility. But these things should not have been allowed
to hide the justice of the demand for such reforms and privileges
as were practical and compatible with the needs and conditions of
the archipelago and its people: for a spokesman or spokesmen of the
Philippines in the Cortes at Madrid; for reforms in judiciary and
fundamental laws, not blindly copied from those promulgated in Spain
but adapted to the Philippines, or if necessary especially drafted for
them; for administrative reforms, above all as to the civil service
and looking toward an increasing recognition of the native element in
government, and toward a decentralization that should be gradually
extended as far as deeply rooted habits and long-standing customs
would permit; and, finally, for greater individual and social freedom,
both in a political and a religious sense. This last was really the
crux of the whole situation, so far as the continuance of Spanish
sovereignty should not come to depend purely on force. In the old
days it had rested on religious teachings, on the friars in fact,
with the sense of race-prestige in the background to support Spanish
authority. It was futile for the friars to cry out for a return
to the old conditions, and to denounce as dangerous any reforms
in the direction of freedom of thought or of speech; the pages of
history could not be turned back. The idea of future independence
from Spain was, to be sure, in the minds of some at least of the
Filipino propagandists. But their present campaign was for greater
political liberty, and the measures they advocated, and even the
methods they employed almost to the last, would have been legitimate
in any free country--were, in fact, legitimate even then in the
Peninsula itself, where they could advocate publicly what they
must whisper among their fellows at home. The very fact that such
organizations as these spurious Masonic lodges were under the ban,
and that even to be suspected of belonging thereto was to invite the
danger of deportation from home as a "conspirator," is sufficient
proof of the essential righteousness of the propagandists' cause. And
the campaign that began with a few Spanish-Filipinos in Manila and
gradually extended to the more independent men of education in the
provinces eventually, under half-educated leaders of the small middle
class, reached in a perverted form the masses themselves, especially in
central Luzon, and found expression at last in violence and an outburst
of race-hatred. The Katipunan was not Masonic, as the friars asserted,
only copying some of the Masonic formulæ; but it was a natural and
logical outgrowth of the smothering of what had been a legitimate
movement for the expression of Filipino reform sentiment.

The title to these notes has indicated the year 1860 as marking in a
general way the opening of the modern era in the Philippines, without
reference to any one particular event. It is proposed to give here,
briefly, such further notes as will afford a working bibliography on
this period, while calling attention to some subjects and certain
points that are commonly disregarded in the bibliographies and
published works dealing with the last years of Spanish rule in the
Philippines. No pretense to completeness is made. The aim is to call
attention, under their proper heads, to the more distinctly useful
(or, in some cases, the more unreliable, and hence to be avoided)
titles already listed in the Philippine bibliography that is to be most
readily obtained, and which is also the most complete and satisfactory
work of this sort, viz., that published at Washington in 1903; [61]
and also to supplement these titles with others there unnoticed and
with other data not easily found. In the main, only such works are
cited as the writer has himself consulted, though in some cases the
notes or recommendations of others have been followed.

The first essential to a study of this period is a fair and
comprehensive survey of Philippine conditions in the years just
preceding--the "old régime," as we may call it, though it was then
breaking down in certain particulars. One book alone will serve the
student's purpose in this respect; and, whatever others are read,
Jagor's [62] is indispensable. Next to him, and in addition to the
documents appearing in this series immediately preceding the present
volume may be cited the 1842 Informe of the Spanish diplomat in the
Orient, Sinibaldo de Mas, and the two-volume treatise of 1846 by the
Frenchman, J. Mallat. In certain respects, the latter has closely
followed Mas; but his is no mere translated plagiarism, like that
of John Bowring (1859), who was only a temporary visitor entertained
by Spanish officialdom in Manila. The work of Paul de la Gironière,
not his Twenty Years in the Philippines, but his more serious work
of 1855 (Aventures d'un gentilhomme breton aux îles Philippines),
merits attention as containing the observations of a cultivated
foreigner who had the advantage of years of residence in Manila and
a neighboring province.

As was indicated at the beginning of these notes, to make a thorough
study of this period, we should consider it under three heads,
viz., economic development, social development, and political
development. Not only has there been no comprehensive review of the
period as a whole, but there exists no review of it under any one of
these heads, nor even any group of writings which can be offered to
the inquirer as covering the field of inquiry in any one of these
respects. For one thing, we must draw mainly upon Spanish sources
of information, official and private, and rare indeed is the Spanish
writer who does not either proceed regardless of the economic point
of view, or else give entirely secondary consideration to the vital
matter concerned in the economic and social progress of a people
independently of political forms and governmental influences. The
result is that Spanish writers, with them the Filipinos, and to a
great extent the writers of Philippine treatises in other languages
(drawing hastily upon Spanish sources), have over-emphasized the
political history of this Philippine period. Of course, in Spain and
the Spanish countries long-standing habit makes it the tendency to look
to government for everything, and to think of all amelioration of evils
and all incitements to progress as coming from above; while social
and economic conditions in the Philippines are such as to emphasize
this tendency, the aristocracy of wealth and education standing apart
from the masses and being, to the latter, identified in the main with
the government, with the "powers above." Nevertheless, it is to be
insisted that social and economic progress in the Philippines during
the last half-century should be considered separately and studied
more particularly than they have been thus far.

It need hardly be said, for another thing, that it is not possible
to make an absolute separation of this subject under the headings
thus indicated. Such a thing cannot be done with any people in any
period of history. In this particular case, one need only mention the
Religious Question, with its phases as a contest between friars and
native clergy, as a demand for modern freedom of thought and speech,
and as an agrarian question, to show at once that matters social,
economic, and political are here interwoven. So also the Spanish
administration cannot be considered wholly apart from its bearing
upon economic and social as well as purely political matters. No
rigid classification is possible, but the student who approaches
the history of this period--which, apart from its own interest, has
had ever since 1898 the most vital bearing upon a public question of
great importance in the United States today--will avoid confusion by
giving consideration to these separate points of view.

SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

One would welcome an attempt by some one of the more ambitious
Filipino writers and students whose attention has been occupied almost
exclusively with political controversy to write the social history of
his people during this last period of Spanish rule. The materials for
such a study, so far as they now exist in print, are very fragmentary,
and the work could hardly be well done by any but a resident of the
islands during that period. But few references need be given here,
and the inquirer must derive most of his information on this line from
the numerous books and pamphlets whose object is primarily political
questions and from the economic and fiscal tables and studies which
shed light upon the general status of the people.

General historical surveys of the period are lacking. Montero y
Vidal's three-volume history comes down only to 1873. And, though
it is the best Philippine historical work for reference purposes,
it is, after all, hardly more than a chronology of important events
and compilation of official orders and projects, touching the life
of the people scarcely at all. The same author's work of 1886, El
archipiélago filipino, merits attention also in this connection,
though primarily it sets forth facts geographical, statistical,
etc. The works of Manuel Scheidnagel deserve also citation as those of
a Spanish official of long and varied experience in the Philippines,
and as shedding, incidentally to the particular subjects which they
treat, light upon the conditions of country and people in general. [63]

The foreigners who traveled in the Philippines during this period, and
who have written thereon, were occupied in most cases with scientific
pursuits, and have confined themselves mainly to these objects in
what they have published. The Luçon et Palaouan (Paris, 1887) of
Alfred Marche touches upon the customs and conditions of the people
in its record of six years' scientific research for the government of
France. Edmond Plauchut's contributions to the Revue des deux mondes
for 1869 and 1877, in lighter vein and perhaps not always accurate,
are, like Gironière's writings of earlier date, interesting as
presenting the observations of a resident foreigner. Among the works in
English, revised or written since 1898 to meet the demand in the United
States for information about the Philippines, Dean C. Worcester's The
Philippine Islands and their People (New York, 1898), brings us nearest
to the life of the people, particularly in the rural districts and
regions most remote from modern changing influences. The treatises of
the British engineers and experts in tropical agriculture, Frederick
H. Sawyer and John Foreman, are written by men who were, naturally,
best prepared to discuss the agricultural conditions and the material
resources in general of the Philippines. Outside of these matters,
except when reciting personal experiences and observations, both
are compilers whose reading in Philippine bibliography has been very
fragmentary. Foreman in particular has undertaken to cover the entire
field of Philippine history and politics, and has, to state the plain
truth, made a very bad botch of it. He has been so often quoted in
the United States as authority for erroneous statements that it is
time to make this fact clear. It is commonly impossible to draw the
line in what he has written between fact and gossip, conjecture,
or partial truth. His latest edition (1906) contains most of the old
glaring errors or even worse omissions, with a full measure of new
ones in his recital of the history of events since 1896. Some data
contained in Foreman's book are not readily available to an American
student outside of the large libraries; but a caution is to be uttered
against relying upon him, even for his recital of fiscal details or
for his statistical tables. Sawyer is very much more accurate and
reliable, just as he is less pretentious in the program of his work.

