The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898; Volume 46, 1721-1739 / Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century

THE FRIAR VIEWPOINT

The truth in this matter. If the means are sufficient and efficacious, the ends will be obtained. Uniformity in the method.

There are matters of importance so transcendental in the progressive evolution of peoples, and which determine in so efficacious a manner the greater or less future and civilization of those peoples, that they cannot be less than regarded by men who govern with the most profound attention and persevering study, converting them into the object of their studies, of their zeal, and of their energies. Perhaps nothing occupies the foremost place with more reason and right than education. The desire of happiness is as natural as it is legitimate in man. That desire is so noble and elevated an aspiration, and man feels that desire in the bottom of his soul with so irresistible a force than one may say without any kind of exaggeration, that even unconsciously he is dragged along by it. Hence, every new step that he takes, every ray of light that he perceives, every unknown point that he discovers in that road, induces one to believe that it is one factor more for arrival at a safe port, one greater facility which he acquires for the attainment of that end. And since that end in man cannot be more than the highest end, hence it is that he feels in an invincible manner the necessity of its possession, which is that which constitutes the highest perfection of that privileged creature [man]. Now, then, in order to attain possession of that end, it is necessary to know it, and in order that it may have a practical result, one must know the means which conduce to it, and perfect them so that the result may be complete. Most marvelously is this trust filled by the teaching which has as its direct object the education and perfection of the faculties of man, which are the only means conducive to the knowledge and possession of God—the supreme end, hence, the highest happiness of man. Education is the object and noble finality of teaching, the unfolding and perfection of the faculties of man, both in the physical order, and in the intellectual, esthetic, and moral; to develop the physical energies, producing the most perfect health and robustness of the body, to extend the horizons of the intelligence, the greater number of points of knowledge conducing to the discovery of truth proportioning it; increasing and ennobling man’s sentiments for beauty, and directing the will along the road of the good and the just, and removing it from their opposites, the evil and unjust. It is the primordial object and noblest end of every man who governs to endeavor to broaden, extend, and perfect instruction among the peoples under the control of his government and direction.

It is the most sacred duty of every gubernatorial authority to excogitate and choose the most suitable, safe, and correct methods of teaching for the attainment of so sacred an end. It cannot be even doubted that the authors of our traditional legislation for the Indias had other motives than the accuracy and rectitude in the creation of the laws concerning instruction, or other primordial end in it than the knowledge and adoration of God, the supreme end of man on earth; and as a means, the knowledge of the divine mysteries, of the revealed truths, in a word, of the Catholic religion, among the human beings of the New World. Rapid without doubt was the progress which the Catholic faith made in the immense territories of that unknown world, notwithstanding the interminable series of difficulties which our fervent missionaries, covetous to gain souls for God, were to meet in the evangelization of so many races and so numerous peoples divided by so diverse languages, which were so many other obstacles superable by their strong desire and never-satisfied zeal. In order to conquer those difficulties, and that that zeal might be more productive for the cause of religion, and more advantageous for the believers, fifty-eight years after the immortal ColÓn had discovered this world full of marvels, the first law was dictated in regard to the creation of schools for the teaching of Castilian, signed by Carlos V while governing at Valladolid, June 7, and reproduced July 17, 1550. Such is law xviii, tÍtulo i, book vi, which reads as follows.

“Having made particular examination in regard to whether, even in the most perfect language of the Indians, the ministers of our holy Catholic faith can explain themselves well and fittingly, we have recognized that that is impossible without committing great discords and imperfections; and although chairs are founded where the priests who shall instruct the Indians may be taught, this is not a fitting remedy because of the great diversity of languages; and having resolved that it will be advantageous to introduce the Castilian language: we command teachers to be given to the Indians, in order to teach those who wish of their own accord to study it, in the way which will be of least trouble and without expense to them. It has appeared that this can be well done by the sacristans, as in the villages of these kingdoms they teach reading, writing, and the Christian doctrine.”

But one can immediately understand that teachers who taught without any charge, who might be sacristans, and Indians who wished to study voluntarily, were not fitting factors to attain the most praiseworthy end which the legislator proposed to himself; and in fact it could not have given the desired result since eighty-four years afterwards, law v, tÍtulo xiii, book i, was issued by Felipe IV, without indicating the means, in Madrid, March 2, 1634, and repeated two years afterward, on November 4, which reads as follows: “We ask and request the archbishops and the bishops to provide and order the curas and missionaries of the Indians in their dioceses, by the use of the mildest means, to arrange and direct that all the Indians be taught the Spanish language, and in that language the Christian doctrine, so that they may become more capable of understanding the mysteries of our holy Catholic faith and so that other advantages may be gained for their salvation, and follow in their government and method of life.” The fulfilment of both laws [was] recorded by the royal decree of March 20, 1686,1 and those laws were at the same time extended to Filipinas, since the desire of the legislator was the same in both parts, namely, “to consult upon what is the most efficacious means for destroying the idolatries incurred at present by the majority of the Indians as was true at the beginning of their conversion, etc.,” as is said in the above-mentioned royal decree. From that decree one infers a wholesome instruction for Filipinas; but it is no wonder that the Filipinos have not learned Castilian, and that they abandon their primitive superstitions with difficulty, when the Americans of greater capacity than they, with greater means, with a powerful and constant stream of Christian civilization, carried by numerous missionaries, and a greater European emigration, after two centuries did not know the Castilian speech, and the majority were sunk in their idolatries, a thing which does not occur with the masses of the Filipinos, although they are not a little superstitious, a quality exhibited in more or less degree by numerous peoples of Europa after so many centuries of illumination.

For the same end and filled with the same spirit was issued the royal decree of April 16, 1770, which, like the preceding one, was also extended to Filipinas, as were also other later ones, all of which were animated by the most Christian zeal, so that the Indians might learn better the mysteries and doctrinal points of the Catholic religion, for the easier and surer salvation of their souls. Without danger of taking from these laws any valuable data, in accordance with the necessity which counsels it, let us reduce ourselves for the moment to a review of the orders given directly for Filipinas which are found in the celebrated ordinances, first in those given by Corcuera in the year 1642, revised by Cruzat in 1696, and added to by their successors. Among them is one, the 52d, of Governor-general Solis, marquis of Obando, dated October 19, 1752. Among other things that ordinance says: “Through my desires of aiding with the greatest exactness the spiritual and temporal welfare of those vassals, supplying them with all the means of acquiring and consolidating it, I have resolved to order, as by the present I do order and command, said governors, corregidors, alcaldes-mayor, and other justices of these islands, that exactly and punctually, and without interpretation or opinion, they give and cause to be given the most opportune measures, so that in the villages of their districts they demand, establish, and found, from this day forward, schools where the children of the natives and other inhabitants of their districts may be educated and taught (in primary letters in the Castilian or Spanish language), seeing to it earnestly and carefully that they study, learn, and receive education in that language and not in that of the country or any other. They shall work for its greater increase, extension, and intelligence, without consenting or allowing ... this determination to be violated, or schools of any other language to be erected or started, under penalty of five hundred [pesos?] applied in the manner decreed by this superior government.... For that purpose, and so that it may have the fullest effect, I revoke, annul, and declare of no use and value ordinance 29, which declares that Spaniards shall not be allowed to live in or remain in the villages of the Indians; for in the future they must be admitted to such residence. The alcaldes-mayor and justices shall see to it that such people live in a Christian manner and according to the commands of God; and they shall arrest, punish, and exile those who fail in this matter. This is to be understood of the schools which are to be supported and maintained at the cost of the villages themselves and of the funds which the communal treasuries shall have assigned for those of the languages of the country (for as abovesaid the latter must cease and shall cease in proportion as the schools for teaching in the Castilian language shall be built and established); and for the attainment of the duties and posts of governors and other honorable military posts it shall be a necessary qualification that those on whom they are conferred be the most capable, experienced, and clever in being able to read, talk, and write, in the above-mentioned Spanish language, and such posts must be given to such persons and not to others,” etc.

In accordance with all that which is faithfully quoted in regard to this particular, is ordinance 25 of the zealous RaÓn in 1768, which reads as follows: “As it is very important that there be good schoolteachers for the teaching of the Indians, and as it is advisable for them to learn the Spanish language in order to know the Christian doctrine better, and since the salary of one peso and one cabÁn of rice, which it is the custom to give them from the communal funds each month, is very little, it is ordered that the alcaldes, with the intervention of the curas, or missionary ministers, make a computation of the salary which can be given in each village (in proportion to its tributes) to the schoolteacher, giving an account thereof to the superior government for its approval.... For, with the increase of salaries, better teachers can be had and the end of law xviii, tÍtulo i, book vi, as will be related hereafter, can be better attained.” This is fulfilled at greater length in ordinance or article 93, reading as follows: “In accordance with section 52 of the ancient ordinances, and 17 of those drawn up by governor Don Pedro Manuel de ArandÍa, it is strictly and rigorously ordered the alcaldes-mayor, and asked and petitioned from the father ministers, that each one, in so far as concerns him, shall apply his zeal to the end that in all the villages there should be one schoolmaster well instructed in the Spanish language, and that he teach the Indians to read and write in it, the Christian doctrine, and other prayers, as is ordered by the king, our sovereign, in his royal decree of June 5, 1754, because of the most serious disadvantages which result by doing the contrary to the religion and the state. For the attainment of so important teaching, the salary of each teacher shall be paid punctually from the communal funds, namely, one peso and one cabÁn of rice per month. Permission is given to the above-mentioned alcaldes-mayor so that, in the large villages and in proportion to the capacity of said teachers, they may increase their salary by giving information thereof to the superior government for its approval, as is stated in section 25. The above-mentioned teachers shall be informed that, if they do not teach the Indians, and instruct them in the Spanish language, they will be condemned to make restitution of the pay which they shall have received, and shall be deprived of holding any post in these islands and punished at the will of said alcaldes. The latter, especially in their visit to the villages of their provinces, shall investigate with particular care the observance of the abovesaid, and shall inform the superior government.... It is to be noted that for any slight omission of the alcaldes in regard to this most important point, they shall incur the indignation of the superior tribunals, and shall be rigorously punished and fined in proportion to their lack of zeal and fulfilment of this section; for experience has taught that for particular ends and unjust laxity or neglect they have proceeded hitherto with little zeal and with total want of observance of law xviii, tÍtulo i, book vi, which is corroborated and confirmed by many royal decrees and by the abovesaid sections of the ordinances preceding that law.”

Since we are decided to make an exact and complete adjustment of accounts treating of this matter, we transcribe here, in order to attain that, whatever has to do most especially with both ancient and modern legislation, in order to remove at once the mask under which the detractors of the religious orders have been masquerading, blaming them openly for the backward state of the Filipino villages, for their deficiency in education and especially for the ignorance of Castilian, without other proof than the completely gratuitous assertion that those religious orders have constantly opposed the development of education and, in a resolute manner, the study of Castilian.2

In order to prove this supposed opposition, they adduce as an argument (which is negative, and, consequently, of no value) the fact that although the teaching (and with it the Castilian speech) was ordered from the beginning of the conquest with evident insistence and under heavy penalties, the established laws have not given the abundant results which were to be desired. Now, because those results have not been obtained, are the missionaries to blame? The supposition made in order to hurl this crimination upon the religious orders is not serious nor can it be cited by persons who esteem themselves as sensible and reasonable beings.

Before that criminal supposition and that groundless crimination it is fitting to ask: “Were those laws, given with the most just desire and the most holy finality, as is that of christianizing those idolatrous souls and guaranteeing them in the faith of Jesus Christ, suitable for the production of the desired ends? Were the means, which were proposed in those laws, conducive to the end which was being prosecuted? Nay, more, granting the sufficiency of those laws and the propriety of those means for the American districts, since those laws were given for them, was it within the bonds of reason to adapt them with equal propriety and sufficiency to Filipinas?” If it is impossible to grant the first, it is evidently impossible to assent to the second as certain.

It has been shown that law xviii was given in the year 1550, or fifty-eight years after the discovery of the New World. One hundred and forty-two years later that order was repeated by means of law v, of 1634, the fulfilment of which was recorded in 1686, or one hundred and ninety-four years after our arrival on the American coasts. Those laws had been, if not barren, of little fruit, whenever the cause for repeating that law was to banish the idolatries in which the majority of the Indians are now sunk, as they were at the beginning of the conversions. How can that development in instruction be acquired “with Indians who would like to learn, when taught by teachers without pay, and which, so that the teachers might not cost anything, could be well done by the sacristans,” who would immediately be Indians like the pupils, doubtless stupid in learning and incapable of teaching the Catholic doctrine in Castilian? Now then, if those laws were inefficient in the American districts, a country more compact, could they be more efficient in Filipinas, which is composed of many islands; could those means exercise more influence on the intellects of those islanders who are of less capacity than the Americans, and the latter were directly invaded by a constant and powerful stream of civilization, catechised and administered by a numerous pleiad of missionaries when the islands of Urdaneta and Legazpi did not receive more than the residues or crumbs, which, both of the former and the latter, came by way of Acapulco—in America with an invader who carried almost all before him, and who tended by his number to cause the pure primitive race to disappear, exactly the contrary to what occurs in the Filipino country, where the native race, in an imposing mass, is above all absorption, this idea being sufficient only so that not even with very many means more powerful than those hitherto placed in practice can they attain the effects which the laws demand?

Consequently, the laws were not adaptable to that country for which they were not made, and not even was that country known when law xviii was given. Neither have the means or factors which have been put in play since, been in relation, even remote relation, with the ends whose attainment is desired.

On one hand, the great scarcity of missionaries scattered among so numerous islands (each one occupying a most extensive territory, with scarcely any communication [with one another], with a work both arduous and multiple, in all the orders, especially in the learning of so diverse and most difficult languages, and the adaptation of these languages in regard to their characters, phonetics, pronunciation, etc., to our characters, spelling, etc., a knowledge attained afterward by prolonged and constant phonological and philological studies), abandoned to their own resources and energies, since it is known that for many dozens of leguas there was no other Spaniard than the missionary, occupied preferably in the administration of sacraments and evangelization and the conservation of so numerous fields of Christendom; on the other hand the means which the laws granted them, entirely null and void, as has been shown, as is also the result obtained by the last royal decree of 1686, by which it is newly ordered “that schools be established and teachers appointed for the Indians, in order to teach the Castilian language to those who would voluntarily wish to learn it, in the way that may be of less trouble to them and without expense;” and with this clause of voluntary instruction, without trouble and without expense, since the natives were scattered in so many and so distant villages or reductions, and had no teachers, not since they knew the Castilian language, but that they could not even know it except by a rudimentary method in their own language: was there any possibility even that that beautiful language whose knowledge would have freed the missionary from so many sorrows, from so painful labor, from so continual anxieties as the detractors of those orders cannot even imagine, could be taught? Notwithstanding, it will be proved by unassailable documents that those missionaries with some useless laws, most of them deficient, have obtained what no one else could have obtained. Those religious orders, then, have not been the enemies, but the great friends, of instruction. They Have not been opposed, nor only slight lovers of its development, but decided well-wishers, and even enthusiasts in its greater development; and in order to achieve that, the missionaries and parish priests have done that which very few, perhaps no one, could have done: namely, to create schools wherever they preached the gospel; to support them by all means, and even pay them from their scant savings; to bring to a head all classes of philological work; to compile methods, grammars, innumerable dictionaries, books of doctrine, of doctrinal discourses, and many others which besides illuminating the understanding, strengthened the souls in the faith, in accordance with the spirit of those laws.

