The supreme court of justice in the Philippines is the Audiencia established in Manila, which is the tribunal of appeal from the subordinate jurisdiction, and the consultative council of the Governor-General in cases of gravity.

The court is composed of seven oidores, or judges. The president takes the title of Regent. There are two government advocates, one for criminal, the other for civil causes, and a variety of subordinate officers. There are no less than eighty barristers, matriculated to practise in the Audiencia.

A Tribunal de Comercio, presided over by a judge nominated by the authorities, and assisted, under the title of Consules, by gentlemen selected from the principal mercantile establishments of the capital, is charged with the settlement of commercial disputes. There is a right of appeal to the Audiencia, but scarcely any instance of its being exercised.

There is a censorship called the Comercia permanente de censura. It consists of four ecclesiastics and four civilians, presided over by the civil fiscal, and its authority extends to all books imported into or printed in the islands.

There are fourscore lawyers (abogados) in Manila. As far as my experience goes, lawyers are the curse of colonies. I remember one of the most intelligent of the Chinese merchants who had settled at Singapore, after having been long established at Hong Kong, telling me that all the disadvantages of Singapore were more than compensated by the absence of “the profession,” and all the recommendations of Hong Kong more than counterbalanced by the presence of gentlemen occupied in fomenting, and recompensed for fomenting, litigations and quarrels. Many of them make large fortunes, not unfrequently at the expense of substantial justice. A sound observer says, that in the Philippines truth is swamped by the superfluity of law documents. The doors opened for the protection of innocence are made entrances for chicanery, and discussions are carried on without any regard to the decorum which prevails in European courts. Violent invectives, recriminations, personalities, and calumnies, are ventured upon under the protection of professional privilege. When I compare the equitable, prompt, sensible and inexpensive judgments of the consular courts in China with the results of the costly, tardy, unsatisfactory technicalities of judicial proceedings in many colonies, I would desire a general proviso that no tribunal should be accessible in civil cases until after an examination by a court of conciliation. The extortions to which the Chinese are subjected, in Hong Kong, for example—and I speak from personal knowledge—make one blush for “the squeezing” to which, indeed, the corruption of their own mandarins have but too much accustomed them. In the Philippines there is a great mass of unwritten, or at least unprinted, law, emanating from different and independent sources, often contradictory, introduced traditionally, quoted erroneously; a farrago, in which the “Leyes de Indias,” the “Siete partidas,” the “Novisima recompilacion,” the Roman code, the ancient and the royal fueros—to say nothing of proclamations, decrees, notifications, orders, bandos—produce all the “toil and trouble” of the witches’ cauldron, stirred by the evil genii of discord and disputation.

Games of chance (juegos de azar) are strictly prohibited in the Philippines, but the prohibition is utterly inefficient; and, as I have mentioned before, the Manila papers are crowded with lists of persons fined or imprisoned for violation of the law; sometimes forty or fifty are cited in a single newspaper. More than one captain-general has informed me that the severity of the penalty has not checked the universality of the offence, connived at and participated in by both ecclesiastics and civilians.

The fines are fifty dollars for the first, and one hundred dollars for the second, offence, and for the third, the punishment which attaches to vagabondage—imprisonment and the chain-gang.

Billiard-tables pay a tax of six dollars per month. There is an inferior wooden table which pays half that sum.

The criminal statistics of five years, from 1851 to 1855 present the following total number of convictions for the graver offences. They comprise the returns from all the provinces. Of the whole number of criminals, more than one-half are from 20 to 29 years old; one-third from 30 to 39; one-ninth from 40 to 49; one-twentieth from 15 to 19; and one-forty-fifth above 50.

They consist of 467 married, 81 widowers, and 690 unmarried men.

During the said period 236 had completed the terms of their sentences, 217 had died, and 785 remained at the date of the returns.

In the city of Manila there was only one conviction for murder in five years. The proportion of the graver offences in the different provinces is nearly the same, except in the island of Negros, where of forty-four criminals, twenty-eight were convicted of murder.