In studying the social process of the Filipino people from about 1860
onward, the subject of education holds the first place. [64] It is,
however, unnecessary to occupy ourselves here with the bibliography of
the subject, which has been very fully covered in VOLS. XLV and XLVI of
this work, the appendices to those volumes giving, in connection with
other documents in this series and with the bibliographical notes,
the most comprehensive treatment of the subject of education in the
Philippines that is yet available in any language.

As we might expect from what has been said, the social life of the
Philippines, at least from about 1875, may best be studied in the
periodicals of Manila. In this connection it is only necessary to
mention Retana's El periodismo filipino, which covers the subject
down to 1894. La Revista de Filipinas, edited by J. F. del Pan,
1875-77, deserves special mention among the many periodicals of short
life. Among those of longer duration may be named El Diario de Manila,
and also, for the closing years of Spanish rule, La Oceanía Española,
La Voz Española and El Comercio. [65] One should also consult these
Spanish periodicals of Manila for the political history of these years,
particularly of 1896-98. It must be remarked, however, that, just as
these periodicals reflected mainly the life only of the capital, and
that quite exclusively from the Spanish viewpoint, so also they treated
political and administrative matters not merely under the constraint
of their editors' notions as to "maintaining Spanish prestige" but
also with a censorship in the background, maintained by and for the
political and the ecclesiastical authorities. [66] Down to 1898 the
Philippine law of censorship of 1857, modeled on that of Spain in the
days of Isabel II, was in force, and it covered the publication of
books and pamphlets of all sorts and of newspapers, the importation and
sale of books, pictures, etc., and the regulation of theaters. [67]
One will, therefore, look almost in vain in these periodicals prior
to 1898 for expressions of the Filipino point of view, or, till the
close of 1897, for any frank expression of liberal political views
on the part of Spanish editors. The few Manila periodicals started
by Filipinos before 1898, usually printed in Spanish and Tagálog, had
but an ephemeral existence. [68] One must look for the expression of
Filipino aims and ideas to the periodicals that have been published
since 1898; indeed, even the Spanish press of Manila has treated
Filipino questions with freedom only since American occupation began.

For population statistics, all practical purposes are served by the
tables and comparisons of the American census of 1903. [69] Here one
may find also the best data for reconstructing before his eyes the
social and economic status of the Philippines and its inhabitants
at the close of Spanish rule. The Spanish civil census of 1896 was
unfortunately never published, nor completed in some provinces. The
civil census of 1887, though published in very condensed form,
merits attention. [70] Certain of the more notable statistical
works of private individuals will require notice in connection with
agriculture, industry, and commerce; here the student may be referred
to the Bibliography under the names of Agustín de la Cavada, J. F. del
Pan, and José Jimeno Agius. [71]

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

Using, as throughout these notes, the Bibliography as a starting
point, the student is referred to the first part of that work, viz.,
the List of the Library of Congress, under the headings Agriculture,
Commerce, Finance, and Political and Social Economy; and to Pardo
de Tavera's Biblioteca under the alphabetical lists of Aranceles,
Balanzas, Boletín, Estatutos, Exposición, Guía, Instrucción, Memoria,
and Reglamentos. Some of the works therein cited are obviously
indispensable, and occasional biographical and bibliographical notes
are also afforded, especially by Pardo de Tavera under the names of
authors cited, which will help in forming an opinion on the value of
their works. [72] It is in point here to designate among these works
those most useful as references in a general way upon Philippine
economic matters, to add some not listed in the Bibliography, and
to give some special references under the particular headings of
Agriculture, Commerce, and Industry.

General.--Jagor's book, already noted as the best introduction to
the study of this period, is again mentioned here as affording data
on the tobacco monopoly (which lasted until 1884, before its affairs
were wound up), the attitude of the Spaniards toward the entry of
foreign traders, and the part these foreigners played in developing the
culture of abaká and sugar. Cavada's Historia geográfica, geológica
y estadística de Filipinas (Manila, 1876) has a good arsenal of data
drawn chiefly from the civil statistical inquiries of 1870, though,
like almost all such works in Spanish, it is without a topical index
and is put together in a disorderly manner most exasperating to the
searcher for facts or figures on a specific point of inquiry. Of the
works of José Jimeno y Agius, his Memoria sobre el desestanco del
tabaco (Binondo, 1871) and Población y comercio de las islas Filipinas
(Madrid, 1884) should be especially mentioned. Gregorio Sancianco y
Goson's El progreso de Filipinas (Madrid, 1881), especially valuable on
administrative matters just prior to the revision of the fiscal régime
in connection with the abolition of the government tobacco monopoly,
has also many data on land, commerce, and industry. Scattered through
the eight volumes of the fortnightly La Política de España en Filipinas
(Madrid, 1891-98) are useful items on Philippine currency and exchange,
trade, etc., with occasional studies of these questions and those of
Chinese and European immigration, in most cases hasty, unreliable
pieces of work, often even fantastic for their utter disregard of
the fundamentals of political economy. Foreman's book has already
been characterized; nevertheless, checked up with Sawyer's, it is of
use in this connection. Of the consular and other official reports,
those of the British Foreign Office [73] are the most valuable as a
series, though the comprehensive reports of the French Consul, M. de
Bérard, covering the years 1888-92, merit first place as individual
treatises. [74]

The testimony and memoranda presented before the American Peace
Commission in Paris in 1898, together with some magazine articles
on the Philippines, form appendices to Senate Document no. 62, 55th
Congress, 3rd session; only the memorandum of General F. V. Greene
(pp. 404-440) and Max L. Tornow's Sketch of the Economic Conditions
of the Philippines require any consideration in this connection. [75]
The reports on civil affairs (1899-1901) of the United States military
government in the Philippines and the reports of the Philippine
Commission have much retrospective value in connection with the
previous economic and fiscal régime, and merit a general perusal in
that light; some of their more especially pertinent revelations will
be hereinafter cited. The Report on Certain Economic Questions in the
English and Dutch Colonies in the Orient (Washington, 1902) by Jeremiah
W. Jenks, special commissioner of the United States government, is
of course of comparative value primarily, but contains some general
remarks on Philippine conditions as regards currency, labor, land, and
taxation. In many respects the best economic study ever made of the
Philippines is Victor S. Clark's Labor Conditions in the Philippines
(Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor no. 58, Washington, May, 1905); though
discussing the labor question, and that under American occupation,
it has been written with a view constantly to past conditions in the
Philippines, social and political as well as economic. [76]

Agriculture, Land, etc.--Beyond the general references given,
no special work can be recommended on the subject of Philippine
agriculture. The reports and bulletins of the present Philippine Bureau
of Agriculture (1902 to date) shed much light incidentally on past
conditions and methods of cultivation. Numerous official provisions
and some private treatises on the Spanish land laws are cited by
Pardo de Tavera; but these remained for the most part dead letters,
and for all practical purposes a little compilation in English [77]
by the present Philippine Forestry Bureau suffices. In a report on
the establishment of land banks in the Philippines, José Cabezas de
Herrera provided a historical review and abstract of landed property
in those islands. [78] In connection with his arguments in behalf of
a tax on landed property as just and as also necessary in order to
support a really efficient government in the Philippines, Sancianco
y Goson gives considerable information on conditions of land tenure
and cultivation down to 1881. [79]

Chinese.--Discussion of the Chinese in the Philippines is related more
particularly to questions of industry and retail trade. Nevertheless,
the Spanish government maintained almost to the end the theory--it was
hardly more than an empty theory--that the Chinese immigration was
being so regulated as to constitute a stimulus to agriculture. The
subject also falls into place here because, from about 1886, when
a campaign for the exclusion of the Chinese was started by Spanish
merchants and newspaper men, a program for fostering the immigration
of Spaniards into the Philippines, and especially into the undeveloped
areas of Mindanao and Palawan, was quite regularly coupled with the
arguments for Chinese exclusion. This program was usually presented
without regard for the climatic and economic considerations involved;
that it was a "patriotic" scheme was sufficient for some of these
writers, who never stopped to ask themselves if their plans were
practical. [80] Among the pamphlets on the Chinese in the Philippines
cited by Pardo de Tavera, those of Del Pan and Jordana y Morera
deserve attention. A good survey of the subject, though not accurate
in its statistics, is G. García Ageo's Memorandum on the Chinese in
the Philippines in Report of the Philippine Commission, 1900, ii,
pp. 432-445. [81]

Industries.--The general references already cited must be relied
upon, and it is a rather wearisome task to uncover the data for a
study of Philippine industries from statistical tables, treatises
and pamphlets which have given the subject a cursory or fragmentary
treatment. The British and French consular reports may, however, be
especially remarked. Also, the reports of the Chief of the Bureau of
Internal Revenue in the reports of the Philippine Commission since
1904, when a new scheme of internal taxation was adopted, contain
much information on industrial conditions, past and present.