Furthermore, do the detractors of the religious believe that, if the alcaldes, corregidors, and justices, threatened with very severe penalties by those laws, were convinced of the fact that the missionaries were opposed to the teaching in that part which was viable or feasible, they would not have used their authority to punish, correct, or prevent, that opposition? The ordinances above copied are a copy of the laws given for America, as already mentioned, and suffer in great measure from their peculiarity and lack of application, especially in what regards the teaching of Castilian.

It was in every point impossible that, with the elements possessed by the alcaldes-mayor, corregidors, and governors, they could have observed ordinance 52 of the marquis of Obando. That ordinance contains orders that are positively impracticable and even contradictory. On one side it is ordered “that schools be erected where the children of the natives may be educated (in primary letters in the Castilian language) seeing to it that in this language and not in that of the country, or in any other, they study, be taught, and educated, and that schools of another language be not erected or started under penalty of 500 [pesos?] applied at the will of this superior government.” This is ordered absolutely and without any limitation in immense districts where there is not a single school of Castilian, nor methods, nor grammars, nor dictionaries, nor any other method of teaching that language, nor teachers to teach it, nor scarcely any Indians who have been able to learn it, as they have not had any great familiarity with Spaniards who were prohibited by ordinance 29 from residing in the villages of the Indians. This happened in the year 1752. That prohibition was suppressed by the above-mentioned ordinance 52. By the same ordinance was prescribed the quota which the communal funds were to pay to the teachers, which makes one see immediately the contradiction of the finality of the preceding order with that stating “because as abovesaid, these languages must cease and shall cease in proportion as schools for the Castilian language shall be erected and established;” the only ones who were ordered to pay.

It results, therefore, quite evidently, both from the context of the latter ordinance and from ordinance 17 of ArandÍa, and 25 and 93 of RaÓn, that in the Filipino provinces and districts there were no means of establishing instruction in Castilian; and that the only schools which were ordered to be paid from the communal funds were those which should be established with that instruction. Consequently, neither the alcaldes and other justices threatened with very severe penalties, and “the anger of the superior tribunals” nor the teachers “condemned to make restitution of the pay which they had received,” and punished according to the order of the alcaldes, could make in their promises and villages those laws, given in the Peninsula and in the official residence of the first authority of the islands, viable or practicable. How many laws are there which are very good and of elevated ends, but barren and unpractical, as they lack practical meaning! However, in the midst of so many contradictions and difficulties, in the midst of a work so toilsome and without rest, in spite of the penury and scarcity which God alone can, and knows how to, appreciate, in constant struggle with the elements and the Moros, having to create it and conserve it all, it can be no less than contemplated with pride by every good Spaniard that those heroic and humble sons of EspaÑa attended from the beginning of the conquest to teaching with a zeal worthy of all praise.

A precious testimony of this is that mentioned by the erudite father AugustÍn MarÍa, O.S.A. in his Historia del Insigne convento de San Pablo de Manila [i.e., History of the glorious convent of San Pablo in Manila], which is preserved unedited in the archives of said convent, when he says: “In the same year (1571) was founded this convent and church of San Pablo, which is the chief one of this province, the capitular house for novitiates, and of studies in grammar, arts, theology, and canons for Indians and creoles, until the Jesuits came and opened public schools.” Passing by those teaching centers created in Manila by the religious orders scarcely yet born in those islands, omitting the introduction of printing, a powerful means for progress, by those orders, some decades after their establishment in the islands, and limiting ourselves only to the creation of schools and the progress of primary instruction, we do not fear to affirm that before our legislators occupied themselves in giving laws for teaching in Filipinas, laws had been proclaimed in the assemblies of the religious orders. Before the famous ordinances of Obando and of RaÓn had been published, the printing houses of the said orders had already printed works entitled: PrÁctica del Ministerio que siguen los religiosos del orden de N. P. S. AgustÍn en Philippinas [i.e., Practice of the ministry followed by the religious of the order of our father St. Augustine in Philippinas]; and the PrÁctica de pÁrrocos dominicana [i.e., Practice of the Dominican parish priest]. Before treating of one or the other it is a duty of historical justice to discard the two above-cited laws given for the New World, the first in 1550, fifteen years before the conquest of Filipinas, and the second in 1634, and both recorded in the royal decree of 1686,3 given likewise for AmÉrica and all extended to the archipelago of Legazpi. Now then, much before those last dates, the Augustinian order in its tenth provincial chapter, held May 9, 1596, in which the reverend father, Fray Lorenzo de LeÓn, was elected provincial, among the acts and resolutions which it established, which are capitular laws, compulsory on all the religious of the province, was the following: “It is enjoined upon all the ministers of Indians, that just as the schoolboys are taught to read and write, they be taught also to speak our Spanish language, because of the great culture and profit which follow therefrom.” That document was providentially conserved in the secretary’s office of the convent of San Pablo in Manila, notwithstanding the devastation which that convent suffered and the loss of precious documents during the English invasion.

They did not cease to hope for the abundant fruits which resulted from such wise rules as the above, and the schools were created and continued to increase in a remarkable manner. In order that there might be uniformity in the method of teaching, in the Augustinian provincial chapter, held in Manila in August 1712, the practice of the ministry prescribed in the [provincial] chapter of April 19, 1698, was ordered to be observed in definite terms. That was directed even in the chapter held May 17, 1716, in which it was ordered by minute 21 that the provincial elect, reverend father Fray TomÁs Ortiz “should make a PrÁctica del Ministerio” [i.e., Practice of the Ministry] and after it was made to send it through the provinces, “so that all the religious might observe it;” he did that, signing the circular which accompanied said PrÁctica, at Tondo, August 10, of the abovesaid year. From this PrÁctica, we copy the following paragraph in regard to the schools: “Number 79. Not only by a decree of his Majesty, but also by his own obligation, the minister must use all diligence and care in promoting and conserving the schools for children in the villages. And when he encounters difficulty in this, it will be advisable, and many times necessary, for him to make use of the alcaldes-mayor, so that they may obtain by their influence what the ministers could not obtain in this matter by their own efforts. And if the parents refuse to send their children, the ministers shall also be able to inform the alcaldes-mayor [i.e., sub-alcaldes] of it in order that the latter may force them to do it. And above all, the minister ought to be very happy in contriving to conserve the schools, and in suffering with patience the great resistance which is found among the natives to the schools. It will be well to care for them with some expenses for their conservation, for they are very useful and necessary.” Beyond this valuable paragraph are prescribed the days for school and the hours and exercises in which the children are to be employed.

This same PrÁctica del Ministerio remarkably increased by its author, the reverend father Fray TomÁs Ortiz, was printed in “Manila, in the convent of Nuestra SeÑora de los Angeles [i.e., Our Lady of the Angels], in the year 1731,” and we copy from it, for the eternal and most valuable testimony in proof of our assertion, the principal paragraph, which reads as follows:

“158. The father ministers, in fulfilment of their duty, are obliged to procure, by all means and methods possible, and, if necessary, by means of royal justices, that all the villages, both capitals and visitas, shall have schools, and that all the boys attend them daily. If the natives of the visitas refuse or are unable to support schools, the boys of those visitas shall be obliged to go to the schools of the capitals, for in addition to the schools being so necessary as are attested by ecclesiastical and secular laws, the absence of schools occasions many spiritual and temporal losses, as is taught by experience. Among others, one is the vast ignorance suffered in much of what is necessary for confession in order that they may become Christians and live like rational people.

“In order to be able to conquer the difficulties which some generally find in maintaining schools, it is necessary for the father ministers to procure and solicit two things: one is that ministers be assigned with salaries suitable for their support; the other is that the children have primers or books for reading and paper for writing. When these two things cannot be obtained by other means than at the cost of the father ministers, they must not therefore excuse themselves from giving what is necessary for the said two things. For, besides the fact that they will be doing a great alms thereby, they will also obtain great relief in the teaching of the boys, and will avoid many spiritual and temporal losses of the villages, to which by their office they are obliged. And if the end cannot be obtained without the means, so also the schools cannot be obtained without any expense, or the teaching of youth without the schools, or the spiritual welfare of souls without the teaching, etc. For the same reasons respectively, endeavor shall be made to maintain schools for little girls, which shall be held in the houses of the teachers where they shall learn to read and pray, for which great prudence is necessary.”

Another very notable paragraph, in which are prescribed the days for school, attendance, method, subjects, etc., follows this paragraph which is worthy of the highest praise. That paragraph imposes the obligation on the children of great practical sense, that after “mass is finished (which they were to hear every day) they shall kiss the father’s hand. By this diligence the latter can ascertain those who do not attend, and force them to attend, etc.”

In order that one may see the rare unanimity existing among the religious corporations in a matter as transcendental as is that of education, it is very fitting to transcribe here some paragraphs of the instructions which the reverend father, Fray Manuel del RÍo, provincial at that time of the Dominicans, gave to his religious under date of August 31, 1739, which were printed in Manila in the same year, and which we have entitled PrÁctica del pÁrroco dominicana [i.e., Practice of the Dominican parish priest] as the valuable copy which we possess has no title page. It reads as follows:

“The king, our sovereign, orders that there be schools in all the villages of the Indians in order to teach them reading, writing, and the doctrine. In those schools the ministers must work zealously and earnestly, as it is a thing which is of so great importance for the education and spiritual gain of their souls. Schools shall also be established in the visitas, especially if they are large or distant from the capital, and in those visitas which are furnished with no schoolteacher because they are small or near the capital, the lads shall be obliged to attend the school at the capital. All the lads, whether chief or timaoas, must attend the school, and they, and their parents or relatives must be obliged to do so, so that they may not be exempted from that attendance by any excuse or pretext, except the singers, who will be taught to read and write in the school of the cantors. For the more exact fulfilment of this, a list shall be made of those who ought to attend the school, and a copy of it shall be given to the said teacher. This shall be read frequently in the school, noting those who fail in order to punish them.

“In order to maintain said schools and the attendance of the lads therein without the excuses which some generally offer of not having primers, pens, or paper for writing, it is necessary for the minister to solicit the one who has those things for sale in the village, for those who can buy them. Those who find it impossible to do so shall be furnished by the minister with those articles by way of alms, and in that, besides the merit acquired by this virtue, he will gather the fruit of the welfare and the gain of their souls.

“Girls’ schools shall also be formed by causing them to go to the house of their teacher, so that they may learn to read and sew, and also learn the doctrine. But they shall not be obliged to attend church daily, as are the boys, but only on Saturday or any other day assigned for the reciting of the rosary and the examination in the doctrine.”

It is to be noted that both provincials, as well as their successors, imposed on their subjects the obligation to faithfully observe what is prescribed in the PrÁctica and respective instructions, which the ministers of the Lord fulfilled with especial solicitude and constancy, since only in this way could they gather the most copious fruits which we all admire.

The unity of thought and action which the religious corporations had in a matter so primordial as is teaching is also to be noted. Evidently it is to be inferred from those beautiful periods that the religious were trying to pay the teachers, having recourse even to the alcaldes when that was necessary; and when that could not be obtained they themselves paid the teacher the fruit of his labors as well as supplying also the children with everything necessary for their instruction, such as primers, books, papers, pens, etc. For that, no quota was put in the budget, since, as is seen, that most essential datum is not mentioned in the laws, ordinances, and royal decrees above given. It is also to be noted that, in the rules above cited, there is no mention of other than boys’ schools, but none for girls, while all were alike considered, both of those of the capital or villages and those of the barrios, with an equal vigilance by our missionaries, who from the first, established compulsory attendance as absolutely indispensable, in contradiction to the old laws, in which was noted the tendency to liberty or non-compulsion, as is inferred from the royal decree of November 5, 1782,4 given for Charcas (MÉjico) and extended to Filipinas confirmed by the law of June 11, 1815, which cites it in its two extremes.

In this way those humble religious worked out the laws as much as possible, although it cost them much, by rectifying what was not viable and by supplying the deficiencies of those laws, especially in the matters pertaining to the salaries of the teachers, and payment for school supplies, which, on account of the scarcity of funds from the treasury, the legislature was compelled to establish as is established in this last royal decree above cited: “That, for the salary of teachers, the products of foundations, where there shall be any, be applied in the first place, and for the others, the products of the property of the community, in accordance with the terms of the laws.” But since the foundations, in case there were any, existed only in the capitals, which were at the same time the episcopal residence, and the communal funds were in general exhausted, it was the same thing as determining that the parish priests would continue to pay the expenses from their poor living, or find some means which would give that so desired and difficult result. This penury of the treasury which was felt equally in EspaÑa and in Filipinas obliged his Majesty to extend to these islands the royal decree of October 20, 1817, which reads as follows:

“The existing state of exhaustion of my royal treasury does not permit that so great a sum be set aside for the endowment of these schools as would be necessary for so important an object; but the convents of all the religious orders scattered throughout my kingdoms may in great measure supply this impossibility....” There was no need to put this royal decree in force in the Filipinas, since, in the majority of the convents or parish houses, schools for boys had already been established in their lower part, and those for girls in the houses of the women teachers, and other houses made for that purpose. It is but right to note how much the missionary always labored for the education of the woman whose better gifts he recognized always. He created numerous schools for her instruction, and paid for them from his living, quite contrary to the total inattention which the administration paid to the schools and teachers for girls, until the regulations of December 20, 1863 were formulated, the eighth article of which orders that “there shall be a boys’ school and another school for girls in every village, whatever its number of souls.”

Article 2 of these regulations,5 quite distinct from the path of the ancient legislation, recognized, in accordance with the conduct and laws of the religious orders, the necessity of establishing compulsion in primary teaching; and firm in this principle, it ordered that “the primary instruction should be compulsory for all the natives, to the degree that the inattendance of the child might be penalized by virtue of art. 2, with the fine of from one-half to two reals.” Neither is the legislation exclusive with relation to the study of Castilian, as is seen by the context of its art. 3; it ordains education gratis to the poor by art. 4; and the well-to-do shall pay the teacher a moderate monthly fee, which shall be prescribed by the governor of each province, after conferring with the parish priest and gobernadorcillo. Paper, copybooks, ink, and pens shall be given free to all the children by the teacher, who, at the proper time, shall receive for this service one duro per month, for every child who writes, in accordance with the ruling made by a decree of the superior government, February 16, 1867. Very suitable measures were to be taken, all in accord with the action of the parish priest, in order not to give any occasion for fraud. That was a very well taken resolution, for it stimulated the zeal of the teacher, who received on this account a sum not to be despised, which, together with the quota of the well-to-do children and the monthly pay which he received, according to art. 22, consisting of 12, 15, and 20 pesos, according as the school of which he was in charge was entrada, ascenso, or tÉrmino, he received a pay quite sufficient for his needs, enjoying in addition, by art. 23, a free dwelling-house for himself and family, and in due season the pension prescribed by art. 24.

Article 32 determines the powers of the parish priest as local supervisor, which, although they were conceded with a certain timidity, were perhaps believed to be excessive or unnecessary, and it seems its abolition was clearly agreed upon by art. 12 in declaring the municipal captain “supervisor of the schools.” This blow must be judged as a very strong one in the lofty governmental spheres of the islands, for the genuine representation of the parish priests in the villages is one of the functions most natural to their charge, both as teachers of the Catholic doctrine and ethics, and in the role of traditional supporters of the schools, although in art. 102 was established the following as an explanation to art. 12 of the decree: “Without prejudice to the supervision which belongs in the instruction to the parish priests according to the regulations of December 1863, whose powers are not at all altered, the tribunal shall watch carefully over primary instruction; shall demand the teaching of Castilian in the schools; shall oblige the inhabitants to send their children to them; and shall stimulate instruction by means of adequate examinations and rewards. Said tribunal shall place in operation the most practical means for the diffusion of the Spanish language among the inhabitants, deciding upon those means in meetings with the parish priests and the delegates of the principalÍa.”

At first view one observes the good desire which the author of said article shelters when he says that the powers conceded to the parish priest as supervisor of schools by art. 20 of the regulations of the same shall not be changed in any point, without perceiving that directly afterward it created another authority in opposition to that of the parish priest, if not with all the powers of the latter, because those which he possesses as teacher in ethics and the doctrine do not admit of transmission, yet clearly of all the others, and in them with prior rank.

It is evident that, by the context of this article, the power of “watching carefully over primary instruction” is conceded to the captain, which is identical with the first part of art. 32 of the school regulations conceded to the parish priest which reads as follows: “To visit the schools as often as possible.” This is the first part of that article, and the second part “and to see that the regulations are observed,” whose art. 3 orders that “the teachers shall have special care that the pupils have practical exercise in speaking the Castilian language,” is of identical meaning and effect with the power conceded to the captain, which declares, “he shall demand that Castilian be taught in the schools.” This power is followed by those of “he shall compel the inhabitants to send their children to the schools, and shall stimulate instruction by means of adequate examinations and rewards;” both powers similar to those which are conceded to the parish priests by the third part of said art. 32, which declares, “To promote the attendance of children at the schools.” To supplement this with the compulsory virtue, he is authorized by art. 2, explained and ratified in No. 3 of the decree of the superior government of August 30, 1867, to be able to admonish and compel parents, who are slow in sending their children to the schools, by means of fines from one-half to two reals, and that which is conceded to him, in accordance with annual examinations, by art. 13, and art. 7 of the decree of the superior government, of May 7, 1871, which declares: “The reverend and learned parish priests, accompanied by the gobernadorcillos and by the principalÍas of the villages, shall visit the schools monthly, shall hold examinations every three months, etc.” By this one can see that the parish priest conserves the first place, even in this, over the gobernadorcillo and principalÍa, by whom he is accompanied, in order to give more luster to the ceremony. That happens in no act or meeting of the present municipality, in which the parish priest has no other functions than those of intervention and counsel, included in that which is signified in the last paragraph of the above-mentioned art. 102, which says when referring to the municipal captain: “He shall put in force the most practical means for the diffusion of the Spanish language among the inhabitants, agreeing upon those means in meetings with the parish priests and delegates of the principalÍa;” and although it is established that the creation of the Sunday schools of which art. 29 of the regulations speaks, which are also of the intervention of the parish priest, as are the boys’ schools, falls completely to his share, as the means, if not sole, yet the one most efficacious and of practical application, it would result as in all the other powers which have been enumerated as conceded to the parish priest by the school regulations and to the captain by decree and municipal regulations—it would result, we say—at each step in an encounter and rivalry in which the parish priests would come out second best, for the simple reason, repeated to satiety in innumerable articles of the decree and municipal regulations, that the action of the parish priest is nothing more than supervision and counsel,6 with the added abasement that “his presence shall not be included in the number of those who shall concur in the validity of the deliberations,” as is prescribed by art. 49 of the decree and 64 of the regulations. Sad then, is, and at once, graceless, the function of the parish priest compared to the action of the captain and of the board which is executive.

It seems unnecessary to say that the action and powers of the parish priest in his duties as local supervisor of schools result in the theoretical legal sphere of action, completely null and void, and that action carried to the practical field of action exposes it to continual rivalries, numerous frictions, and even deep quarrels between two authorities, who in that, as in everything which belongs to the multiple affairs of the village, ought to be in perfect accord, as is demanded jointly by the lofty interests of religion and of the fatherland, of the spiritual welfare and of the material order and peace of the villages.

And as that duality, besides being shameful and lowering for the parish priests, is inviolable, and since by another part art. 12 of the decree and 102 of the regulations, both above cited, in the form in which they have been compiled, do not fill any need or space, as all that which is ordained therein is a repetition of what has been already decreed, there is no reason for their existence, to the evident common harm, and to the small shame of the parish priest, who deserves eternal gratitude for his labors, for his solicitude, and for the zeal which he has ever displayed, and in the midst of the greatest sacrifices, for the instruction.

Nearly three centuries, since 1565, when the first Augustinians, the companions of Legazpi and Salcedo reached the Filipinas shores, until 1863, the year in which regulations were first made for primary instruction, outlined only hitherto in numerous laws and royal decrees which it was impossible to fulfil, as is proved, for almost three centuries, we say, of bold zeal bordering on the inconceivable, of constant anxiety and watching, of unusual effort, which borders on the heroic, and with remarkable expenses never paid back, ignored by most people, and recognized and praised by very few: are these not sufficient, not only so that the liberty to exercise the noblest charge which Church and fatherland have confided to them for centuries in the teaching of the schools, which is intimately associated with the teaching in the pulpit, be conceded to the parish priests, but that also by justice illumined by gratitude, the necessary law, moral force, aid, and support, for the exercise, with perfect repose and without any impediment, and more, without any asperity and struggle, of that sacred duty so full of trouble and bitterness for him, so full of results most beneficial for religion and fatherland, be conceded to him? If, then, one desire to concede to the parish priest the position which is in justice due him in education, if there is to be granted to the missionary that which the most rudimentary gratitude urges, it is of imperious necessity that that mortifying and abasing duality be radically destroyed, for it renders useless all the energies of the parish priest supervisor, and stifles his noble and disinterested aid offered without tax for the service of the holy ideals of God and fatherland. Perhaps the parish priest is deprived of this salutary intervention because such intervention is believed unnecessary, superfluous or prejudicial to the lofty interests of the fatherland or of the well-being of the native? Today necessarily more than ever, through the deep-colored dripping of the blood of the insurrection,7 one can see with the clearness of noonday that the intervention of the parish priest ought to be established in all the orders, in order that it might again take the lofty position which was overthrown thirty years ago. Is it, perhaps, because the intervention of the parish priests will be a barrier, or obstacle, even to the sustained mark of true progress in education in general, or of Castilian in particular? But this is perfectly utopian, and even an argument now of bad taste. The religious orders enemies of true progress! Perhaps they are not the ones who in their teaching have created everything today existing in Filipinas? Are not the religious corporations those who have always formed their ranks in the vanguard of science, and today especially both in the Peninsula, and in the Magellian Archipelago, do not numerous colleges nourish with special predilection on the part of the public? As an incontestible proof of this truth, let one concede without difficulty what shall afterwards be proposed as a supplement of that existing today.

The argument of Castilian is a mythical argument of more than long standing, since it has been proved quite clearly during the preceding centuries that there has been an absolute lack of material for teaching it. The patronizing enthusiasts of the Castilian, who think it to be a panacea, so that the Indian may learn everything and obtain the social height of the peoples of another race and of other capacities, and who are persuaded, or appear to be so, that “what is of importance above all else is that the Indian learn Castilian in order to understand and to identify himself with the Castila,” are laboring under a false belief. We sincerely believe that the native, if he once come to understand the Castila in the genuine meaning of the word, will never come to identify himself with them. Thus it was explained by a distinguished man of talent, both illustrious and liberal, Don Patricio de la Escosura,8 the least monastic man in EspaÑa and the one most favorable to the friars in Filipinas of his epoch, as he himself declared in most ample phrase; a man of government and administration, who throwing aside as was proper the vulgar opinion that the friars were opposed to the teaching of Castilian, assigned in his famous Memoria on Filipinas “of the parish priests, I say, little must be expected in this matter;” in order to affirm as follows: “And by this I do not pretend, and much less, deny to them their apostolic zeal, their desire for the common good, and the importance of the services which they have lent to religion and the mother country, and are lending and may lend in the future;” and adding some years later in his prologue to the small work Recuerdos [i.e., Remembrances] which could better be entitled Infundios [i.e., Fables] of SeÑor CaÑamaque: “Let the friars in the archipelago be suppressed, and that country will soon be an entirely savage region of the globe, where there will scarcely remain a vestige or perhaps a remembrance of Spanish domination. That is a truth, for all those who know and judge impartially concerning the archipelago, of axiomatic authority.” And that truth established, he immediately asked: “Why then is not that force utilized, in whose existence and supreme efficacy all agree? Why are not the friars charged as much as possible with the responsibility of the immense authority which they in fact exercise by associating them officially and in reasonable terms with the governmental and administrative action in Filipinas?” Why? For a very simple reason. Because governments, like ministers of the crown and royal commissaries in Filipinas, like SeÑor Escosura, suffer prejudices and embrace opinions so original and vulgar as that of the opposition of the religious corporations to the teaching of Castilian, a universal panacea as abovesaid, to knowing everything, and which will enable the native to conquer every sort of obstacle; for this most clear talent, and we say it truly, caused to be based on the ignorance of Castilian “so much ignorance and so absurd superstitions at the end of three centuries, and in spite of the efforts of the Spanish legislator to civilize the Indians. So long as the Indian,” he adds, “speaks his primitive language, it is approximately impossible to withdraw him completely from his prejudices, from his superstition, erroneous ideas, and the puerilities belonging to the savage condition. So long as he understands the Castilian with difficulty, ... how can he have clear notions of his duties, and of his rights—he who cannot understand the laws more than by the medium of some interpreter?...”

What candor and how little understanding of the native, or what excess of political or party idea!

That illustrious statistician believed that the knowledge of Castilian and the unity of the language could not be in any time a favorable base for the insurrection, which was one of the contrary arguments which he was opposing, for, he was asserting in general that “neither the population through its number, nor the native race through its nature and special conditions, are here capable of independence at any time. This country is not a continent, but an archipelago. Its diverse provinces are for the greater part, distinct islands; ... and so long as there is a Spanish military marine in these waters, supposing that any serious insurrection should arise (which seems to me highly improbable) there is nothing easier than to circumscribe it to the locality in which it should be born, and consequently to stifle it in its cradle.” A few lines afterwards he says: “The Indians here, I repeat, can never become independent. They feel that also for the present, although perhaps they do not understand it; and furthermore by instinct they prefer at all times Spaniards to foreigners, on whom they look moreover with unfavorable caution.” What an illusion, and what an enormous disillusion! How great would be the deception of SeÑor Escosura if he would come to life in his grave! Without troubling us with the argument of the Castilian, or taking into account the circumstances that he lays down in regard to the multiplicity of islands which are extremely unfavorable for their defense, according to his way of thinking, what would he say now if he lifted his head and observed that the knowledge of Castilian has been considerably extended—perhaps four times as much as when he went as royal commissary to Filipinas, in order to write that Memoria; that, if not the lawyers, the men of most letters and knowledge of Castilian, the intelligent, and those of the most cultured native society, in which figures a numerous pleiad composed of advocates, physicians, pharmacists, painters, engravers, normal and elementary teachers, municipal captains, past-captains, cuadrilleros,9 and hundreds more of those who understand one another and are in the way of identifying themselves with the Castila, as SeÑor Escosura would say, are the leaders, are those who captain and direct the enormous native multitudes who are related to them in thought and action, and stimulate and spread that bloody rebellion which is spreading through all the islands like an immense spot of oil, in spite of the fact that they are so numerous and are defended by a respectable squadron; of that insurrection, which scarcely born and without arms, presents itself powerful, and armed in the greater part of LuzÓn and certain other provinces, and latent or masked in all the remaining provinces; of that insurrection which without any preamble of liberties, and of little more than two years of limited exercise of municipal autonomy, is beginning to proclaim and demand independence, and passing to active life is establishing a government and is exercising perfect dominion for more than one-half year in an entire province a few leguas from Manila, at the very foot of a strong fort and under the fire of its arsenal, in spite of the numerous squadron which touches its coasts. What would the author of that Memoria, abounding in liberties and so ample in his criticism, say? He would say much of that which he then censured in his opponents. He would ingenuously and solemnly assert in the face of the bloody panorama of so enormous hetacombs that he had been deceived, and he would even add that it is at least rash to sow the winds, which become, as a logical sequel, fatal whirlwinds to finish us; that the implanting of a certain class of reforms and liberties is a rash work; and would adduce the reason which he gave in the above-cited prologue when treating in regard to the difficulty of implanting with result in those islands “certain literary and scientific professions;” namely, “that given the physical and intellectual qualifications of their race, it would be rash to expect that they would ever compare with Europeans. The Indian learns much more readily than we do; but he forgets with the same readiness, and retrogrades to his primitive condition.” It seems impossible how a man of so clear judgment and so exact concepts in regard to persons could stumble so transcendently as is found throughout in his Memoria. How powerful is the strength of consistency. The political ideal, like the sectarian, annuls the deepest and most righteous convictions.

But let us turn backwards a piece to pick up an end not allowed to fall to chance. We said that, as a proof that the religious orders have neither now nor ever been opposed to the teaching, one would concede without difficulty what we are going to set forth as a supplement of what exists today.

It is known by all, and is demonstrated quite clearly, that the traditional laws for teaching, if admirably penetrated by the spirit, profoundly Catholic, of their epoch, were very deficient, and in no small measure impracticable in Filipinas, because they lack almost all the means indispensable for the happy attainment which legislators and missionaries ardently desired; equally notorious is it, and also demonstrated, that the absolute lack of legal rules and regulations to facilitate their obligation accentuated more strongly the deficiency of those laws. We say legal, because the few regulations that there were, and which were practiced, were those of which mention has already been made in the PrÁctica del Ministerio of 1712, circulated as was compulsory, by their provincial among the Augustinian parish priests, revised in the provincial chapter of 1716, and amplified and printed in 1731; and the Instrucciones morales y religiosas [i.e., Moral and religious Instructions],10 printed in 1739 for the use of the Dominican fathers—a lamentable lack which disappeared with the publication of the regulations of December 20, 1863.

This law which was successively perfected by numerous decrees of the superior government of the islands, especially by generals Izquierdo, GÁndara, and Weyler, who were filled with the praiseworthy desire for the teaching; this law together with the opening of the Suez Canal, which has produced a notable increase in the European population,11 and by this and by the facility of numerous communications and most valuable commercial transactions, has been an abundant fount of education and progress, which must be perfected and heightened so that what ought to be an abundant and beneficial irrigation for so valuable possessions may not be converted into a devastating torrent.

But even after this which we might call a giant’s step in the history of the Filipinas, their progress and their relations with Europa, within the islands even, very much still needs to be done. It is a fact that the coasting trade steam vessels have acquired an increase more considerable than could have been imagined twenty years ago, while the sail-coasting trade has not been diminished for this reason, but increased. But just as the maritime communications have acquired great facility, communications by land have deteriorated not a little, and the neighborhood roads of all the islands have been falling into complete neglect since the day when the days of forced labor began to be reduced, and this tax became redeemable [in money].

If the greater number of roads in good condition with their corresponding log bridges over the creeks and the simple plank over the narrow valleys are absolutely indispensable for commercial transactions, for the advisable development of primary instruction, the capital is the constant attendance of the children at the school. In order that this may be attained, it is quite necessary to construct those roads, for in their majority they have no existence, and where they have fallen into neglect they must be made passable alike for the dry season and for the rainy season, prohibiting and rigorously fining the owners of the adjacent fields who cut the roads in order to make fields or runnels of water for the same. This being done, it is equally necessary that the small barrios and isolated groups of dwellings be grouped together, thus forming large barrios; or those already existing be united in such manner that they form districts of seventy to eighty citizens as a minimum.