Commerce, Internal Trade, Navigation, etc.--The Spanish statistical
annuals, tariff regulations, etc., are fully listed by the Library
of Congress and Pardo de Tavera, under the headings above noted
for general references on economic matters. The most comprehensive
survey of trade statistics, and one which almost serves the purpose
by itself alone, is contained in the Monthly Summary of Commerce of
the Philippine Islands, for December, 1904, published at Washington by
the Bureau of Insular Affairs. It presents classified tables covering
Philippine imports and exports for the fifty years 1855-1904; they
were prepared from the best available Spanish trade statistics,
reduced to terms of American gold currency at the average rate of
exchange for each year, and, so far as the writer has checked these
figures, they are the most reliable that are presented anywhere. [82]
Among the very few Spanish writings, Azcárraga's Libertad de Comercio
(Madrid, 1872) and Jimeno Agius's Población y comercio (1884) deserve
special mention, also once more the useful little book of Sancianco y
Goson, for brief but useful data for 1868-80 in its appendices. [83]
For 1891-98, La Política de España en Filipinas has some scattering
figures on trade and commerce, year by year, highly unsatisfactory for
the most part. Besides the general references upon the Spanish customs
tariffs, one will find in Senate Document no. 134, 57th Congress,
1st session (Washington, 1902), in its Exhibit D, a comparison of
the 1901 tariff with the Spanish tariff of 1891. [84]

Currency.--The List of the Library of Congress, under the heading
Finance, cites a few Spanish and foreign treatises on Philippine
currency prior to 1898, and the earlier American official reports
on the subject. One will get more enlightenment upon the actual
conditions prevailing during the last years of Spanish rule from
memoranda and testimony in certain of these American reports than from
any of the printed sources of date earlier than 1898. Nevertheless,
the petition of the Manila Chamber of Commerce in 1895 reproduced in
La Política de España en Filipinas, v, no. 105, brings out in part the
highly unsatisfactory conditions produced by the Spanish government's
inaction and disregard of well-established economic principles. In
ibid., vii, p. 217, is given the text of the decree of April 17, 1897,
providing for the new Philippine silver peso which was beginning to
circulate in the islands when American arms intervened, and which
was proclaimed as a "settlement" of the Philippine currency evils,
yet would obviously not have proved sufficient, unsupported as it was
by provisions to sustain it in the face of the decline of silver. In
much of the loose talk about economic depression in the Philippines
since the wars of 1896-98 and 1899-1901, not enough attention has
been paid to the fact that "hard times" had really begun before,
during 1891-95 particularly, and that an unstable currency and
exchange fluctuations had then played their part in producing these
conditions; also that it was the Filipino laborer and small producer
who was especially mulcted of his due by conditions produced in part
officially and in part by governmental neglect. [85] In addition to
the American documents listed by the Library of Congress, reference
should be made, as regards currency and exchange evils before 1898,
to the survey of the subject by the Schurman Commission (Report of
the Philippine Commission, 1900, i, pp. 142-149), and the testimony
of Manila bankers and business men in the same report (vol. ii);
to magazine articles by Charles A. Conant printed as appendices in
Report of the Commission on International Exchange (Washington, 1903);
and, for a few details on previous conditions, with exchange tables,
to the reports of E. W. Kemmerer, Chief of the Division of Currency,
for 1904 and 1905. [86]

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT--SPANISH ADMINISTRATION

Our object here being primarily the political progress of the Filipino
people, we are concerned incidentally, as it were, with the subject
of Spanish administration considered by itself alone. A good study
of that subject, be it said, is lacking, and it may be recommended
as an opportunity worth improving.

No one who has read even a little about the Philippines and
Filipinos need be told that it is necessary to trace the political
development of this people along two lines--unfortunately, it proved
for Spain, lines that are divergent in considerable degree. Hence
the subdivision of this heading, regarding, first, development
under Spanish Administration and then the Filipino Propaganda,
first of Reform and finally of Revolution. We are concerned in
the first instance, that is, with reforms and progress realized in
consequence of measures "from above." It has already been said that
very considerable progress had been made by the Spanish government
from about 1860 onward, and was being made when the Tagálogs
appealed to arms in 1896. [87] It is also true that the stimulus
to the Filipino reform propaganda came in considerable degree from
the movements toward betterment of the government itself, and from
the agitations for reform in Spanish home politics. [88] But the
development of the Filipino people, social, political, and economic,
proceeded at last more rapidly, or less haltingly at least, than the
progress in reform from above; the reform measures were only partial,
often unpractical or ill-adapted to Philippine conditions; abuses
of administration continued under so-called Liberal periods as well
as in times of full clerical domination; in the action and reaction
of Spanish politics, in which so often are party divisions merely
nominal and superficial, the course of progress was so irregular and
uncertain as to lend justification to the feeling of the Filipinos
that they were being treated with insincerity; and all the while,
in the midst of bitter partisan and religious controversy, conducted
on both sides by writers most rabid and intemperate, the two peoples
were constantly growing apart from each other, and were losing the
mutual good-feeling of past years which, though always superficial
in large part (as in any such domination of one race by another),
had nevertheless had a foundation of genuine esteem.

The administrative organism.--For present purposes, it almost suffices
to refer simply to the List of the Library of Congress under the
headings Finance, Law, Political and Social Economy, and to Pardo de
Tavera's Biblioteca under the names of authors cited in the above List
and the alphabetical headings Aranceles, Balanza, Boletín, Colección,
Disposiciones, Exposición, Guía, Memoria, Proyectos (those of 1870 for
all sorts of reforms proposed after the Spanish Revolution of 1868),
and Reglamentos. The bibliography of Colonization published by the
Library of Congress, besides these special works on the Philippines,
lists also works on Spanish colonies and works on colonization in
general. [89] Of the compilations, annuals, etc., listed in these
bibliographies, special attention may be directed to those cited
under the names of Rodriguez San Pedro (to 1869) and Rodriguez Berriz
(to 1888). The most complete reference work on Spanish legislation,
executive regulations, etc., is the Colección legislativa de España,
and this work contains provisions enacted at Madrid with regard to
the Philippines down to and including 1898. For the full official
record, not only of enactments at Madrid, but of the forms under
which these were carried into effect in the islands themselves, the
Philippine governmental regulations, proclamations, etc., covering
this entire period down to the end of Spanish rule, the official
gazette of the Philippines (published under the name La Gaceta de
Manila, 1860-1898) is the final source; but the writer knows of no
full collection thereof in any library of the United States, though
there is of course one in the archives at Manila. In this connection,
it should be remarked that the governor-general had very wide, and
in some respects not very exactly prescribed, powers, one of the most
indefinite and sweeping of which was that requiring any general law or
special provision of Madrid, before it actually acquired force in the
Philippines, to be published with the governor-general's "cúmplase"
("let it go into effect"). This might be, and usually was, a mere
formality; but it was capable of being used so as at least to postpone
the execution of a legislative decree or ministerial order which was
distasteful to the chief authority of the Philippines, was violently
opposed by the influential interests in the islands (particularly the
ecclesiastical element), or, as happened in some cases, was manifestly
inapplicable to Philippine conditions. Of course, the governor-general
could readily be overruled, but even so, he could, if he desired,
secure thus a delay and possible reconsideration of the matter,
and the frequent changes of party administration in Spain encouraged
delays of this and like sorts, not a few reform decrees remaining thus
dead letters in the Philippines. It is often important, therefore,
to discover not only what was the law or regulation provided for the
Philippines in Madrid, but how it was put into force in the islands,
or if it actually took effect at all. For this purpose, the Official
Guide of the Philippines (Guía de forasteros to 1865, Guía oficial
from 1879 to 1898) supplements in some respects the official gazette
and the collection of Rodriguez Berriz. [90]

Of surveys and summaries of Spanish administration in the Philippines
listed in the Bibliography may be mentioned Cabezas de Herrera's
Apuntes (1883) and Fabié's Ensayo histórico (Madrid, 1896), also
José de la Rosa's La administración pública en Filipinas. [91] In the
compilation by Jesuit fathers published at Washington in 1900 under
the title El archipiélago filipino, there is to be found in vol. i,
a survey of the governmental organization and the various activities
of the government both under civil and ecclesiastical control. This
is reproduced in English in vol. iv of Report of the Philippine
Commission, 1900. In vol. i of this report of the Schurman Commission
(part iv, chapter i, also pp. 122-123) is an abstract of the Spanish
system of government which, so far as the framework of that government
is concerned, serves the purpose for one who can not readily consult
the Spanish official sources from which it was drawn. [92] The major
portion of this abstract is occupied by a translation and summary of
the law reforming the Philippine local governments in 1893, commonly
called the "Maura Law" after the Colonial Minister who promulgated
it. [93] As put in force by Governor-General Blanco, however, it was
somewhat altered and revised, and many of its more promising provisions
for local autonomy had in most towns remained in reality dead letters
up to the time when revolt broke out in the Tagálog provinces in
1896; elections under the new law were suspended, and martial law
established. For this law in its original text and as promulgated
by Blanco, with regulations and model forms for the municipalities,
see Felix M. Roxas's Comentarios al reglamento provisional de las
juntas provinciales (Manila, 1894). [94]