Not a little labor and repeated orders will it cost to form these groups, since it is known that the native feels as no one else the homesickness for the forest, an effect perhaps of his humid temperament, perhaps the reminiscence of his primitive condition; and when this is done, to establish municipal schools for both sexes in all the barrios which consist of more than one hundred citizens, or uniting two for this purpose, which are distant more than three kilometers from the central schools or from the village, which is the distance demanded by the law for the compulsory attendance of the children. These Schools, with the necessary conditions of ventilation, capacity, and security, ought to be erected by the respective municipalities, in accordance with the simple lithograph plans which must be furnished gratis by the body of civil engineers which shall be conserved, as was formerly done, in the archives of said tribunals, in order that they might be used when the time came. The men and women teachers who shall be normal [graduates] shall have the option of petitioning these posts, and if they should not be supplied with them, the former teacher may petition them under the condition of capacity, which they shall prove by a preceding examination held before the provincial board of primary instruction, in case that they shall not already have stood a prior examination. Both of them shall be suitably paid according to circumstances, and that quota shall be completed with another small particular quota from each well-to-do child.

It is of great convenience for the ends of fitness, and especially of morality, that men or women teachers shall not be appointed either in the villages or in the barrios of the villages, without a previous report of the parish priests of their native towns, to the effect that they do not fall short of the age of twelve years, and naming the villages where they shall have been resident; and that the parish priests have the power of suspending them, according to the tenor of the second authorization of art. 32 of the school regulations and the superior decree of August 30, 1867, informing the provincial supervisor for the definitive sentence, if this last measure of rigor shall have been used; naming or recommending, according to the cases of casual or definitive suspension, the substitute with his respective pay.

An unequivocal proof that the religious corporations not only are not trying to escape the instruction, but that they are promoting it with all their strength, is that they believe and sustain both in Manila and in the provinces, numerous schools and refuges for both sexes. And so that so praiseworthy desires, as the said corporations are found to possess in this matter, may have a happy outcome, and so that the provinces may reckon an abundant seminary of the youth of both sexes, which in due time shall be converted into an intelligent and capable staff of teachers, which shall have as its base morality and unconditional love for EspaÑa, who shall cause those two sacred loves—love of virtue and love of fatherland—to spring up in the hearts of their pupils, not only should the above-mentioned corporations be empowered but also furnished all the means of establishing normal schools for men and women teachers in the principal provinces of the archipelago, under the direction and care of those corporations, in order by this means to assure the Catholic and social education, which carry with themselves a deep and abiding love for EspaÑa.

No one, in better conditions than the religious orders, who by means of the parish priests are at the front of the villages, can proceed with more accuracy and knowledge of the cause in the selection of the youth who shall people those schools, for no one, better than the parish priests, has a more perfect knowledge of the moral and intellectual conditions of those youth and of their inclinations and ancestral inheritance from their forbears, the absolutely necessary factors for obtaining the beneficent result which it is desired to obtain, namely, the most complete moral, intellectual, and truly conceived patriotic regeneration, profoundly disturbed by a not small number of causes, which rapidly developing within the envenomed surrounding of masonry, and powerfully pushed forward by that impious sect, have produced grievous days for EspaÑa and Filipinas, in which the precious blood of their sons has been abundantly shed, causing thereby enormous expenses to the Peninsula, and a half century of retrogression for the islands, together with the infamous blot of the highest ingratitude of its rebellious sons. Now more than ever is this means of regeneration demanded.

And we faithfully believe that that means of regeneration ought to be placed in practice as soon as possible, the government removing on its part every kind of obstacle, especially of documents and information. That is the point on which these initiatives are wrecked, or are indefinitely detained, as happened to the zealous and untiring SeÑor Gainza in regard to his school of Santa Isabel—the normal school for women teachers in Nueva CÁceres—who after having struggled for a long time in the offices of the superior government, of administration, instruction, and engineers, was compelled to resolve his cherished project by presenting it personally to Queen DoÑa Isabel, who fully and kindly acceded to his supplication, and even thus with the valuable license of her Majesty communicated in due form, that eminent prelate still met all sorts of difficulties, from the provincial chief, which only disappeared with his departure from the same. In order that these labors might have a homogeneous result and those normal schools respond efficaciously to the concept of the fatherland, it is not advisable that the instruction in them be given by others than Spanish corporations, and consequently, by Spanish religious, who are the ones who can really impress that love, prohibiting, as a consequence of this standard, the teaching of the schools already established, be they private or not, from being given in any other language than the Spanish, or in ordinary conversation, that any other language than the Castilian be used, without this at all preventing other languages from being taught.

For the better order, progress, and homogeneity, it is indispensable that one bear in mind the capacity of the natives, in order to assign the list of studies which they are to take. That must be proportioned in all institutions to their nature, and those studies, as is evident, must be suppressed, which either give an unadvisable or useless result, because of being outside the intellectual sphere of the native. Still more evident is the necessity of the instruction for the natives obeying a uniform plan of method and social education, in order to avoid ill feeling among the teaching communities, and peculiarities and comparisons, which by themselves are always odious, and which cause not a little mischief among the natives, who, if they are not distinguished by their character and reasoning, yet are by nature very observant, and lay great stress on all external details, so that without troubling themselves in seeking the cause, they form their opinion or standard; and from that time on they will not be inclined toward those things which the masons and separatists are pursuing with the greatest of rancor by finding in those same things more obstacles for the attainment of their evil purposes.

The list of studies, as well as the method of teaching and of education will be the first and immediate end of the studies, opinion, and formula which the Superior Board of Public Instruction shall bear to its conclusion with singular interest. This board shall form the consequent schedules and above-mentioned methods, which it shall subject to the approbation of the general government of the archipelago.

The abovesaid superior board may be composed of the following gentlemen: the archbishop of Manila; the intendant of the public treasury; the president of the Audiencia; civil governor of Manila; secretary of the superior government; one councilor of administration; the provincials of the Augustinians, Franciscans, Dominicans, and Recollects; the rectors of the university, of the normal school, and of the seminary. To it shall be submitted the revision of the present schedules, both for the normal schools and in so far as the schedules of the studies of primary and secondary and higher education need to be revised; and at the same time the method of teaching and of education for both sexes, the execution of which, as I have just said, will be accomplished under the character of its importance and immediate necessity.

The attention of every studious and observing man, who has lived in residence in the Filipino provinces, is not a little struck by the excessive number of young men, who having taken more or less courses in Manila, but without concluding the course begun, or even taking the degree of bachelor, after their parents have spent considerable sums on them, return to their villages with very little or no virtue, but with many vices. At first sight one notes in these young men an irritating radical attitude and a freedom mixed with unendurable arrogance and vanity. Their fellow countrymen, whom they disdain because they possess, although in a superficial manner, the Castilian speech full of phrases and sounds, which would make the most reserved Viscayan laugh, and of high-sounding words which they use without understanding their real significance, immediately look up to them as so many Senecas. They are persuaded that they are perfect gentlemen, for by dint of seeing them practiced they have learned a few social formulas; they wear a cravat, and boots, and pantaloons of the latest style. For the rest, they are completely devoid of fundamental knowledge, and of the fundamentals of knowledge in the studies which they have taken, and have acquired only a slight tint of the part, let us say the bark of those studies, which they conclude by forgetting in proportion as time passes and their passions increase. These young men who forget what they have learned with so great facility, do not, as a general rule, devote themselves to any work, for they do not like work and cannot perform any; for the habits that they have contracted are very different—habits of pastime, idleness, and the waste of their paternal capital. In such condition are those who, as a rule, furnish the contingent of the staff of those who are employed without pay, of aspirants, and amanuenses with little pay of the offices and municipalities, while the most intelligent and skilful devote themselves to making writs for parties in litigation, a very handy matter, and one never finished among the natives, not even by force of many deceptions and the loss of great interests.

And that our opinion is not formed from the smoke of straw, and lightly, is proved by the numerous lists of matriculations which accompany the conscientious and well written memorials by trustworthy Dominican fathers, especially those which were published in the years 1883 and 1887, because of the expositions of Amsterdam and Filipinas, in Madrid. We cannot resist the temptation to transcribe here a valuable paragraph, which wonderfully meets our purpose. It is taken from the writing signed by the excellent Dominican, Father Buitrago, for the last-mentioned exposition. It is as follows: “The first thing which offers itself to the consideration of the reader, is the multitude of the inscriptions of matriculation, and the small proportionate number of approvals. On this point, the first thing that offers is to investigate the causes of that disproportion, which is a great surprise to those who are ignorant of the special conditions under which secondary teaching in this country is found. Many of the young men who matriculate for it, have scarcely any or no desire to obtain a passing mark in their courses, their only object being to learn the Castilian language, and to know, in order that they may afterward occupy a more important position in their villages, some of the customs of the Spaniards. Those who come to Manila with the decided intention of terminating a literary career are relatively very few. In this matter their families exact but little also. And then there is added the method of living in this place, crowded together in their greatest part in private houses under the nominal vigilance of their landlords or landladies, as they call the owners of the houses in which they are lodged. Consequently, not few in this capital are reared in idleness and learn the vices of Europeans without taking on their good qualities. The rector of the university can do nothing on this point, for the rules allow students to matriculate two or three times or even more often, in the same course, in spite of their not passing in it.”

Before such an inundation of wise men, whose scholastic modesty suffers with a serene mind and with immovable resignation [resignaciÓn de estuco] three and more failures in one study, there is no other means, since the lash cannot be legally used, or the oak rod of the oldtime dominie, than to put in practice a salutary strictness in the examinations of the secondary education, and to revise the regulations more strictly, in order thereby to free the provinces of that inundation of learning which parches the fields for lack of arms to work them, uses up the savings of the wealthy families, fills the villages with vampires who suck the sweat of the poor or careless with impunity, increases the lawsuits and ill feeling in the villages, makes of the municipalities and offices a workshop of intrigue, and gives a numerous contingent to the lodges and to separatism.

And as the above-mentioned author of the said Memoria adds: “It is apparent to us at times that (the rector) actively negotiated to subject the lodging houses for students to one set of regulations, in order to watch over their moral and literary conduct better; but such efforts have had no result;” it is thoroughly necessary to create a law, in which the rector shall be authorized to extend his zeal, vigilance, and action to such houses, and also to subject all the day students of Manila, without distinction of establishments, to the university police of the rector and his agents, reËstablishing in this regard the ancient university right. For that purpose, full powers ought to be given to the rector, so that, now by himself in faults of less degree, and now by the university Council in the greater, he may impose academical fines, and even ask the aid of public force in case of necessity, beginning by demanding from each young man who wishes to matriculate, the certificate or report of good conduct given by the parish priest of the village whence he comes. This requirement is of exceptional advisability, not only for the general ends of the instruction, but also for the more perfect selection of the persons who, on devoting themselves to the noble employment of teaching, shall form the understanding and the heart of future generations.

Only in this manner can we succeed in getting the Filipino youth to acquire the conditions and habits of morality and study, until they reach the end of their capacity. Only in this manner can we succeed in giving to the fatherland, grateful children, to Filipinas, honored citizens, to society, useful members, to families, children who honor the white hairs of their parents, and to the public posts a suitable staff, without pretensions, and faithful in the performance of their duties; and that they shall be consequently, fervent Catholics, who shall never forget what the parish priest taught them when they were children, in his simple doctrinal lessons, and who shall be heard afterwards to repeat to their teachers, to bless the divine cross which illumined their intellects and saved their souls, and to bless EspaÑa, which amid the folds of its yellow banner or crowning its standards, brought the cross triumphant to those shores, and with it Christian civilization and true progress.

“Until the end of the year 1863 in which was dictated the memorable royal decree, which established a plan of primary instruction in Filipinas, and which arranged for the creation of schools of primary instruction in all the villages of the islands, and the creation of a normal school in Manila, whence should graduate well-educated and religious teachers who should take the foremost places in those institutions, it might be said that there had been no legislation in regard to primary instruction in these islands. For, although it is certain that precepts directed to the attainment of education by the natives, and very particularly the teaching of the beautiful Spanish language, are not lacking (some of those precepts being contained in the Leyes de Indias, and in the edicts of good government), it is a fact that those precepts are isolated arrangements without conclusions, the product of the good desire which has always animated the Spanish monarchs and their worthy representatives in the archipelago for the advancement and prosperity of these islands, but without resting upon a firm foundation for lack of the elements for its existence.

“Before the above-mentioned epoch the reverend and learned parish priests of the villages came to fill in great measure and voluntarily the noble ends of propagating primary instruction throughout these distant regions by the aid of their own pupils, the most advanced of whom dedicated themselves to the teaching of their fellow citizens, although they received but very little remuneration for their work and care, and there was no consideration of teachers or titles which accredited them as such.”12

In fact the religious corporations in Filipinas were those who busied themselves with the interest which the matter deserved in primary instruction, which was abandoned almost entirely by the authorities until the year 1863, notwithstanding the repeated recommendations, orders, and laws of our monarchs and of the Councils of Indias. The religious were the first teachers of primary letters in Filipinas, as they were afterwards in secondary instruction, in the superior teaching with faculties, and in the principal arts and trades which the Indians learned. By the advice of the religious, the villages constructed the first schools. The religious directed the works; they gave the instruction, until they had pupils who could be substituted for them and leave them free for the spiritual administration of the faithful; and they, the religious, paid the wages of those improvised teachers, without official title or character as such, but sufficiently instructed to teach the tiny people their first letters, and to succeed in obtaining that seventy-five per cent of the inhabitants [of the Filipino village] might learn how to read and write correctly. SeÑor HilariÓn,13 archbishop of Manila, was able to say to the most excellent Ayuntamiento of that city when provincial of the calced Augustinians: “There are multitudes of villages, such as Argao, Dalaguete, and Bolhoon, in CebÚ, and many in the province of Iloilo, in which it is difficult to find a single boy or girl who does not know how to read or write, an advantage which many cities of our EspaÑa have not yet succeeded in obtaining.”

The pay that the religious could give to the teachers educated by them was moderate, but in faith none of the detractors of the monastic corporations of Filipinas had given as much, or even the half, for so beneficial a work. The religious not only provided large, roomy, and ventilated places for the primary instruction of the two sects, and acted as teachers until the most advanced pupils could use something of what was supplied them in teaching, but also provided the schools with the suitable and necessary furnishings in which the industry and genius of the parish-priest regular came to aid their pecuniary appeals and the absolute lack of the materials for teaching. There was no ink, paper, or pens. The first was not necessary for the new papyrus, which was no other than the magnificent leaf of the banana, and the pen was a small bit of bamboo cut in the manner of a pen. From each leaf of the banana they could get twenty or thirty pages of a larger size than those of Iturzaeta. On the other side of the leaf, covered with fine down and smooth as that of velvet, the Indians wrote their letters with the bamboo cut in the form of a pen or of the ancient stylus. What was thus written was not very permanent, nor was there any need that it should be, for the copy pages were not kept as a justification of the expenses of writing allowed by the teachers according to rule later, because of the distrustful or cautious official administration. Since the material was plentiful and free the children were allowed to write as many pages as they wished. More, in fact, they would be seen seated and writing at all hours of the day, not only in their houses, but also in the square, in the street, on the roads, for in all parts they had ready at hand bananas and bamboos, and a stone or any other kind of an object was used as a desk. And, since the aptitude of the native Filipino is so remarkable for imitation, and his patience so great, they did not stop their writing until they imitated ours with the greatest perfection. The religious also wrote the books and primers for their reading, formerly in manuscript, then printed in their own dialect, so that they might profit from the maxims and doctrine, and history and religion, in proportion as they became proficient in reading.