The administration in actual operation.--What most interests us is the
actual working of this machine in Manila, the provinces and towns, and
the works above cited will mostly provide for us only its skeleton on
paper. To make it an effective machine, we must resort to personal
testimony, occasional revelations thrown upon it by such of our
writers as looked beyond mere routine, and perhaps most of all to the
periodical literature of the times. [95] Few of the resident writers
of the old régime thought it was quite patriotic, or would serve their
personal interests, to discuss matters as frankly, for example, as
did Sancianco y Goson. [96] Testimony before the Schurman Commission
(vol. ii of its report) in 1899 brings out, here and there, revelations
as to how the former government was actually administered. [97]
Philippine government reports under American rule bring to light here
and there revelations about the former administration, especially in
fiscal and judicial matters. The customs collections benefited the
treasury far less than they should have done; perhaps fully as much
as was turned in was "absorbed" in one way and another. [98] Special
surtaxes on the customs and port dues were collected at Manila for
the improvement of its harbor from 1880 to 1898, amounting during the
last five years alone to 3,500,000 pesos. Yet the work, when at last
inaugurated, dragged along in desultory fashion and the value of the
breakwater constructed and the equipment in hand in 1898 amounted to
no more than $1,000,000 gold. [99]

Taxation.--No one of the works on administration just cited treats
this subject in a comprehensive or satisfactory manner. The only
special study of the subject that is known to the writer is Carl
C. Plehn's Taxation in the Philippines (Political Science Quarterly,
xvi, pp. 680-711, and xvii, pp. 125-148), and the author of this
excellent survey had to drag his data forth from the official records
and compilations. This survey gives all the most necessary information
as to kinds of taxes, their incidence, and amounts; but for the most
part there lie outside of its scope the questions one wishes to have
answered as to methods of collection and the working of the fiscal
administration in general, the actual receipts and expenditures for
government purposes, and particularly the special local revenues
so far as separate from general revenues. Sancianco y Goson again
helps to fill the gap, as regards the system of taxation prevailing
before the abolition of the tobacco monopoly and the reform of the
tribute and the corvee in 1884. [100] Anyone who has had experience
with Spanish fiscal tables need not be told that they do not always
show what they appear to show. It is thus that the writers who have
reproduced in English since 1898 Philippine budgets for various years
[101] have unwittingly misled their readers as to the real cost of
government under Spain. The figures shown in these budgets were the
totals of net collections (and expenditures), for ordinary purposes,
for the central government of the islands alone. They did not include
the purely local licenses and other taxes, the surcharges on general
taxes for local government (to be expended under supervision of the
central authorities), the percentages that went to collectors, the
other fees forming part or all of the compensation of some judicial and
other officials, special surcharges for port works and other purposes
not covered in the ordinary budget, etc. Naturally, no estimate was
included of the value of the forced-labor levy. The products of
"squeeze" and "pickings," in some cases so fully established as
to be notorious, were of course not included; nevertheless, they
represented part of the cost of government to the people. Finally,
an ecclesiastical establishment, really a part of the government
itself, drew support from the people in many ways beyond what would
have been provided had not the power of government been behind it,
under a system of voluntary contributions, for instance, apart from
the communities which paid rent to the friars as landlords. [102]

The Spanish-Philippine debt of 40,000,000 pesos, incurred in 1897 in
consequence of the insurrection, has not had sufficient notice as
being originally the cause at Paris of the payment of $20,000,000
by the United States to Spain in connection with the clause of the
treaty providing for the cession of the Philippines. Had the islands
remained under Spanish sovereignty, they would have carried this
their first public debt, expended wholly for war purposes, part of
it being loaned for the payment of military operations in Cuba. [103]

Legal and judicial.--In the introduction to the List of the Library of
Congress, under the heading Law, and on the pages of the List cited in
that note will be found the formal bibliography of the subject. [104]
Some references upon the actual conditions of the administration of
justice in the Philippines have already been given. For this purpose,
note also a comparison of the old criminal procedure with that
introduced in 1899 in Military Governor on Civil Affairs (Rept. War
Dept., 1900, i, part 10), pp. 17-20. The compilation of Rafael Morales
y Prieto [105] is also to be specially mentioned for the criminal
law and procedure, 1880 to 1894, and also for an appendix containing
circulars as to judicial fees of various sorts. For brief summaries in
English of the old judicial organizations see Exhibit J of the Report
of the Taft Philippine Commission, 1900, a résumé by Chief Justice
Arellano, especially for a statement as to the conflict of laws and
codes, old and new, and as to the relative degree of authority of
these codes; and Census of the Philippine Islands (Washington, 1905),
chapter on the Judiciary. [106] Justice Willard's brief Notes on the
Spanish Civil Code (Manila, 1903) also merits consultation.

Science and material resources.--So far as the scientific work of
the period has a direct bearing upon our present purposes, it relates
rather to the section on Economic Development. But the materials are
sufficiently listed in the Bibliography, and the subject is introduced
here only to say that this is one of the lines along which, in recent
years, Spanish administration was beginning to make progress. This
was true, however, chiefly of forestry and mineralogy, and was due
almost entirely to the Spanish officials Abella y Casariego, Centeno y
García, and Sebastian Vidal y Soler, and to the stimulus of the work of
foreign investigators, especially Germans. The work of the Jesuits in
meteorology should also be specially mentioned. It will be noted that
little headway was made in the matter most vital for the Philippines,
viz., agriculture; nor can we say that even a beginning was made in
industrial chemistry or other researches calculated to foster either
incipient or undeveloped industries, while the public health service
was lamentably defective and scientific research relating thereto
amounted practically to nothing. Reference may be made to the already
large list of publications of the present Philippine government's
Bureau of Science, Board of Health, Agriculture, Forestry, and Mining
bureaus as showing the state of scientific investigation before 1898,
also for bibliographical data. [107]

Moros and pagan peoples.--Ethnology as a science does not claim a
place here. [108] We are concerned with the Spanish advance toward
the establishment of effective control over large areas either partly
occupied or kept in a wild state of nature by backward or warring
tribes; though considerable headway was made in the last half of the
nineteenth century, Spanish sovereignty over these areas was after
all only nominal in 1898. Moreover, especially as regards the Moros,
the materials and bibliography have been presented in other volumes
of this series. [109] Attention is called to a useful compilation of
Spanish campaigns against the Moros by Lieut. W. E. W. McKinley, [110]
especially for its reviews of Malcampo's campaign of 1876, Terrero's
of 1886-87, Weyler's of 1888-91, and Blanco's of 1894-96. [111]
The American military reports from 1899 to date and reports on the
Moro Province since 1903 contain scattered data on Spanish relations
with the Moros and also the hill tribes of Mindanao. Similarly, the
reports and publications of the Philippine Ethnological Survey from
1902 to date contain references to Spanish contact in recent years
with the pagan peoples of Luzón, Mindoro, and Palawan. [112]

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT--FILIPINO PROPAGANDA AND REVOLUTION

Religious Question.--It need scarcely be repeated that the "friar
controversy" enters not only into this, but every phase of our
discussion, and in one form or another, is touched upon in almost
all our sources of information about the Philippines. For one thing,
however, we are not here concerned with a historical judgment upon
the work of the friars in the Philippines, though it is proper to
note that there has of late been evident a reaction in their favor
from the tendency common in the United States immediately after 1898
to judge them wholly by recent events, and their work is now more
fairly viewed in its three-century perspective. We are, moreover,
excused from entering upon a comprehensive survey of literature about
the friars and their work in general by the fact that the subject has
been constantly to the fore throughout this series. What is needed
here is only the citation, supplementary to the Bibliography and to
the great accumulation of bibliographical references in other volumes
of this series, of certain titles easily overlooked (some because of
recent publication) and of such special passages in all these works
as elucidate particular matters of importance.

As with all the political literature of the Philippines, 1860-1898, the
reader is to be warned against the exaggerations of both sides. Always
and everywhere, religious privileges and prejudices have aroused
discussion both violent and intolerant; and in this case we find,
on one side, a defense of religious and ecclesiastical privileges of
a medieval character and in a tone and temper inherited from those
times. Nor, even setting the purely ecclesiastical and religious
questions aside, need we expect to find in this literature any
review or discussion written in a calm and scientific spirit. Spanish
political literature is almost entirely polemic, and Spanish polemics
is sui generis. So, as with the friars and their defenders, we
find here the principles of modern political science, which appeal
properly to cool reason and the tolerance of liberalism, put forward
by Spaniards and Filipinos in a language and with a spirit that hark
back to times which we have come to think of as far remote from ours.

The bitterness of tone, the intolerance and contempt of the Filipino,
and the flaunting of "race superiority," which came to characterize
the writings of the friars and their defenders in this period--and
which played no small part in leading the Filipinos to the brink of
separation--are shown to the full in the numbers of La Política de
España en Filipinas, 1891-98. The purpose of this organ was to combat
in Spain the program of those who would further liberalize the régime
of society and government in the Philippines. W. E. Retana, at first an
associate editor with José Feced, was after 1895 its sole editor. Just
what were the relations of the Madrid establishments of the Philippine
religious orders with the business department of this periodical is not
known; but it is admitted that "the friars helped by subscriptions"
at least, and it has generally been supposed that their connection
with it was really closer, in short that it was practically an organ
of theirs. [113] In it will be found the pro-friar and anti-liberal
account and view of events and matters current during the years of its
publication, and also various studies of earlier years written from
the same point of view. The case for the friars, especially for the
period from 1863 on, may also be found quite typically set forth in
a single volume of five hundred pages by a Philippine Augustinian,
Padre Eladio Zamora (Las corporaciones religiosas en Filipinas,
Valladolid, 1901). [114] Testimony given before Hon. William H. Taft
in 1900 regarding the friars and their part in the old régime, by the
Spanish archbishop and heads of the orders themselves as well as by
Filipinos on the other side will be found in Senate Document no. 190,
56th Congress, 2nd session.

Friars' Estates.--The above document, which is entitled Lands
held for ecclesiastical or religious uses in the Philippines, also
gives information on the friars' rural estates. One will find no
comprehensive treatment of this subject before 1898, though it is
usually touched upon, often with great inaccuracy, in the anti-friar
pamphlets. For further data upon the subject in American official
reports, see: Report of War Department, 1900, i, part 4, pp. 502-508
(General Otis); Report of Taft Philippine Commission, 1900, pp. 23-33;
ibid., 1903, i, Exhibits F, G, H, and I; ibid., 1904, i, Exhibit I
(Report on Examination of Titles to Friars' Estates); and Report of
Secretary of War, 1902, appendix O (Rome negotiations of 1902). [115]

The Filipino clergy and their Cause.--Contests between secular and
regular ecclesiastics, and over the subjection of friar-curates to
ordinary jurisdiction had filled many pages of Philippine history
in every century. But, when revived under somewhat new forms from
about 1863 on, as remarked in the introduction to these notes, they
speedily assumed a new and rather distinct phase. The introduction
has noted the connection of the Jesuits' return with the encroachment
upon the Filipino secular priests and with the counter demand for the
belated subjection of the friar-parishes to the ordinary ecclesiastical
legislation and jurisdiction of the Church; under the encouragement
of the 1868 revolution in Spain, these demands grew apace from 1868
to 1872, and became interlaced with strictly political demands,
until finally we may regard the cause of the Filipino clergy as a
part of the campaign for Filipino nationalism. The reaction of 1872
and immediately subsequent years checked it, and it has found full
expression only since Spanish sovereignty was overthrown; but it is
best considered in its broadest scope, as a part of the Filipino
movement toward nationality, though it may have been but dimly or
not at all felt as such by some of its most active protagonists.

For the documents showing what was the modern phase of the question
regarding parishes in its beginnings, see the pamphlets cited in the
List of the Library of Congress under Agu[a]do (p. 64), and in Pardo
de Tavera's Biblioteca under the same name and numbers 681, 873,
1,348 and 1,962. [116] We must come down to the period of American
rule for full statements of the case of the Filipino clergy against
the friars. A Spanish cleric, formerly an Augustinian friar-curate,
who was excloistered on his own petition some time before the end
of Spanish rule and has since continued to reside in the islands,
has been the chief spokesman for the Filipino clergy. He is Salvador
Pons y Torres, and, apart from frequent contributions on the subject
to the press of Manila since 1898 and various pamphlets, he undertook
to review the entire subject in his Defensa del clero filipino and
its supplement El clero secular filipino, both published at Manila
in 1900; while in connection with the visit of Delegate Chapelle, a
campaign was being conducted for fuller recognition of the Filipino
clergy by the Vatican. [117] Their claims are set forth in Memorial
elevado á Sa Santidad El Papa León XIII por el Pueblo Filipino (Manila,
1900). [118] For the full exposition of the question, one must study
it under the Filipino revolution against the United States and in
the history of the Aglipay schism since 1903. [119]

Revolt of 1872.--That the chief victims of this episode were prominent
Filipino priests connects it rather with religio-political than with
purely political matters. The civilians who were arrested for too great
activity in agitating for political privileges were deported to Guam,
whence their escape to foreign ports was perhaps winked at, while after
a time some of them returned to the Philippines. [120] But the three
most prominent priests who were tried for complicity in the mutiny
at Cavite (Burgos, a Spanish-Filipino, Zamora, a Chinese-Filipino,
and Gomez, a pure-blooded Filipino) were condemned to death by a
very speedily summoned court-martial and were promptly executed. If
we had the record of the proofs submitted before this court-martial
(which acted very summarily and under pressure of official and other
demonstrations of indignation, not to say vindictiveness), and the
statement of its conclusions, we should be in better position to judge
whether or not a great injustice was done. But neither officially
nor semi-officially was the guilt of the condemned ever shown, and we
have either to accept very vehement and intemperate assertions about
it having been proved, or to incline to the belief that these men
were struck down by a power which stretched out its hand in the dark,
and that their death was a punishment for having ventured under the
preceding Liberal administrations to advocate the withdrawal of the
friars as curates of parishes. Certainly this became the belief of
the Filipino people, propagated from year to year by word of mouth
(acquiring thus exaggerated and distorted details as being of sober
truth), and occasionally finding expression in print. [121] The usually
sober and colorless Montero y Vidal becomes very rabid in his recital
of this episode in Philippine history and is very positive not only
in denouncing the priests who were executed and the deportees as
guilty but in proclaiming their movement as actually separatist
in character. He ridicules at length the account of the Frenchman
Plauchut in the Revue des deux mondes for 1877; but Plauchut, as well
as Montero y Vidal himself, was resident in or near Manila at the
time of these occurrences. Finally, Dr. Pardo de Tavera, a nephew of
one of the prominent Philippine Spaniards who were deported, supports
Plauchut's version and impeaches Montero y Vidal's. [122]

Reforms and Demands for more. "Assimilation."--The reactionists had
regained the saddle in the Philippines even before the Republic in
Spain came to an end; they used the incident of the Cavite mutiny as
a "horrible example," and succeeded in repealing or nullifying all
reforms not to their taste even in educational or purely administrative
matters. Till after 1880, the "Filipino cause" was in hiding. But
meanwhile young Filipinos of wealth were going abroad for education,
and above all a new generation of Filipinos were coming from the new
middle class produced by the better industrial opportunities consequent
upon expanding trade and commerce, were breathing in popular ideas
of hostility to the friars in the more advanced rural districts, and
were exchanging ideas, and imbibing in the exchange a new sentiment
of nationality, when they met, in constantly increasing numbers,
in the colleges and normal school at Manila, Tagálogs, Ilokanos,
Bisayans and others of the hitherto separate communities. Regional
feeling was still strong, but it was beginning to break down. [123]
Those who went abroad for education soon began to propagate the idea,
already half expressed at home, that Philippine education, even with
the improvements, was still archaic and in some ways anti-modern;
and every avenue out of this condition was found to be blocked by the
friars. If in reality the men of Spanish blood (in whole or part)
who had agitated for greater political liberties during 1868-72,
had aimed at separating the Philippines from Spain--and all the
reasonable probabilities are opposed to such a belief--at any
rate, the new generation of Filipinos who took up the cause in the
eighties were ardent and, for some time at least, sincere advocates
of Spanish-Philippine union. They carried the matter, indeed, to the
extreme, in the campaign for "assimilation," which has already been
characterized as unpractical.