Notwithstanding, after 1863, when the government took charge of education, and the normal school directed by the Jesuit fathers provided the villages with normal teachers under official title and pay, the religious ceased to continue to foment education in their villages, yet not only as local supervisors, with which character they were invested by the memorable decree of that date—the foundation of all the circulars, decrees, and instructions which afterward fell upon that historical document in a vast jumble—but also since the boys and girls of the barrios distant from the villages twenty kilometers and sometimes more, were not able on account of the distance to be present at the official school, did the parish-priest religious, attentive and vigilant, hasten in their anxiety to supply with their pecuniary resources the official deficiencies in every barrio or visita. They had schools built of light materials but solid and well built, in which teachers, both male and female, appointed and paid by the parish priests, gave primary instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic; and sewing and embroidery to the girls. Finally, the parish priests also supplied them with paper, pens, ink, books, thread, needles, and all the other materials needed in teaching. The said schools were visited by the parish priests, if not periodically, yet whenever the duties of their ministries would permit. All the boys and girls of the nearby barrios attended those schools. Every Sunday after mass, masters and mistresses, with their respective scholars presented to their parish priests their copy books, sums, sewing, and embroidery, which they had made during the week. In order to comprehend the significance of all that has been set forth to this point, one must bear in mind that the population in Filipinas is found much scattered in groups of houses called barrios or visitas, more or less densely populated, and separated by a greater or less distance from one another. So true is this that of the fourteen thousand inhabitants of the village of Ogton, verbi gratia, scarcely four thousand lived within the radius of the village. This scattering of the inhabitants throughout the jurisdiction of the villages, if it were meet and convenient at the beginning of the conquest, in order that the barrios or the visitas might become the nucleus of future villages, yet had no reason for existence, during the last half of the past century in the very densely populated provinces like that of Iloilo and others. The inhabitants of the barrios distant from the village, from authority, and from the parish priests, could not be watched and attended to by the paternal solicitude of the latter, so much, or so well as those of the village, who lived under his immediate eye. Many of the priests themselves were suspected by the authorities as breeders of evil doers and criminals, for in the distant barrios people of evil life gathered, combined their thefts, and concealed the thefts. They were the pests of the civil guard and of the local authorities, and the constant preoccupation of the parish priests who saw that they were not fulfilling their religious duties as good Christians, and who, in order to administer the sacraments to them, had to go on horseback, by chair [horimon] or by hammock, whether it rained in torrents, or the equatorial sun melted their brains. Many times, and in distinct seasons and occasions, the superior authority of the islands ordered that the barrios be incorporated into the villages. Not being able to succeed in that, they ordered the small barrios to be fused into the greater, and roads to be opened which would put them in communication with the mother village. Not even this could they obtain because of the inborn passivity of the Indians. The one most harmed by that order of things was the parish priest who had the duty of watching over those scattered sheep, and giving them the food of the spirit to the danger of his health, and the exhaustion of his purse, by paying the wages of the teachers and for the materials used in teaching for the schools of the barrios.14

When the schools were already running with regularity, and the fruits which were produced under the accurate direction and immediate inspection of the parish priests were plentiful, the superior government of the islands took possession of the department of education, and in the above-mentioned decree of 1863, gave official character to the schools instituted by the parish priests. It conceded titles as teachers ad interim to those who were then in charge of the schools appointed by the religious. It assigned them a moderate pay, but one much greater than that received from the parish priests, whose resources were certainly very meager, and with which they had to attend to other duties which their ministry imposed on them. But the government left in most complete abandonment the settlement of the barrios composed generally of two-thirds of the total number of souls. We have already related how and in what manner the parish priests supplied the governmental omission. Teachers ad interim were gradually substituted by the normal teachers as they graduated from the normal school. Indeed in the last years of the past century there were but few schools not ruled over by teachers of the normal school. Did education gain much by the semi-academical title of the new teachers? Did the language of the fatherland become more general? At first, we must reply with all truth that while the normal teachers remained under the immediate supervision of the parish priests, authorized by the official rules to suspend them and fashion them suitably, education made excellent progress. But when they were emancipated from the supervision of the parish-priest religious by the decree of sad memory countersigned by SeÑor Maura in 1893, creating the municipalities to which passed the supervision and management of the schools and the teachers, education went into a decline.15 The presence of the children became purely nominal in the triplicate report which the masters and mistresses sent monthly to the government of the province. That report had to be visoed by the parish priests, but the governors received and approved them without that requisite, disdaining and despising the signature of the parish priests. In that the latter understood that the visto bueno [i.e., approval] was a farce, which, taken seriously, lessened the reputation of and gained ill will for them, without any profit to the teachers and municipal captains. Consequently, it was all the same for the results whether they signed the said reports, or did not sign them. But if was painful to contemplate the empty benches in the school, from which those regular and interminable rows of four hundred or five hundred boys, and two other rows of as many or more girls, reduced afterwards to two or three dozen at the most, no longer went to the church after the afternoon class. That happened and we have seen it. It was one, and not of the least serious, misfortunes that came upon the country because of the unfortunate decree in regard to the Filipino municipalities.

On the creation of the normal school the government proposed as its principal object the rapid and quick diffusion of Castilian as the bond of union between the mother country and the colony. The end was good and praiseworthy, but a mistake was made in the means by which it was to be obtained, for those means were neither sufficient nor efficacious. Departing even from the false supposition that all the normal teachers constantly directed their efforts to teaching Castilian to the children, nothing serious and positive could be obtained. In the schools the children read and wrote in Castilian, learned the grammar by heart, and some teachers gave the explanation in Castilian also. The teacher asked questions in Castilian, and the scholars replied in certain dialogues, which they learned by heart.16 But what was the result? The children did not understand one iota of the master’s explanation. They answered in the dialogue like parrots, and the few phrases which they learned in the harmonious language of Cervantes, they forgot before they reached home, if not in the very school itself, because they did not again hear them either when playing with their comrades or in their homes, or in the school itself. For the constant and daily presence in the school left much to be desired, especially during the last decade of Spanish rule. Before the creation of the municipalities to which SeÑor Maura gave the local supervision of the schools, the parish priests visited them frequently. Every afternoon when the boys and girls were dismissed from school they went to the church in two lines, and the parish priest observed and even counted the number of those who were present, and when many of them were absent, they asked the teachers for their report of the absent children, called on their parents, and with flattery, admonitions, or threats, succeeded in getting the latter to see that their children were punctual in attendance. Furthermore, they clothed at their expense the poor boys and girls who excused their non-attendance at school because they had no pantaloons, or were without a skirt with which to cover the body. Later, with the municipalities, neither the municipal captains nor anyone else took care of the daily attendance of teachers and scholars in the school. If primary instruction in Filipinas had gone on in this way for considerable time it would have pitifully retrograded.

We have already seen the intervention which the parish priests had in primary education before the decree of 63, after that date, and also after the never sufficiently-deplored decree in regard to the municipalities, proposed for the royal signature by the then minister of the colonies, Don Antonio Maura, in 1893. But, notwithstanding that, there are many Spaniards who blame the parish-priest religious for the ignorance of the Indians of Castilian. Why this charge, both gratuitous and unjust? Some have argued that the parish priests should personally teach Castilian to the native children. In order to understand the absurdity of so great a pretension, one need only bear in mind that the parish-priest regulars in Filipinas had in their charge the spiritual administration of the villages, the number of souls in the smallest of which was not less than six thousand, and for the greater part reached ten thousand, fourteen thousand, and even twenty thousand, and more. For that work only a few parish priests had a coadjutor, and those among the TagÁlogs, two or three Indian coadjutors, who aided them in the administration of the sacrament to the well and sick. It was also the duty of the parish priest to reply to consultations, give advices, direct communications, exercise the duties of alcaldes, justices of the peace, decisions, etc.; for in all that they had to take action, as neither the municipal alcalde nor the justice of peace of the village understood Castilian, and least of all, understood the orders, reports, acts, and measures. And it is asked us, if, after attending to so varied occupations, some peculiar to their ministry, others imposed by charity and by necessity, the parish priests would have time, willingness, or pleasure, in officiating as masters of Castilian without pay; however, there is still more. The parish priests were the local presidents of the boards of health and of locusts, public works, industrial and urban contribution, citizen and tributary poll, etc., etc., and we are asked, I repeat, if with all these trifles and mummeries the parish priest would have time even to rest, at the very least.

Others carried their pretension even to meddling with sacred matters of the temple and interfering with the parochial dwelling, demanding from the parish priests that the theological moral preaching, and the explanation of the Christian doctrine be in Castilian, as if it were the duty of the parish priest to please four deluded people, and not to instruct his parishioners who, not understanding Castilian, would have obtained from the catechism and from the sermon that which the negro did from the story. The same is true of the demand that the religious should address their servants in our beautiful language. Seeing that the Indian servants did the reverse of what their Spanish masters ordered them, and seeing the desperation of the latter for the said reason, why should the religious have to be subjected to like impatience when they could avoid it by addressing their servants in their own language? So general was the opinion that the religious were opposed to the Indians learning Castilian that Governor-general Despujols, in his visits to the Ilonga capital, apostrophized the parish-priest religious harshly, who had gone in commission to salute him. “You,” he said to them, “are the ones who oppose the diffusion of Castilian in the country.” Such were the words of that Catalonian, who claimed that a colony separated from the mother country by thousands of miles, and almost abandoned for that reason until the opening of the isthmus of Suez, should know and speak the Castilian, which is not known or spoken as yet in CataluÑa, or in other provinces of EspaÑa. It was very convenient for the Spaniards who went to Filipinas on business or as employes, and even necessary for them to understand the Indians, and they demanded that the latter learn Castilian. It was also very convenient and comfortable for the religious, since the learning of a dialect of the country cost them at least a year’s study and practice. But was it not easier and more just that forty or fifty thousand Spaniards learn the language of the country since they needed it to live and do business in it, than to make six or seven millions of Indians, very few of whom needed to know it, learn Spanish?

Father ZÚÑiga17 already declared in his time: “It has been ordered that books be not printed in the TagÁlog language, that the Indians learn the doctrine in the Castilian language, and that the fathers preach to them in that language. The religious, in order to observe that command preached to them in Spanish and in TagÁlog, but to ask them to confess some Indians who only knew the doctrine in a language which they did not understand and that the parish priests should be satisfied by preaching to their parishioners in a language of which the latter were ignorant, was almost the same as asking them for that which Diocletian asked from the Christians, and they would rather die willingly before fulfilling it.... In order that one may see the inconsistency of those who rule, it is sufficient to know their method of procedure in regard to plays. These Indians, as I have said, are very fond of plays, and the most influential people are those who become actors. Since such people do not generally know the Castilian language, they petition that they be allowed to play in their own language, and there is not the slightest hesitation in allowing plays in the TagÁlog language in all the villages of this province, even in that of Binondo, which is only separated from the city [of Manila].

“And it is asked that the parish priests preach in Spanish!”18

In 1590, we find in the records of our province the following most note-worthy minute of the provincial chapter: “Likewise, it shall be charged upon all the ministers of the Indians that, just as the lads of the school are taught to read and to write, they also shall learn to talk our Spanish tongue because of the great culture and profit which follow therefrom (Archives of St. Augustine in Manila).” This was the rule made by the Augustinian fathers in 1590, and still there are some who accuse the religious of having been opposed to the diffusion of Castilian in Filipinas.

The decree in which the religious were charged to teach Castilian in the kingdoms of Indias is as follows: “By Don Felipe IV, in Madrid, March 2, 1634; and November 4, 1636, law v. That the curas arrange to teach the Indians the Castilian language and the Christian doctrine in the same language.

“We ask and charge the archbishops and bishops to provide and order in their dioceses the curas and instructors of the Indians, by using the gentlest means, to arrange and direct all the Indians to be taught the Spanish language, and that they be taught the Christian doctrine in that language, so that they may become more apt in the mysteries of our Catholic faith, and profit for their salvation, and attain other advantages in their government and mode of living.”—Book i, tÍtulo xiii.

“We could cite other dispositions19 but these are sufficient to cause the noble propositions of our governors-general and the first apostles of Christianity in that country to be appreciated. Apart from the fact that in former times the friar could not alone carry the weight of the extraordinary labor, which is inferred from the teaching of a language which can be contained in the head of but very few Indians, the aspiration that our language supplant the many which are spoken in Filipinas can be only completely illusory.”

We cannot resist the desire to reproduce here some paragraphs of the Carta abierta [i.e., open letter] which was directed through the columns of La Época by SeÑor Retana to Don Manuel Becerra, who was then minister of the Colonies.20

“I do not see, SeÑor Don Manuel, that a single Spaniard exists who would not be delighted to know that peoples who live many leguas from ours use the Spanish language as their own language. Why should we not be proud when we are persuaded that in both Americas live about forty millions of individuals who speak our beautiful language? Consequently, I esteem as most meritorious that vehement desire of yours to effect that there in Filipinas the Malays abandon their monotonous and poor dialects, and choose as their language that which we talk in Castilla. Very meritorious is it in fact among us to sustain so fine a theory; and I say, among us, for if you were English and set forth your laudable propositions in the House of Lords, or the House of Commons, of diffusing the language of the mother-country among the natives of unequal colonies, you may be assured, SeÑor Becerra, that on all sides of the circle there would come marks and even cries of disapproval. For it is a matter sufficiently well known in Great Britain and in Holland; and in a certain manner in France also, it is not maintained, not even in theory, that it is advisable for the conquered races to know the language of the ruling race. The great Macaulay, a liberal democrat, freethinker, a sincere and enthusiastic man, published his desire that Christianity be propagated in India, but he never spoke of a propagation of the English language in the Hindoostan Empire.

“Think, SeÑor Don Manuel, and grant me that if it were possible to please all the Spaniards to have our language propagated in all quarters of the world, there may be some persons who, thinking like the English, may conceive that that propagation would be unadvisable, from the viewpoint of politics.

“But by deprecating such tiquis miquis21 since I hold, so far as I am concerned, that today our fellow countrymen who think in the English fashion in this manner are exceptional, let us come to the real root of the matter. It is an easy thing for you, Don Manuel, to see that it is practicable in a brief space of time to place the Castilian in the head of seven millions of Filipino Indians. Permit me to make a citation which is of pearls. Not many months ago the director of the royal college of the Escorial, or, to be more explicit, Fray Francisco ValdÉs, a man of superior talent who has lived in Filipinas for eighteen or twenty years, said: ‘Our language cannot be substituted advantageously for the TagÁlog, so long as the social education of that people does not experience profound and radical transformations.’ And the same author adds: ‘And since the total transformation of the customs and manner of living of a race is not the work of one year, much less of one century, hence, our firm conviction that great as may be our strength and much as the fondness of the Indian for Castilian may be exaggerated, the latter will never be the common idiom of Filipinas.’

“Do you think of tearing out the entrails of seven millions of individuals by giving them other new ones in this manner all at once? For the peculiar idiom is born in the peculiar country, and develops with the individual, and there is no human strength, which in many years can tear it out. At one step from us lie CataluÑa and Vascongadas, where no success is had in making the speech of Cervantes common to individuals for whom the resonant drapery of our rich language is very loose, and whom it suffocates. Much less could it be so [in Filipinas]!