Reforms of a partial nature, any statesman could predict, would breed
the demand for more. So, during the eighties, when most headway was
made in administrative and legal reforms under Liberal administrations,
we find the Filipinos formulating demands for the first time; and
it is significant that they all centered about the friars. Under the
liberal Governor-General Terrero, and with sympathetic Spaniards in
the posts of secretary of the civil administration and civil governor
of Manila, officers of some of the Tagálog towns ventured to display a
sense of independence of the traditional friar-dictatorship in local
affairs, even (in the case of Malolos and the Binondo district of
Manila) to carry contests with the friars over the personal tax-lists
before higher authority; the friars' tenants around Kalamba, where
José Rizal's parents lived, challenged the administrator of that
Dominican estate, and aired their protests publicly in 1887; [124]
and in 1888 a public demonstration against the friars, and especially
Archbishop Payo, took place in Manila, and a petition for the removal
of the friars was addressed to the Queen Regent. In 1887 these
civil authorities of Liberal affiliation had issued official orders
regarding cemeteries and church funerals, contravening, on grounds
of public health, long-standing practices of the friar-curates; and
the friars, even the archbishop, had been almost openly intransigent
about the matter, indicating the belief that they would soon upset
this régime of affairs by the exercise of their power at Madrid. The
demand on the part of some Spanish periodicals of Manila that the
proposed government trade school should not be surrendered to the
Augustinians was another indication of the current of the times. [125]

In form at least, there was nothing in any of these demonstrations
or representations which would not be perfectly legitimate under
any free government. Yet, even before the expiration of Terrero's
term, he was prevailed upon to send home Centeno y García, the civil
governor of Manila, and the processes of law had been set in action by
judicial authority against some of the participants. And, even before
the downfall of the Liberal ministry at Madrid, the mere display of
a disposition on the part of Filipinos to speak for themselves as
a people had started the currents of reaction there. Weyler was the
successor of Terrero as Governor-General. The friars' representations
at Madrid obtained, while the Liberal minister Becerra [126] was
still in office, the omission of the provisions for civil marriage and
registration from the Civil Code as it was extended to the Philippines
in 1889. Weyler used force to quell the subsequent disturbances at
Kalamba, and among the score or so of deportees were some of Rizal's
family. [127]

The Propagandists.--A full history of the Filipino Propaganda would
list a large number of names, both of members of the Filipino colonies
abroad and of secret agitators and wealthy contributors at home. But
the story must be developed from the various sources to be cited, and
we are concerned here with those who figured most actively by their
writings. Of these, Marcelo H. del Pilar and José Rizal were altogether
the most notable, their prominence indeed leading to the formation
of factions about them and the display of those personal jealousies
which wreck or threaten to wreck every Filipino movement. [128] It is
significant that the propagandists coming to the front in the eighties
were, one may say, genuine "sons of the people" though associated with
them were others who were sons of the half-caste aristocracy. It is
significant also, that, though these two leaders Del Pilar and Rizal,
came from Bulakan and Laguna provinces respectively, the heart of the
more advanced communities of Tagálogs around Manila, yet the islands as
a whole were beginning to be represented in the propaganda, notably by
the Lunas, from Ilokos, and Graciano Lopez Jaena, a Bisayan. The latter
started the first Filipino periodical of consequence, La Solidaridad,
and published eighteen numbers of it at Barcelona up to October 31,
1889, when Del Pilar took charge of it, transferred it to Madrid and
edited it there as a fortnightly till 1895. It was face to face with
La Política de España en Filipinas from 1891, and, as the latter
is the chief source for the pro-friar and anti-liberal side of the
controversy, so La Solidaridad, which circulated among the educated
Filipinos in many parts of the archipelago despite the censorship,
is the chief source for the writings of the propagandists. [129]

Marcelo H. del Pilar had taken an active part in stimulating
opposition to the friar-curates, particularly in matters of local
government, in his native province (Bulakan) for some years before
the troubles of 1888. When the pendulum swung towards reaction, he
left his family (being then a man of middle-age) and went to Spain
to carry on the fight close by the center of government, support of
his campaign being pledged by a committee who undertook to secure
Filipino subscriptions, certain wealthy Filipinos being identified
privately with the cause. Del Pilar's writings show nothing of the
poet or dreamer, as do Rizal's; he had, in some degree, an "economic
mind," though entirely untrained in that line, and he was at the
outset of the active propaganda in Spain (1889) a maturer man than
Rizal. Coming straight from the problems of actual life among his
people, he stated their grievances with more practical reference to
direct and immediate remedies and with special reference to their
economic status; while Rizal, as a student in contact with modern
European life and thought, dreamed of and preached, in more general
terms but on a far wider scope, the social regeneration of his people
and the expansion of their political rights. Del Pilar would have
made a good representative of his people in the Cortes. But Rizal
was a genius, who with the touch of imagination and satire lifted the
cause of the Filipinos to a place in the thought of the world, and at
the same time, as poet and patriot combined, fired the enthusiasm of
his own people and became their idol. And, in the course of events,
it was Rizal who proved the soberer, the more mature as time went
by. He was opposed to means of violence, even to the last, and the
whole record bears out his protestations on this score; he still
looked to the future as a dreamer-patriot, but he also looked to
the present state of his people and saw that the most vital problem
was the teaching them that they must raise themselves by their own
efforts, must deserve a better destiny. Del Pilar, disappointed
by the failure to achieve greater immediate, practical results by
relying upon the progress of Liberalism in Spain, after seven years
of propaganda along these lines, was starting for Hongkong or Japan,
to conduct there a really revolutionary campaign, when death overtook
him shortly before the Tagálog revolt in 1896. He had, apparently,
lost faith in the ideals of "assimilation," of Spanish-Filipino unity,
which he had set forth in glowing phrases in 1888 and 1889. He had
also, apparently, become convinced that the upper-class Filipinos,
especially the most wealthy and prominent, were too lukewarm or too
prone to temporize for safety's sake, that the time had come to make
the cause more distinctly one of the people as a whole. He is credited
with having suggested and outlined the organization of the Katipunan,
and he seems to have concluded that it was time for the Filipinos to
resort to Cuba's example and not to political petitions only. [130]

Even in Noli me tangere, first published under his own eye at Berlin
in 1887, when Rizal, at the age of twenty-six, was just fairly setting
out in life, there are many evidences that the author, if he meant
primarily to set before the world the backwardness of the existing
social and political régime in the Philippines, its stifling of
thought, and its many tyrannies, had also in mind to set before his
people, in some of his instantaneous photographs of Philippine life,
their own defects. In El filibusterismo (Ghent, 1891), the more
mature reformer preached yet more plainly the necessity of social
and political progress beginning from below, and not simply inspired
from above. That his people took the lessons meant for themselves
(and take them still today) less to heart than they responded to the
satire and invective directed against the form of rule imposed upon
them, was the fault not of Rizal but of human nature, prone to apply
the preacher's words only to the other fellow.

It is a great misfortune that we have in English no real translation
of Noli me tangere, [131] and none at all of El filibusterismo,
which, as a political document, is the stronger of the two. [132]
It is no less regrettable that no biography of Rizal, tracing his
mental development and his relation with the events of 1880 to 1896,
nor even a good biographical sketch of him, has been published in the
English language. Retana's biographical and bibliographical notes,
published in a Madrid monthly, Nuestro Tiempo, 1904-06, and about to
appear in book form, are indispensable as the only comprehensive work
on the subject, and resort must be had to them for a full array of
citations, as also for many documents not available elsewhere. [133]
Rizal's edition (Paris, 1890) of Morga's Sucesos de las islas Filipinas
has already been cited in connection with that work in VOLS. XV and
XVI of this series (see note 3 of former). Its annotations are Rizal's
chief contribution to the history of his people, and it must be said
that his political feeling has crept into them to the damage often
of their scientific value. [134] There also deserve mention here
Rizal's discussion in 1889 of the future of his people, [135] and
some of Blumentritt's writings about Rizal and in his defense. [136]

Masonry, Liga Filipina, etc.--In almost all the Spanish writings
about the Philippine insurrection, especially those by friars, we find
it ascribed primarily to "Franc-Masonería," the terrible bugaboo in
naming which the Spanish friar sums up in one word his notion of all
that is pernicious in modern life since the French Revolution, and
the chief cause of the loss by Spain of her American colonies. So,
as to the Philippines, the argument is, had not Spanish Masons been
able secretly to organize there, and to pervert the minds of certain
Filipinos, the colony would have remained in its loyalty of primitive
simplicity and happiness. The truth is that Masonry played a very
secondary part in the Filipino agitation for reform, furnishing simply
a convenient medium for conducting the propaganda. Up to the last
ten years of Spanish rule, only a few lodges of Spanish Liberals and
foreigners, into which some of the half-castes and more well-to-do
Filipinos had been admitted, had been organized in the Philippines,
and had led a rather irregular existence. At about the time when La
Solidaridad was moved to Madrid, a Spanish-Filipino Association was
there formed, in which Spaniards and Filipinos combined to agitate
for reform. This circle was virtually identified in membership with
a certain Spanish Grand Lodge (probably spurious, as regards the
legitimate parent organization of Free Masonry), which delegated
agents to conduct the active organization of new Philippine lodges
dependent upon it. It appears certain that this was done with the idea
definitely in view of being able thus to propagate liberal political
ideas and secretly distribute such literature among the Filipinos,
also the more easily to raise funds for the work. But had not such
a favorable means of conducting the propaganda been presented, it
would have been improvised. One must subject to critical examination
the Spanish writings, and will readily discover their exaggerated
deductions from such facts as came to light. [137] Interesting reading
is afforded by the confidential Royal Order of July 2, 1896, addressed
to Governor-General Blanco. [138] It approves his deportation of the
principales, or headmen, of Malolos and Taal (who had defied the
local friar-curates), and orders him to have provincial and other
officials watch and report confidentially on all secret organizations
(forbidden by the Laws of the Indies, as recited in Royal Order of
August 2, 1888) and list all persons of whom "there may be indications
enough to believe that they are affiliated," etc. (opening up thus
a splendid opportunity for private denunciations). He is to use in
this secret work only officials who are Peninsulars, never natives;
so also he is to invite coöperation of "the parish-priests who belong
to the religious orders." As to punishments, it is preferable to deport
the "suspected," fixing their residence in the Moro country or Guam,
rather than to exile them, as they would then join the colonies abroad
and conduct a propaganda.

The project of Marcelo del Pilar for an association called Solidaridad
Filipina, [139] which came to nothing practical, and the Liga Filipina,
organized by Rizal just before his deportation from Manila in July,
1892, though in part modeled after Masonry, are among the things
which show that the Filipino propagandists did not confine their
efforts to Masonic organization. Our Spanish sources would have it
that the Liga Filipina was really separatist in character, and the
prosecution deliberately based upon this charge the demand for Rizal's
conviction in 1896. It remains unproved, and the statutes of the League
as prepared by Rizal [140] entirely support his assertion that the
design of the League was to foster coöperation among the Filipinos,
to "raise the arts and sciences," and develop Filipino commercial and
economic interests generally. The organization was a fraternal society,
in effect, the aim being to bring Filipinos closer together in a
"brotherhood," and incidentally to undermine the control of Chinese
and others upon the trade of the country--in which respects it would
likely have proved mostly utopian, even had not political conditions
and Rizal's deportation brought it virtually to naught. In the pledges
of its "brothers" to stand by each other for the "remedy of abuses"
as well as for other things, the League very plainly looked toward
unity of action in matters social and political, and no doubt the
idea of bringing his people together for such political action as
might become possible was foremost in the mind of Rizal and its other
organizers. But this does not prove the charge that it merely covered
up a plan to get arms and rise in rebellion as soon as possible.

The Katipunan.--We come now to the parting of the ways. Just as Marcelo
del Pilar had concluded that the time was at hand for more vigorous
measures, so on the other hand some of the Filipinos of education
and social position (cautious also, in some cases, because of their
property) had become discouraged and faint-hearted. The deportation
of Rizal had its effect in 1892, and the local government reforms of
1893-94 were followed by a reactionary government in Spain which might
nullify even such concessions, in the face of the constant demand for a
check upon the half-liberal régime of Blanco. Some of the middle-class
leaders of Manila, who had been drawn into the Masonic movement, had
decided that the time had come to organize the masses, at least in the
Tagálog provinces. Andrés Bonifacio, an employe of a foreign business
house in Manila, was the leading spirit; gathering his ideas of modern
reform from reading Spanish treatises on the French Revolution, he had
imbibed also a notion that the methods of the mob in Paris were those
best adapted to secure amelioration for the Filipinos. His ideas were
those of a socialist, and of a socialist of the French Revolution type,
and he thought them applicable to an undeveloped tropical country,
where the pressure of industrial competition is almost unknown,
and where with the slightest reasonable exertion starvation may be
dismissed from thought. There was in this new propaganda an element
of resentment toward the wealthy, upper-class Filipinos, the landed
proprietors in general, as well as toward the friar landlords and
the whole fabric of government and society resting on them. Summing
up all the evidence he has been able to obtain on the Katipunan, the
writer agrees with Felipe G. Calderón, a Filipino, in his opinion
[141] that its socialistic character negatives the assertion of
the Spanish writers that the upper-class Filipinos were its real
supporters and directors, working in the background; and that, while
this propaganda from below looked to independence and the substitution
of Spanish rule by Filipino rule, yet it was without any political
program, properly speaking, and there was merely a crude idea in
the minds of the masses that they were somehow going to shake off
their masters, get rid of the whites, and divide up the big estates
not only of the friars but of Filipino landholders as well. Calderón
does not discuss the alleged plan of the Katipunan to assassinate the
whites, especially the friars. It is certain that such bloodthirsty
ideas were in the minds of some of the leaders; but the more direct
documentary evidence that has been produced on this point is perhaps
open to the suspicion that it was manufactured in connection with
the courts-martial which operated with such fury after the outbreak
of revolt in 1896. [142] After all the furore that had been made, the
actual revelations as to the importance of the organization, character
of its leaders, number of its followers, and extent of its operations,
would have made the whole affair somewhat ridiculous, had it not been
represented that behind this humble organization of perhaps forty
thousand initiates in the Tagálog towns there was a great program for
setting up an independent government and that the upper-class Filipinos
were simply using this organization as a stalking-horse. The truth
appears to be that, while these over-important Katipunan leaders
thought in terms grandiloquent, and led their humble followers in
the towns around Manila most affected by the propaganda to indulge
in futile and ridiculous dreams of a coming millennium (while some of
themselves were quarreling over the obols contributed), the movement
was mostly talk even up to the time when an Augustinian curate in
Manila made himself the hero of the rabid Spanish element in Manila by
"exposing" an organization about which the governmental authorities
had had partial information for some weeks, or even months. Bonifacio
started this separate organization in 1894, but Calderón seems to be
correct in saying that work in the towns outside of Manila was only
begun in the spring of 1896. The humble followers were assured that
the Japanese government would help them oust Spain, and that rifles
to arm the whole population would come from there. But Japan never
in the least violated her obligations to Spain, and, if the leaders
even bought any rifles in Japan, they must have been few indeed. [143]
When Bonifacio sent an emissary to Dapitan in the spring of 1896, to
propose to Rizal a plan of armed revolt and that he should escape on
a steam vessel sent for the purpose, and join in this campaign, Rizal
rejected the proposition as folly, and displayed his great impatience
with it. [144] On every ground, it seems probable that, had not Friar
Gil and the Spanish press of Manila been so insistent on giving great
publicity to some Katipunan engraving-stones, receipts for dues, etc.,
kept in hiding by the affiliated employes of a Spanish newspaper,
the revolt might never have come about at all. Certainly, no date was
set for it (though various future dates had been vaguely discussed),
till the sudden arrests of August 19 and 20, 1896, sent Bonifacio and
his companions fleeing to Bulakan Province where, practically without
arms, they appealed to their fellow-workers in Bulakan, Manila, and
Cavite provinces to rise in revolt on August 30. The friars and the
rabid element of Spanish patriots were so anxious to force the hand
of Blanco, and to discredit him, that, it may be, they forced upon a
military commander whose troops were mostly in Mindanao a revolt that,
a few months further on, might either have dissipated itself or have
been avoided by an adequate show of force. [145]

Because the friars are so much to the fore in all the discussions of
these events, we must not overlook the part played by governmental
abuses, as already described. The Civil Guard, given a more extensive
organization and scope of action during these closing years of Spanish
rule, by its abuses (committed, for the most part, by Filipinos
upon their own fellows) played probably the foremost part in drawing
odium upon the government. [146] Next to police abuses, and sometimes
allied with them, were the misuses of the powers of local government
(with which alone the great majority of the people came into direct
contact), especially in regard to the levy of forced labor; and here
again, the humble Filipino's complaint was chiefly against his own
fellow-countrymen of power and position. But, summing up all the
administrative abuses and all the evils of the government system, we
are still left a long way from agreement with the friars' assertions
that the masses loved them and that governmental abuses were the sole
cause of rebellion. [147]

Insurrection of 1896-97.--No history from the Filipino side has
yet come to light, and there are certain points that can be cleared
up only by the frank testimony of the Filipino participants. [148]
We are dependent chiefly on Spanish sources, written in the passion
of the times by men not careful about sifting the facts. All things
considered, the two best sources, both for what they say and for
what may be inferred from them, are the so-called Memorias of two
Governor-Generals, prepared in order to defend their administrations
before the Spanish Senate and the public; that of Blanco covering the
preparatory stage and early months of the rebellion, that of Primo
de Rivera its closing stages. Between these two Governor-Generals,
the work of Monteverde y Sedano covers the military operations under
Polavieja.