“Those who make the greatest propaganda are not, indeed, the masters. As many masters as there are in Cavite, there are in Bulacan, for example, or more, and in Cavite the people talk fairly good Castilian, while in Bulacan they scarcely talk any. Why? Because in Cavite there are many Spaniards who live there, while in Bulacan there are perhaps not fifty. For the rest another citation and the conclusion. The famous student of Filipinas, now the bishop of Jaca, Fray Francisco ValdÉs, says: ‘There are many Indians who come to know quite well the material of the Spanish word; but the internal signification and the logical character of our beautiful language is for them an undecipherable secret. Our meanings [giros] and phrases are opposed to their peculiar fashion of conceiving and correlating ideas. From this discrepancy in the association of ideas, they produce literary products as nonsensical as the one below. This example is chosen from among innumerable others of the same kind, as it is the work of a master who passed among those of his class and was really one of the best instructed. The matter is an invitation elegantly printed and gotten up on the occasion of the mass called vara which the gobernadorcillos usually cause to be celebrated with great pomp on that day when they receive from the governor the vara or staff of command. It is as follows: On the nineteenth day, in the morning, and of the present full moon, the mass of my vara will be held in this church under my charge, for God has gratuitously granted me this honorable charge. I invite you, therefore, to my house, so that from that moment the vacancy of my heart having been freed, it may become full by your presence, until my last hour sounds on the clock of the Eternal.’” Come now Don Manuel, what do you say to this?22

“We might extend our remarks to much greater length23 in this important matter in order to prove that the ‘Ordeno y mando’24 of those who govern always falls to pieces before insuperable difficulties, and therefore to accuse the religious of being the reason why Castilian is not popular in Filipinas when we have the most eloquent data that in the villages ruled by secular priests of the country, there is less Castilian spoken than in the parishes ruled over by the friars, is an immense simplicity into which only the malevolent can fall or those who do not know those races by experience.—Consult Barrantes’s La InstrucciÓn primaria en Filipinas; and Father ValdÉs’s El ArchipiÉlago Filipino.”25

If the Spanish government desired that the Castilian language be rapidly diffused in Filipinas, the normal school or the teachers who graduated from it were not the most efficient and suitable means, but the establishment in the Filipino villages of five hundred thousand Spanish families. The servants of those families, and familiarity and converse with the native families would have done in a short time, what never would have succeeded by means of the normal teachers, and which the other educational schools in which the native dialects would not be allowed to be spoken, would have taken centuries in obtaining. It was observed that in the ports and in the capitals where the Spanish element was numerous, almost all the Indians spoke Castilian. Consequently, this same thing would have happened in the villages in which fifty or one hundred Spanish families would have been settled. Neither was it the mission of the parish-priest religious to teach Castilian to the Indians, nor did they have time to dedicate themselves to it. Neither would they have succeeded in that in a long time, not even with all their prestige and competency. Nor did they need as parish priests that the Indian should know Castilian, although as Spaniards they desired it, and very greatly. For, very strongly did it come to them that language, religion, and customs, are strong chains which united mother countries to colonies.

No one could be in a position to know the needs of the country, to feel its forces and appreciate its progress as could the parish-priest religious. Individual members of respectable communities consecrated to the spiritual and material happiness of the Indians, passed, but the spirit which guided their footsteps toward so noble an end, without separating itself any distance from the preconceived plan, always existed. When the opportunity to give greater amplitude to education, and to open up new and vaster horizons to the studious youth of the country, came, the parish priests were the ones who recognized that need and satisfied it. By a royal decree of June 8, 1585, King Don Felipe II arranged for the foundation of the college of San JosÉ, which was destined for the education and teaching of the children of Spaniards resident in Filipinas. Lessons in Latin, rhetoric, and philosophy, were given in that college by distinguished Jesuit fathers. The restrictions placed as to the number and quality of the pupils did not satisfy the need for more centers of learning, which the Filipino youth urgently demanded within a little time. His Excellency, the archbishop of Manila, SeÑor Benavides, a Dominican, projected the foundation of the college of Santo TomÁs, aided by his Excellency, Don Fray Diego de Soria of the same order, bishop of Nueva Segovia.26 With the one thousand pesos fuertes donated by SeÑor Benavides and the four thousand by SeÑor Soria, and the acquisition of the libraries of both, the works were commenced in the year 1610. In 1617, the college was in condition of being admitted as a house by the province of the Dominican fathers in the islands. In 1620, having been provided with professors, it opened its halls to the Filipino youth without distinction of race. King Don Felipe IV took the college under his special protection by a royal decree of November 27, 1623. Some years later, its royal protector obtained from his Holiness, Pope Innocent X, the fitting bull given November 20, 1644, by which the said college was erected into a university, and the latter decorated with the honorable titles of Royal and Pontifical. By a royal decree of May 17, 1680, it was admitted solemnly under the royal protection, and his Majesty, the king, was declared its patron. By another royal decree of December 7, 1781, the statutes approved by the government of the colony, October 20, 1786, were formed. It continued and is at present in charge of its founders, the learned and virtuous Dominican fathers. That royal college and pontifical university has a rector religious, and all the professors except those of medicine and pharmacy are also Dominicans.

The studious youth who saw in the new center of teaching the glorious future which invited them by the golden laurels of learning, came in crowds to fill the cloisters of the new university, which, narrow and reduced for containing within their halls so many young men desirous of learning and instruction, begged the aid of another institution which should share with the university in the task of the teacher. The time urged, the necessity was pressing, there was no time to think of the construction of a new edifice for circumstances did not permit it. Then there was fitted up as a college the school of primary instruction instituted by the illustrious Spaniard, Don GerÓnimo Guerrero, of glorious memory, whose name should pass to posterity so that he may be blessed eternally by Spaniards and Filipinos, since he dedicated his wealth, his labors, and his care to their instruction and education, not only instructing them in the primary letters, but also supporting them and clothing them with his own resources and with the alms which other charitable persons who were desirous of contributing in so deserving a work gave him. The efforts of that remarkable Spaniard deserved the protection of the government of the mother country and the support of the Council of Indias. The king remunerated them by granting him an encomienda in Ilocos as an aid in that blessed establishment, and God rewarded it by conceding him the religious vocation which induced him to take the habit in the order of the Dominican fathers. He ceded to the latter his schoolhouse, his encomienda, and all his goods, with the sole condition that the said fathers were to take charge of the gratuitous education and teaching of the poor Spanish and native boys. The condition having been accepted by the Dominican fathers the schoolhouse of the worthy Spaniard and now virtuous religious was erected into a college under the advocacy of San Juan de LetrÁn, July 18, 1640, by license from the governor-general and from the archbishop. Since that college was a school, it had also as its object the elemental instruction and education of abandoned and poor children, in order to make of them good citizens and excellent military men for the defense of the plaza of Manila, and the colony. Erected into a college, the students continued therein the study of philosophy, theology, and canons, in order that those who showed aptitude and merited that dignity, might be ordained as priests. Later, all the young men who cared to devote themselves to the study of secondary education were admitted as pensioned inmates. At the end of that course, and after they had taken their degree, they went to the university of Santo TomÁs to take up the higher branches. The above-mentioned college was always very useful and commendable. A blessed asylum in its origin, it has always been until today the institution of secondary teaching in which the Dominican fathers, subjecting themselves rigorously to the urgent, although ancient plan of studies, have been able to mold themselves to the peculiar capacity of the natives, directing with exquisite prudence, their native qualities to the professional studies which most harmonize with them.

Thus, in proportion as the necessities for education were exacting, the monastic orders, ever attentive to every movement which could be of interest to the colony, continued to create centers of instruction: the Jesuit fathers in the Ateneo and in the normal school in Manila; the Dominicans in the university, LetrÁn, and Dagupan; the Franciscans, in Camarines; the Augustinian Recollects, in Negros; the calced Augustinians founded in Iloilo colleges of secondary education directed by themselves, which promised to be the dawn of a new era of civilization and culture, if the last Indian rebellion, provoked by the obstinate governors and supported by the Americans had not caused its ruin with a secular work, the wonder of the world, with the colleges, with the Spanish domination, with the country, and with all the existing things gained quietly yet at the cost of great hardships, and of enormous sacrifices in self-denial and virtue.27

The weak sex also were attended to according to their merits by the religious orders. From before the middle of the eighteenth century dates the institution of the school of Santa Rosa, or of Mother Paula, as its foundress was called. She was a religious of the tertiary branch of St. Dominic, who went from CataluÑa to Manila to consecrate herself to the welfare of her own class. Having arrived at Manila, she saw that the greatest benefit which her flaming charity could produce was the education and instruction of the young Indian women. In reality, she labored with pious and burning zeal, until she obtained a house, in which she made the foundation of the beaterio school in which the young Indian women received a Christian education. In the holy fear of God, they learned the doctrine and exercised themselves in the labors peculiar to their sex, in order to later dedicate themselves to God and to the moral education of their sex, or to become married, in which estate they gave application and example of the excellent maxims and sane principles which they learned from their glorious foundress. Mother Paula endured many persecutions which she suffered with resignation and patience. She gave her name to the beaterio, which continued as an educational institution and as a retreat for the girls who desired to embrace it temporarily.

Before the beaterio of Santa Rosa, or of Mother Paula, was founded that of Santa Catalina de Sena. The former was the complement of the latter, which in its beginning only took charge of the education of young Spanish women, It is said that its foundation was due to a certain number of women of the tertiary branch of St. Dominic who retired to a house in order to devote themselves to pious exercises, and from which they went out only to hear mass. Others attribute the foundation of that beaterio school in 1696 to the solicitude of Mother Francisca del Espiritu Santo, and to the reverend father, Fray Juan de Santo Domingo. The illustrious author, Fray Joaquin Martinez de ZÚÑiga, recognizes as foundress of that beaterio in 1694, DoÑa Antonia Esguerra, but from any of those three opinions which we follow it will always result that the said beaterio school of Santa Catalina de Sena was dedicated from its beginning to the education and teaching given by women religious to the Spanish girls primarily, and admitted afterwards into its classes Indian and mestizo girls. All learned to read, write, reckon, and the work peculiar to their sex.

The prodigious increase of the Filipino population and of the general prosperity of the country, and even more the advanced extension made by culture in all social classes made the above-mentioned beaterio schools insufficient, and, just as other monastic orders came to the aid of the Dominican fathers when the needs of the times demanded it, so also, the sisters of charity came to the aid of the tertiary mothers, and founded the schools of Luban and Concordia in Manila, in Tuguegarao, Pangasinan, Camarines, Iloilo, CebÚ, and Ilocos-Sur.

The monastic orders, charged with the superior rule of almost all the literary profession, directors of the scientific movement of the country, could not have forgotten one class of the greatest utility at any time of the scarcity of religious, although it never corresponded as it ought to the desires of its professors, or to that which the high spiritual interests of the Church and of the faithful demanded and hoped from it. The bishops of the country all proceeding from the monastic cloisters founded the conciliar seminaries directed by religious of all the orders, in which the native clergy was educated, instructed, and formed, as an aid to the regular clergy in the beginning, and as parish priests and administrators after the missions and ministries surrendered to the miters by the religious orders.

All the above-mentioned centers of education gave a suitable increase for the end for which they were created. All attained in a short time so high a degree of splendor, that but seldom or never is seen in cultured Europa. They counted their regular pupils by hundreds, and their day pupils by thousands. The confidence of the families in the solid instruction and morality of the religious professors, in the method and facility in the explanation by expert professors who knew the qualities and defects of the scholars, and even the language of the country, and in the moral and religious regimen to which they rigorously submitted both regular and day pupils contributed to so happy a result.

With respect to the condition of education in the last third of the past century, some affirm that it was highly satisfactory, while others have asserted that its backward state and abandonment were pitiful. If we consider that the courses were made, if not by the rule of the statutes approved by the general government of the colony, October 20, 1786, at least by a plan of almost as respectable an antiquity, the secondary and university education had to result as deficient for modern times. If we add the small capacity of the Indians for the sciences, the chronological defects will show up more clearly through the little gain of the scholars in spite of the enlightened efforts of the eleven doctors, and eighteen licentiates of the royal and pontifical university of Santo TomÁs.

As if led by the hand we have now come to touch upon one of the Filipino problems discussed so often and with so great heat, and yet without result to the satisfaction of all. We speak of the aptitude and capacity of the Indians for the letters and sciences.

Has the Filipino Indian that aptitude and sufficiency?

Before entering fully upon the question, we ought to advise that we have lived in several Visayan villages for the space of twenty-three years; that we speak the language fluently; that, as a parish priest, we have necessarily had among our duties to treat with Indians of all social classes, from the most enlightened to the rudest; that we have merited their confidence; that we have studied them and observed them at their domestic fireside and in public life; that we know their customs, their passions, their defects, and their good qualities. And if all this, and much more which we could add, is not sufficient to form an exact and definite judgment on the nature of the Indian, we will say that we have consulted the experience of our predecessors, and the parish-priest religious brothers of the habit, friends, and associates who took part in the sacred ministry in villages of other provinces, and we have found our opinions upon this particular in accord with their more valuable opinions. We will say also, in order that our opinion may not be censured as partial, that by the divine grace we wear the habit of our glorious founder, St. Augustine, the wisest and most universal of the holy fathers, the great figure of the fourth century, the wonderful ancient author, the admiration of the moderns, from whom we have inherited our love for study and the sciences, which with prayer and contemplation constitute the foundation and essence of our institute, as it was founded by a saint consecrated all his life to letters and converted to the faith by means of a book: Tolle lege; tolle, lege.28 Lastly, we advise that the Order of St. Augustine, to which I have the good fortune to belong, also built a school in Iloilo, dedicated to secondary education, in which it spent huge sums to make it the equal of the best schools of Europa.

Now then, having set forth these preliminaries, we enter upon the question. More than two centuries ago, the university and the colleges of San JosÉ, and San Juan de LetrÁn, in Manila, opened their halls to the Filipino youth. The Indians annually matriculated by thousands in the various courses which were taught by erudite professors. How many scientific notabilities have resulted from the natives up to the present from the university cloisters? How many Indian theologues, canons, philosophers, moralists [have graduated] from the conciliar seminaries? Not even one by exception, which usually is found in any general rule. At the most we have heard of some good advocate, of some regular theologue, of some mediocre canon, of some advanced pharmacist, or of some clever physician. But those whom we can consider as exceptions to the rule, never reach the top rank of their equals in other countries. This lack is not attributed to the professors, for they were always picked men, and in the university of Manila, the present bishop of Oviedo, SeÑor Vigil, his Excellency, the lately deceased Cardinal Ceferino, the archbishop of Manila, Father Nozaleda, the illustrious Father Orias, and very many other Dominican fathers who were the honor of their order, of their country, and of all the monastic orders, shone pre-eminently for their learning. We recognize more sufficiency in the European mestizo and the Sangley or Chinese mestizo, than in the pure-blooded Indian; and the mestizos of those races are the ones who distinguish themselves, some notably, as authors, advocates, physicians, canons, and among other literary professions, in which not one single pure-blooded Indian has been found. What does this signify, if not that the deficiency exists in the race, and not in the professors or in the books.29

When we have tried to demonstrate to them some abstract truth, a mystery, a catholic dogma, some philosophical thesis, with the greatest simplicity, clearness, and precision, we have observed that the attention of the Indian, excited and sustained at the beginning, gradually diminished, his eyes wandered, his distraction was manifest. Giving another turn and another form to the exposition, we have succeeded in awakening those sleepy or tired minds, but always for only a few moments. By one example we obtain more than by the most exact dissertations, and by the most clear explanations; for their childish minds, their excessively acute sensibility needs something palpable to bring some light to the darkness of their understandings. We have observed that phenomenon also in the rude as well as the instructed Indians who had learned to reason by logic, and have cultivated the mind by study as far as their mental strengths can go. It must be inferred then that the Filipino Indian is a grown-up child. As a child he cannot go beyond the elemental in the sciences, for his most limited understanding cannot mount in its flight to the heights of the metaphysical. Examples, similes, and metaphors are the indirect means to make him understand the intangible, the spiritual, and the abstract. There can be no luminous philosophical dissertations, or brilliant theories, or abstruse problems, but examples, many examples to make him perceive the truth and the essence of things, causing him to touch, feel, and perceive, with eyes, ears, touch, and the other bodily senses.

There have not been lacking those who have attributed the incapacity and insufficiency of the Indians to intellectual laziness which corresponds to the laziness peculiar to an equatorial country, where the burning rays of fiery sun enervates the physical and intellectual forces. We neither affirm nor deny this, since it might well happen that the Indians possess, like children, in the beginning in potentiality intellectual faculties in their germ equal and even superior to those of the white race, but we incline to the belief that the Indian of pure blood can never reach in scientific culture to the level of the European. If he ever attains anything in the field of science, it must be because another blood inoculates in his own blood the divine breath of wisdom, and then he will be able to advance somewhat when the cross whitens his olive-colored face, has lowered his prominent cheek-bones, and elevated his flat nose a trifle. Until that time comes, the Indian will always be a grown-up child, as simple, as ignorant, and as credulous as a child, but with all the passions, vices, and defects of the adult.

“In regard to the nature and understanding of the Indians,” says Retana, “speaking in general, they are more clever than the American Indians.30 They readily learn any art, and with the same readiness they imitate any work which is placed before them. They make fine clerks and are employed in the accounting offices and other offices in that duty. For, besides the fact that they write well, they are excellent accountants, have capacity for directing a lawsuit, and very sharp in getting the parties to the lawsuit all tangled up. There are good stonemasons, and musicians among them. But in all these things, they only reach a certain degree which they never surpass, either because of laziness, or for the lack of intellect, which we must suppose to be sufficiently limited. For they never invent anything, and all is reduced to their skill of imitation. Those who give themselves to the sciences never surpass a mediocrity in their comprehension.

“He who has had to do with the Indians of Filipinas can do no less than assent to this truth. We find them more clever than ourselves in learning any mechanical work, but more stupid in whatever depends upon the understanding or on the imagination. In so brief a time do they learn the trade of artists, musicians, embroiderers, cobblers, tailors, and whatever is reduced to the mechanical, that they exercise it fairly well in little time. If they are not satisfied with it, they readily give it up and learn another trade. There are Indians who have gone through all those trades, and they have filled them all well. But not one of them has ever surpassed mediocrity. There has never been an artisan who has invented any improvement in the trade which he learned. They are most ingenious in imitating what they see, but they never invent anything. If those men had the talents of Europeans, why is it possible that one cannot find in three hundred years one who has added anything to what was taught him?

“I can affirm of the Filipinos with whom I have lived for more than sixteen years, that they are handy in every kind of mechanism which is shown to them. They are capable of imitating the most curious works, but they can invent nothing, for they lack imagination and fancy, and are very obtuse in the abstract sciences because they lack understanding.

“Some try to attribute this to the subordination in which the Spaniards hold them. I will ask such people why does not that subordination and submission prevent them from making any mechanical work with a sufficient perfection? The soldiers learn the military exercise quicker than do the Spaniards; the children learn to read readily; most of them write an excellent hand. The girls easily imitate the laces and embroideries of Europa. Why do they not imitate equally well our philosophers, our mathematicians, and our poets? Why do they not make any advance in painting, in music, and in the other sciences which require imagination and understanding?31 More than half of the seculars of the Manila archbishopric are Indians. There are some who have become alcaldes-mayor, officers in the royal army, and advocates in the royal Audiencia. Why have none of them gone beyond a very moderate mediocrity in the sciences to which they have dedicated themselves? Just as among Europeans individuals are found for all kinds of abstract sciences, it must be confessed that in the same manner nations are found who, because of the climate in which they have lived for a long series of generations, have contracted a certain tangency of understanding which disposes them very little to receive metaphysical and spiritual ideas.”32

This gives us the key to the fatal results obtained in education in Filipinas. Of the hundreds of students who matriculated annually in the colleges, fifteen per cent did not succeed in obtaining the degree of bachelor, and if those who gained a professional title in the university scarcely reached ten per cent, and of them the greater number were advocates without clients, and physicians without patients, they, united with those who abandoned their books and mutilated their career, were in the villages the greatest calamity that befell the country. They all pompously called themselves pilÓsopos for filÓsofos [i.e., philosophers], and they were no more than ignorant and presuming fellows, pettifoggers, intriguers, and lazy, haughty, and vain fellows, who neither could nor would work, or aid their parents in work or trade, but could dress as those in Manila, prink themselves out like women, censuring everything, even the religious acts, in order that they might be esteemed sages. They were, through their vices, a grievous weight to the parish priests; by their laziness and viciousness, an insupportable burden to their families; by their lewdness and intrigues the mine which furnished suits to the lawyers, and for the disaffected and filibuster, as they were almost all of them affiliated with freemasonry, a danger to the government and to the nation.33 All those evil students learned all the evil of the capitals and laden with vices, evil ideas, and morals, they were in the villages a scandal for the majority, a snare for some, and mischievous for all.

“Those deserters from the university,” says Escosura, “half instructed with incomplete notions of the sciences which, belonging to the superior education, require to be studied by persons of consideration and social prestige, and above all to be upright, in order that they may not be dangerous to the public safety; those deserters from the university form, I repeat, a class in Filipinas, and are, above all, insatiable leeches who devour the substance of the Indians, so many other founts of lawsuits and quarrels among their fellowcitizens.”

Perhaps I shall be asked at this point: “Why since you [religious] see and know all this, why did your religious devote themselves to, and encourage, education?” Because it is very difficult to separate oneself from the influence of the time; for it is impossible to oppose the conquering current of opinion, as the monastic orders of Filipinas did not arrange means to free themselves from the pressure of the government, and to reply to the unjust charge of having retrograded, which those who did not know the country even on the map fulminated against them; and lastly to avoid greater evils. The regular province of the Augustinian fathers was the last to devote itself to superior education among the Indians. When did it do that, and why? When SeÑor Becerra was minister of the colonies in the years 1887 and 1888, and that minister of sad memory planned an official institute in the capital of Iloilo, the Augustinian fathers saw in the plan of the minister a most grave danger for the country, and they went ahead to ward it off. All we parish-priest regulars of Filipinas saw with pain the advances which freemasonry was making in the country by means of the abandoned advocates and physicians, unfit students, ambitious caciques, wealthy fellows, ruined by their vices or by play—we know the works of the spade against the foundation of Spanish domination which were based on religion, prestige, and superiority of race. We all recognized and experienced the apathy and indifference of the authorities who were not ignorant of the frauds and plans of the lodges; and there were even governors of the provinces who protected them. And if to all that which we knew, recognized, and could not remedy, we had consented that SeÑor Becerra establish in Iloilo an institute of secondary education with professors who might have been freemasons or atheists, the catastrophe would have been certain and imminent, for such institute would be a seeding place for filibusters and insurgents. In order to avoid that, the Augustinian order planned and constructed at its own expense an edifice which it resolved to dedicate as an institute. That could not be carried out, for the last revolution of ’98 came upon them before it was inaugurated.

More beneficial for the country, more in accordance with the monastic traditions, more in harmony with the recommendations of our glorious founder, which were practiced by our virtuous ancestors, would have been the opening of schools of arts and crafts. In reality, although the Spanish government established a few of those schools in Manila, Pampanga, and Iloilo, it was so unseasonable that it was unable to gather the fruits which were promised in their founded hopes. Such is the scarcity of Indian artists and artisans, that of the former there are a few sculptors, engravers, and painters, etc., but of the latter, we can assert that almost all the trades are in the hands of the Chinese, and only carpentry, cabinet-making, architecture, masonry, and some other trades, are exercised by Indians, to whom the parish-priest religious taught them because they needed them for their works and constructions.

It is known that the ancient monks divided their time among prayer, contemplation, study, and manual work. St. Anthony34 and his five thousand monks, as well as all those who afterward imitated the monastic life or that of the desert, employed part of their day in labor with their hands, weaving mats, making shoes, oars, boats, or small skiffs, and other similar labors. Our father, St. Augustine, desired his monks to also devote some hours of the day to manual labor. Accordingly, our predecessors did it. It is true, that the spirit of the respective epochs changed the character of the bodily work, but the monastic corporations of Filipinas, which recognized the incapacity of the Indian for science and deplored the pernicious effects of science poorly digested by the natives, if they could not do away with the action of the governments, the influence of opinion, the pressure of the times, would have had to turn aside, by means of their parish-priest religious, the tendency of the Indians to the literary branches, and to have directed that tendency to those branches of pure imitation, for which it is necessary to recognize, and we do that gladly, that the Filipino Indian has exceptional abilities. At the same time that the university was founded, and the colleges provided, schools and workshops ought to have been established for the natives, which would have obtained the preference in those narrow, dull, and lazy minds, with greater benefits to the country and less harm to all. All the monasteries founded by St. Basil the Great35 had in charge an elementary superior school, and another of arts and crafts joined to it. That ought to be the model of the religious orders in Filipinas, in spite of the governments of the mother country, of the demands of opinion manifestly gone astray on this point, and of the spirit of the epoch which could not have any influence in that country, most especially by their constitution, nature, customs, and government. Had the religious corporations, thoroughly permeated with their Christian and civilizing mission, proceeded in that manner, the contingent of sons with the three pointed design of the square and apron,36 who left the halls of the colleges and became the petty leaders and chief revolutionists who betrayed the mother country and were also the greatest enemies of those who had taught them the little good that they knew, would not have been so numerous.

The cholera, which made ravages in the Filipino Archipelago in 1882, left in the saddest orphanage many children of both sexes and of all the races. They, abandoned, and without resources, wandered through the streets begging public charity. The Spanish women, moved by the disconsolate spectacle, which so many ragged and hungry children offered, formed a society, from which a committee was chosen, which went to the governor-general to beg for food and shelter for those abandoned children. The governor summoned the provincials of the monastic order, as being the natural protectors of the destitute, and creators of the centers of education and learning in the country. He petitioned them for support and aid. The father provincial of the Augustinians, representing his order, took under charge of the province of SantÍsimo Nombre de JesÚs, the support, education, and teaching of the abandoned and orphaned children. The Augustinian fathers assigned for that purpose local sites provisionally in the avenue of San Marcelino, where they gathered the children who were wandering through the city of Manila, and gave them shelter in the temporary barracks. But since the latter had no hygienic conditions, and were not large enough, they transferred the children to the lower parts of the convent of Guadalupe, which were spacious and well ventilated. There they opened workshops of sculpture and ceramics, painting, and modeling, and there they remained until the year 1892, when the schools, workshops, and children were transferred to the building of the new plant constructed for that purpose in the village of Malabon. That place united all the desirable conditions of solidity, decoration, size, and even elegance, which could be desired. There the Augustinian fathers taught the orphans, in addition to their primary letters, painting, designing, sculpture, and modeling, printing, and binding, and indeed the printing plant was bought by the voluntary donation of some religious, through the economies practiced in the missions by dint of privations and of a life of poverty and mortification. We know one of those religious, respectable for his exemplary virtue, who gave for that purpose all his savings, consisting of two thousand pesos. We feel that his humility has prohibited us from placing his name here, so that he may be blessed by all who should hear of a charity and liberality peculiar to the sons of a St. Augustine, who gave even his death-bed to the poor, and suitable also to those of Santo TomÁs de Villanueva, father of the poor. That asylum of the orphans, and of the unfortunates abandoned by its founders who had to flee from the ingratitude of the revolutionists, was burned by the shells which the Americans threw to dislodge the Indian rebels who had made forts of it, and being looted afterward by pillaging Chinese who took away even the paving-stones of the lower floor, a cargo of which was surprised by the North American police in the Pasig River, and returned to the Augustinian fathers—the only indemnity which they have received up to date.

The Augustinian fathers also extended their charity to orphan girls. For that purpose they caused sisters of their tertiary branch to go from the Peninsula, who took charge of the education and instruction of the children in the orphanage that was built in Mandaloya at the expense of the said Augustinian fathers. More than three hundred Indian mestizo and Spanish girls received a fine education there, so much so that their work in embroidery, sewing, and the manufacture of artificial flowers, took the prize in the expositions at Madrid and Manila.

So excellent and fine was the education that the orphan girls received in Mandaloya, that it was necessary to accede to the repeated requests of influential families who begged that the Augustinian tertiary mothers receive as pensioners the daughters of many Peninsulars and Spanish mestizos.

1 See this decree in VOL. XLV, pp. 184–186, where it is dated June 20, 1686.?

2 TomÁs G. del Rosario, cited often in these notes, says (Census of Philippines, iii, pp. 594, 595): “A decree of the general government, issued October 6, 1885, provided for a competition to be followed by prizes for the best grammars written in Visayan, Cebuano, Ilocano, BÍcol, PangasinÁn, and Pampango, there being one already in TagÁlog. Naturally these grammars, which were written in different dialects and taught in the public schools, made it more difficult (and that was the object) for the Spanish language to become general. Matters reached such a stage that teachers were punished and threatened with deportation, and some were actually deported, for teaching Spanish.”

Speaking on the same subject, LeRoy (“Friars in Philippines,” in Political Science Quarterly, for December, 1903, p. 673) says: “In proclaiming the law of 1893 [the Maura law], Governor-general Blanco instructed the municipal councils to employ ‘the most practical means for the diffusion of the Spanish language.’ The common assertion that the friars did teach the natives Spanish is contradicted by these provisions and by the numerous decrees from 1585 on; those who frankly admit that they did not spread Spanish, and who hold that it is impracticable to make the natives accept either Spanish or English, have a fair argument to present.”?

3 See this decree in VOL. XLV, pp. 184–186.?

4 This is given by Barrantes, InstrucciÓn primaria, pp. 69–71.?

5 For this and following citations of the regulations, see ante.?

6 Speaking of the legislation of 1863, LeRoy (Philippine Life, pp. 202, 203) says: “Most significant of all, local school boards of a civil and lay character were ordered established, a feature of the decree which had not by any means been realized when the municipal reform of 1893 was decreed, and which that reform itself did not accomplish. Theoretically, the friars were left in supervision only of religious instruction in the public schools; practically, in four towns out of five, they managed everything about the schools to suit their own will, down almost to the last hours of Spanish rule.”?

7 The TagÁlog insurrection broke out prematurely through betrayal of the plot in August, 1896.?

8 Patricio de la Escosura, formerly minister and ambassador in Berlin, member of the Royal Spanish Academy, went to the Philippines about 1863, as royal commissary. His Memoria is important and worth consultation for the history of the islands. It has a prologue by CaÑamaque. The first chapter on the teaching of Spanish argues that Spanish be taught the Filipinos. Chapter viii is on the creation of a school of physicians and surgeons. The various chapters of this book, although written as letters to the President of the Council of Ministers, in 1863, were not published until 1882. See Pardo de Tavera’s Biblioteca filipina.?

9 See VOL. XVII, p. 333. The Cuadrilleros occupied in a certain sense, the position occupied now by the constabulary.?

10 The author of this book was Manuel del Rio, who went to the Philippines in 1713, where he labored many years in various villages of PangasinÁn. He was procurator-general of his order, definitor, and provincial; and was bishop-elect of Nueva Segovia at his death. A fuller title of his book is as follows: “Instrucciones morales y religiosas para el govierno, direccion, y acierto en la practica de nuestros ministerios. Que deben observar todos los religiosos de esta nuestra Provincia de el Santo Rossario de Philipinas del Orden de Predicadores.” See PerÉz and GÜemes’s Adiciones y continuacion (Manila, 1905), p. 114.?

11 The opening of the Suez Canal, as much probably as any other factor promulgated modern ideas in the Philippines, because of the vastly shorter route thus brought about between them and the mother country.?

12 The above citation is from Daniel Grifol y Aliaga’s prologue to his book La instrucciÓn primaria en Filipinas (note by Zamora, p. 235).?

13 Fray Hilarion Diez, O.S.A., who was consecrated archbishop of Manila, October 21, 1827. His death occurred May 7, 1829. See Ferrando’s Historia, vi, pp. cliii, cliv.?