Blanco's Memoria [149] affords, unconsciously, the most severe
indictment that could be passed on Spain's fitness to hold the
Philippines (or her other colonies) in 1898. This man was really of
liberal temperament; he had formed a just conception of the real
insignificance of the Katipunan movement; and he strove, when the
crisis was prematurely forced on him, to restrain the vindictiveness
of the rabid Spanish element, and really believed in the efficacy of a
"policy of attraction." But instead of setting forth on broader grounds
the reasons for his course of action and discussing with sincerity
and frankness a policy for the Philippines, he felt compelled after
his return to Spain to bow before the howls of press and public. He
defends himself before his clerical-conservative critics not by showing
the folly of their illiberal policy for the colony, but endeavors
to prove that they were wrong in accusing him of lack of severity as
well as of energy. Thus we learn (p. 20) that, even under a Blanco,
before the outbreak came, one thousand and forty-two persons had been
deported "as Masons, disaffected and suspicious or harmful to their
towns." During the night of August 19-20, 1896, following the sensation
created by Friar Gil, there were forty-three arrests in Manila, and
three hundred more within the next week. During September, thirty
seven men taken in arms were shot, after summary trials (p. 25.) The
number of Filipinos, mostly men of some position, who had not taken
up arms, but were arrested for alleged complicity in the Katipunan,
and involved in the trials before a special court for conspiracy and
sedition, very soon mounted to five hundred, including those sent
in from the provinces. Some remained incomunicados for more than
forty days. The men executed from September 4 to December 12, 1896,
when Blanco surrendered command to Polavieja, numbered seventy-four
in all. [150]

Evidence as to the "reign of terror" that was inaugurated in Manila may
be drawn from the Spanish treatises to be cited, wherein the episode
is recited with gusto. The Spanish press of Manila for 1896-98;
also that of Spain, especially Philippine letters of 1896-98 in La
Política de España en Filipinas, El Heraldo, El Imparcial and El
Correo of Madrid, furnished the original source of information for
these writers, and should be used to supplement this history of the
insurrection. Transcriptions of testimony taken by the special court
for sedition and conspiracy appear in Retana's Archivo, iii and iv, and
evidences that the more yielding witnesses had their phraseology, and
sometimes their statements of fact, dictated to them will be noted by
the careful reader, especially if he be familiar with Spanish methods
of judicial procedure. References to the common use of torture to
make witnesses (in some cases eager enough to insure their own safety
by "delation") sign such testimony, will be found in the Filipino
press since 1898, occasionally also in Spanish periodicals of Manila
since 1898. [151] These same sources also supplement the citations
on Rizal already given, for the story of his trial and execution,
and the increase of severity and terrorism after Polavieja took
charge. They are also, in the main, our sole, fragmentary sources
on the state of Cavite during insurgent control of the province,
the insurgent organization, etc. [152]

The Spanish treatises and pamphlets on the insurrection are: [153]
José M. del Castillo y Jimenez, El Katipunan, ó el Filibusterismo
en Filipinas (Madrid, 1897). Partial accounts of events of 1896-97;
already characterized as rabid and cheaply patriotic.

Ricardo Monet y Carretero, Comandancia general de Panay y
Negros. Alteraciones de órden público ... desde Octubre de 1896 á
Marzo de 1897 (Iloilo, 1897). Mostly official proclamations, etc.,
by the author as commander in the western district of Bisayas,
regarding disturbances there and symptoms of a tendency to revolt.

E. Reverter y Delmas.--Filipinos por España. Narración episódica de la
rebelión en el archipiélago Filipino (Barcelona, 1897); 2 vols. The
title of a later edition is La insurrección de Filipinas. Known to
the writer only by title. [154]

Enrique Abella y Casariego, Filipinas (Madrid, 1898). More temperate
than most other Spanish writings. Treats of the development of the
insurrection, and of the course of events under Blanco, Polavieja,
and Primo de Rivera.

Federico de Monteverde y Sedano, Campaña de Filipinas, La división
Lachambre. 1897 (Madrid, 1898.) Excellent account of the campaign
of Polavieja by his aide; somewhat grandiloquent, considering the
comparative insignificance of the military operations themselves.

Les Philippines et l'insurrection de 1896-1897 (Paris, 1899); a
thirty-nine-page reprint from Revue militaire de l'étranger.

L. Aycart--La campaña de Filipinas. Recuerdos é impresiones de
un médico militar (Madrid, 1900). Contains some charts and some
interesting data on the military campaign as such.

Manuel Sastrón--La insurrección en Filipinas y guerra hispano-americana
(Madrid, 1901). [155] Written by a Spanish official in Manila during
this time, and composed of accounts and documents drawn mainly from
the press of Manila. It is, however, the most useful arsenal of data.

Major John S. Mallory--The Philippine Insurrection, 1896-1898
(appendix viii to report of Major-General G. W. Davis, commanding
the division of the Philippines, in Report of War Department, 1903,
vol. 3, pp. 399-425). A non-critical compilation, mostly from Sastrón
and Monteverde y Sedano. It is, however, by far the best review
of the 1896-97 insurrection as such that is available in English,
and is a fairly satisfactory account for one who cannot consult the
Spanish sources. Far better than Foreman's account.

M. Arroyo Vea-Murguía--Defensa del sitio de Naic (Filipinas). Antes
y despues. (Madrid, 1904.) Of little value.

The Pact of Biak-na-bató.--Purposely, the word "treaty," so often
applied to this transaction, is here avoided; for, apart from
technical objections to a word that applies to agreements between
sovereign powers, this was no treaty in any sense of the word. There
was some mystery surrounding the negotiations by which the insurgent
chiefs surrendered a few hundred nondescript firearms and retired to
Hongkong; untrue or half-true charges were bandied back and forth,
for political effect, in the Cortes and the press of Spain; and,
of the chief actors in the affair, only Primo de Rivera has given
his account--perhaps not with entire frankness. [156] Aguinaldo has
confined his statements on the subject to the most brief assertions
of a general nature [157] to the effect that reforms by the Spanish
government were promised. Primo de Rivera categorically denies this;
while Pedro A. Paterno, the go-between, has made no statement at
all during the nine years that have passed since the conflicting
statements have been before the public, involving directly the
question of his own veracity and good faith. Primo de Rivera is an
ex parte witness, to be sure; but his statements upon the more vital
points involved are corroborated by the very insurgent documents on
this subject captured by the American army in 1899 and now in the
War Department at Washington. [158] Primo de Rivera says that, when
Paterno presented a paper early in the negotiations containing a full
program of reforms, [159] he rejected the document absolutely, saying
he could not discuss such matters with the insurgent chiefs, that
the Spanish government would accord such reforms as it thought wise,
and he could only interpose his good offices to make recommendations
in that respect. The copy of this document now in the War Department
at Washington shows the clauses about reform to have been crossed
out. Primo de Rivera says that, from that time forth, the negotiation
was purely on the basis of a payment to the rebel chiefs to surrender
their arms, order the insurgents in the other provinces to do the same,
and emigrate to foreign parts. The only documents bearing signatures on
both sides, either of those published at Washington or elsewhere, refer
exclusively to these particular points of money, surrender of arms,
and program of emigration, though Paterno inserted in a preliminary
of the final contract on these subjects a clause as to reposing
confidence in the Spanish government to "satisfy the desire of the
Filipino people." [160] Primo de Rivera recommended the transaction to
his government for one reason, expressly because it would "discredit
[desprestigiando] the chiefs selling out and emigrating." [161]

The first proposition of the insurgents was for 3,000,000 pesos; Primo
de Rivera acceded, under authority from Madrid, to 1,700,000 pesos;
and the total sum named in the contract signed on December 14, 1897, is
800,000 pesos. When Aguinaldo and his twenty-seven companions reached
Hongkong, they received 400,000 pesos and never any more. Though
really looking at it as a bribe, the Spanish government had consented
to the money payment ostensibly on the ground of indemnity to widows,
orphans, and those who had suffered property losses by the war, and
to provide support for the insurgent chiefs abroad. That it was the
idea of at least some of the insurgent leaders that the money was
to be divided between them is shown by a protest signed by eight
of those who remained behind to secure the surrender of more arms
than the paltry number of two hundred and twenty-five turned over at
Biak-na-bató, appealing to Primo de Rivera for "their share." [162]
The latter says he turned over to these men and Paterno the 200,000
pesos of the second payment (the actual disposition of which is
unknown [163]); and that he turned over the remaining 200,000 pesos
to Governor-General Augustín in April, 1898, when it was evident that
peace had not been assured, after all. As to the remaining 900,000
pesos which Primo de Rivera had authority to pay, but which did not