14 Zamora, speaking in his chapter ix of the intervention of the friar, and discussing in general the accusations against the religious orders, says (pp. 408–452): “The Spaniards in admiration of the sanity of life, of the austerity and purity of the morals of the religious; thankful for their good offices as intermediaries among themselves in their disputes, and among the Indians during rebellions; convinced of the efficacy of their word, and of their intervention in all things; of the necessity of their active and diligent coÖperation for the conservation and consolidation of the colony: began to respect, venerate, and recognize in them spontaneously, a certain right to intervene in their affairs, to settle their differences, submit to their judgment their quarrels, and respect their decisions with more submission and conformity than would proceed from the legitimately constituted authority. The governors themselves could not leave the religious out of account in all that they undertook.” The Indian learned to distinguish, says Zamora, between the peaceful and helpful friar, who sought only his welfare, and the often brutal and harsh encomendero. “Not otherwise was the origin of the prestige of the religious among Indians and Spaniards;” and the lapse of time furthered it. The governors made use of the friars as ambassadors, counsellors, and in other capacities connected with the government. “The religious were the ones who formed the villages and made a record of their parishioners on the tribute and citizen list.” As the friars were the only ones who understood the native dialects and the natives were ignorant of Spanish, the authorities were forced to work through the former, and consequently, the friars had the right of “visÉ” of the tribute and citizen lists. They became the presiding officers of all local boards, and so had all the power. In the provinces the dwelling of the parish priest was open to strangers who lodged there as in a hotel. The envy and maliciousness of certain people, however, conspired to take away the power of the parish priest, a reform that was rather agreeable than otherwise to him, as it left him more time for his ministry; but he deplored it as it seemed to threaten the country at no distant future. “The vigilant, noble, and disinterested intervention of the parish priests in all matters was the chief and necessary wheel of the gubernatorial, administrative, and judicial mechanism, in their multiple and complicated attributes and duties. That was exercised with regularity, until, in the last years of Spanish dominion in that country, the impelling force restrained the impulse.” The fruit of the “reform” was the contempt of the natives for the Spaniards. “If the religious orders were the cause for the loss of these islands, they were so unconsciously and ignorantly, or consciously and maliciously.” Zamora argues that they were not in any way the cause for the loss of the country. “The religious communities knew that the ruin of the country was their own ruin, the end of the Spanish domination, the end even of their existence in Filipinas.” “On three bases rested the Spanish domination in Filipinas with its institutions and organisations: religion; the prestige of the parish-priest regulars; and the superiority of race in so great accord with Spanish nobility.” To freemasonry was due the destruction of the high ideal of religion, and also the idea of the superiority of race; and to freemasonry is due, then, the loss of the colony. The friars have not committed the abuses with which they have been credited, and were not the cause of the revolution. They were always the upholders of Spanish sovereignty, and protected the natives.?

15 The municipal reform of 1893, the “Maura law,” in conferring a considerable degree of local autonomy on Philippine towns, made the newly created municipal councils also school boards. It was a further step in taking from the padre the power to “visÉ” and supervise everything done, small and great, in a town. In promulgating the law, Governor-general Blanco (popular with the Filipinos for his liberal measures) took pains to explain that the priest’s school-inspecting powers, so far as religious teaching went, were to be the same as ever. As a matter of fact, this reform of Minister Maura, sent forth amid much accompaniment of proclamas in Spain and the islands, was virtually made a dead-letter under succeeding governors. Its non-enforcement, except in a few towns, was one of the complaints of the insurgents in 1896. See LeRoy “Friars in the Philippines,” in Political Science Quarterly for December, 1903, pp. 672, 673.?

16 Victor S. Clark (Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, no. 58, May, 1905; Labor Conditions in the Philippines), says (p. 854): “Practically all the Christian population of Mindanao spoke Spanish in 1883, which indicates that the statistics probably did not cover the remoter Jesuit mission stations among the Moros. In that year about 21 per cent of the total population reported for the islands could read, but less than 5½ per cent could speak Spanish. In other words, 75 per cent of the persons able to read could do so only in the Malay dialects.”?

17 Estadismo, chapter xiv (Retana’s ed.; note by Zamora).?

18 ZÚÑiga (Estadismo, Retana’s ed., i, pp. 299, 300), says of the natives of Tondo province: “The language of these Indians is somewhat corrupted, because a great number of Spanish words have been introduced. That is the only benefit which they have derived from living near Manila, since there are very few who know Spanish. In the suburbs themselves, as well as in Binondo and Santa Cruz, the TagÁlog language is spoken. The Spaniards cast the blame on the religious for the Indians not knowing the Spanish language. But let them examine the villages of the seculars, and they will find whether they know more than those of the regular curacies. We cannot succeed in getting them to learn the doctrine, and it is wished that we teach them the Spanish language. There are some Spaniards who believe that we are opposed to them learning it, but this calumny was clearly destroyed in the time of SeÑor Anda, when it was ordered that no one could become a gobernadorcillo unless he knew Spanish; and it was necessary in almost all the villages to take the servants of the fathers. Now even, if there is any Indian who knows Spanish in the villages, it is because he has served some religious or some Spaniard in Manila. I know very well the method of introducing the Spanish language into Filipinas; but since I know that my plan will not be observed, I shall say only that hitherto, certain absurd means which would not have been used among barbarians, have been taken.”?

19 Estadismo, appendix A (note by Zamora). This citation is from vol. ii, pp. 59*, *60.?

20 The issue of June 5, 1891 (note by Zamora).?

21 An expression used in ridicule, like the English folderols. It might be translated “utter nonsense.”?

22 The Spanish for this invitation is as follows: “El dÍa diecinueve de su maÑana y del presente plenilunio tendrÁ lugar la misa de mi vara en esta Iglesia de mi cargo que Dios gratuitamente me ha concedido esta carga honorosa. Invito Á Vd. tanto como Á mi casa que desde luego se llenarÁ el vacio acendrado de mi corazÓn en su asistencia hasta resonar mi Última hora en el relox del Eterno.” Some of the words are taken in the wrong acceptation.?

23 This letter is given by Retana in his edition of ZÚÑiga’s Estadismo, ii, pp. *60–63*.?

24 Literally, “I ordain and command”—the form of opening often used in decrees, edicts, etc.?

25 This last paragraph is not a part of Retana’s letter to Becerra, but it is taken from Retana’s words following the letter in his edition of the Estadismo, ii, pp. 63*, *64.?

26 The friars virtually controlled secondary and higher instruction in the islands until they were lost to Spain in 1898. The reaction that followed the liberal measures (some of them practical, some foolish) of 1863 to 1870 really strengthened the hold of the friars upon superior education (though one must take into account the competition from the Jesuits in Manila with which the disturbed Dominicans had to deal in increased degree each year). See LeRoy’s Philippine Life, p. 205.?

27 “The friars maintained control of secondary and higher instruction till the islands were lost to Spain in 1898. A reaction from the liberal policy of 1863 to 1868 was stimulated by the appearance of a radical party in the Philippines, and by an insurrectionary movement at Cavite, in 1872. The friar party declared these to be the natural consequences of ‘reform’ and when the government changed, as it soon did, the projects of educational reorganization were speedily nullified.” James A. LeRoy in Political Science Quarterly, December, 1903, pp. 673, 674.?

28 i.e., “Take and read.”?

29 The comments of Victor S. Clark, in his Labor Conditions in the Philippines (Bulletin no. 58, of Bureau of Labor), in regard to Filipino workmen, are interesting, and show a somewhat different side than that presented by Zamora.

Zamora has left out of account the Filipino patriot, Dr. JosÉ Rizal, who was executed by order of the Spanish government, December 30, 1896. Rizal was a pure-blooded TagÁlog, and attained highest rank in the Orient as an eye specialist. In addition he was a poet, a sculptor, and a novelist of more than average ability, a wonderful linguist, a widely-read man, and a clear thinker. He studied in the Ateneo Municipal and in Santo TomÁs. The two following selections, the first from his novel Noli me tangere, often called the “Filipino bible,” and the second from El Filibusterismo (both taken from LeRoy’s Philippine Life in town and country, pp. 210–213, and 207, 208) are interesting criticisms of the education of the friars. The first is the reflections of the village philosopher, the second apropos of the teaching of physics in the University of Santo TomÁs.

“The country is not the same today as it was twenty years ago.... If you do not see it, it is because you have not seen the former state, have not studied the effect of the immigration of Europeans, of the entrance of new books, and of the going of the young men to study in Europe. It is true that the Royal and Pontifical University of St. Thomas still exists, with its most wise cloister, and certain intelligences still busy themselves in formulating the distinctions and threshing out to the final issue the subtleties of scholasticism. But where will you now find that metaphysical youth of our times, with an archaic education, who tortured his brain and died in full pursuit of sophistries in some remote part of the provinces, without ever having succeeded in understanding the attributes of being, or settling the question of essence and existence, concepts so lofty that they made us forget what was essential in life, our own existence and individuality? Look at the youth of today. Full of enthusiasm at the view of wider horizons, it studies History, Mathematics, Geography, Literature, Physical Science, Languages, all subjects that in our time we heard of with horror as though they were heresies; the greatest freethinker of my time declared all these things inferior to the classifications of Aristotle and the laws of the syllogism. Man has finally comprehended that he is man; he refuses to give himself over to the analysis of his God, to the penetration of the imperceptible, into what he has not seen, and to give laws to the phantasms of his brain; man comprehends that his inheritance is the vast world, dominion over which is within his reach; weary of a task that is useless and presumptuous, he lowers his gaze to earth, and examines his own surroundings.... The experimental sciences have already given their firstfruits; it needs Only time to perfect them. The lawyers of today are being trained in the new teachings of legal philosophy; some begin to shine in the midst of the shadows which surround our courts of justice, and point to a change in the course of affairs.... Look you: the press itself, however backward it might wish to be, is taking a step forward against its will. The Dominicans themselves do not escape this law, but are imitating the Jesuits, their implacable enemies; they give fiestas in their cloisters, erect little theatres, write poesies, because, as they are not devoid of intelligence in spite of believing in the fifteenth century, they comprehend that the Jesuits are right and will continue yet to play a part in the future of the young peoples that they have educated.

“But are the Jesuits the companions of Progress? Why, then, are they opposed in Europe?”

“I will answer you like an old scholastic.... One may accompany the course of Progress in three ways, ahead of her, side by side with her, and behind her. The first are those who guide the course of Progress; the second are those who are borne along by her; the last are dragged along, and among them are the Jesuits. Well would they like to direct her course, but, as they see her in the possession of full strength and having other tendencies, they capitulate, preferring to follow rather than be smothered or be left in the middle of the road without light. Well now, we in the Philippines are traveling along at least three centuries behind the car of Progress; we are barely commencing to emerge from the Middle Ages. Hence, the Jesuits, reactionary in Europe, when seen from our point of view represent Progress; the Philippines owe to them their dawning system of instruction, and to them the Natural Sciences, the soul of the nineteenth century, as it has been indebted to the Dominicans for Scholasticism, already dead in spite of Leo XIII—no Pope can revive what common sense has judged and condemned.... The strife is on between the past, which cleaves and clings with curses to the waning feudal castle, and the future, whose song of triumph may be faintly heard off in the distant but splendorous glories of a dawn that is coming, bringing the message of Good-News from other countries.”

“The walls were entirely bare; not a drawing, nor an engraving, nor even any kind of a representation of an instrument of physics. On occasions there would be lowered from heaven an instrumentlet to be shown from afar to the class, like the Holy of Holies to the prostrate faithful: ‘Look at me, but don’t touch me.’ From time to time, some complacent professor came, a day of the year was assigned for visiting the mysterious ‘cabinet,’ and admiring from afar the enigmatic apparatus arranged inside the cases. Then no one could complain; that day there were seen much brass, much glass, many tubes, disks, wheels, bells, etc. And the show stopped there, and the Philippines were not turned upside down. For the rest, the students are convinced that these instruments were not bought for them; merry fools would the friars be! The ‘cabinet’ was made to be shown to foreigners and to high officials from Spain, that, on seeing it, they may nod in approbation, while their guide smiles as if saying: ‘You have been thinking you were going to find a lot of backward monks, eh? Well, we are at the height of the century; we have a cabinet!’

“And the foreigners and high officials, obsequiously entertained, afterward wrote in their voyages or reports: ‘The Royal and Pontifical University of St. Thomas, of Manila, in charge of the illustrious Dominicans, possesses a magnificent cabinet of physics for the instruction of youth.... There annually take this course some two hundred and fifty students; but, be it on account of the apathy, indolence, scanty capacity of the natives, or through any other cause whatsoever, ethnological or unperceivable, up to date there has not developed a Lavoisier, a Secchi, or a Tyndall, even in miniature, from the Philippine-Malay race!’”?

30 See p. 801 of Victor S. Clark’s article in Bulletin no. 58, ut supra, for a comparison between the Filipino and the Central and South American Indians.?

31 Retana’s praises of Rizal, a full-blooded TagÁlog, in all these lines, as seen in his Vida y escritos del Dr. JosÉ Rizal, a series just concluded (October, 1906), in the Madrid review, Nuestro Tiempo, are the best answer to his own question.?

32 See Retana’s Estadismo, appendix A (note by Zamora).?

33 According to Eduardo Navarro, O.S.A., the first freemason lodge established in the Philippines was the one called Luz Filipina, about 1860, which was established in Cavite under the Gran Oriente Lusitano. It was in immediate correspondence with the Portuguese lodges of Macao and Hongkong. Shortly after another lodge was created in Zamboanga of Peninsulars and creoles resident in Mindanao. Some time after 1868, must have occurred the creation of another lodge composed of foreigners and dependents of the lodge of Hongkong, of the Scottish rite. Into this lodge were admitted some Peninsulars and Filipinos. Shortly after this many other lodges were created under the GraÑ Oriente de EspaÑa. See Navarro’s Asuntos filipinos (Madrid, 1897), pp. 221–277. Manuel Sastron (InsurrecciÓn en Filipinas, Madrid, 1901, p. 41), who represents the friar standpoint, says: “We believe and affirm in good faith, that, in our opinion, the origin, the primitive cellule of the insurrection of 1896 in Filipinas, is to be found in masonry.” The masonic movement was by 1890 widespread in the islands. See also Sawyer’s Inhabitants of Philippines, pp. 79–83.?

34 St. Anthony the Great, who was an Egyptian, born A.D. 356. His day is January 17. See Baring Gould’s Lives of the Saints, i, pp. 249–272.?

35 St. Basil the Great was a native of Cappadocian CÆsarea. His death occurred A.D. 379. His day is celebrated on June 14, except by the Greeks who keep January 1 in his memory. See Baring Gould’s Lives of the Saints, vi, pp. 192–202.?

36 Referring to the Katipunan, or Kataas-taasan Kagalang-gÁlang Katipunan Nang MaÑga Anac Nang Bayan, “Sovereign Worshipful Association of the Sons of the Country.” This society, of which it is yet too early to have definite and detailed information, was due in the main to AndrÉs Bonifacio, a warehouse keeper in the employ of Fressel and Co., of Manila, who became its third president, although primarily founded by Marcelo Hilario del Pilar. This society enrolled in its ranks the common people among the TagÁlogs. It is more than likely that the plan of the organization was copied from the masonic lodges, but the analogy stops here. The Katipunan was not masonry. See Sastron’s InsurrecciÓn, pp. 51–59; Sawyer’s Inhabitants, pp. 82, 83; and The Katipunan (Manila, 1902), purporting to be by one Francis St. Clair, although it is claimed by some to have been written by or for the friars.?

Clyx.com