These two Malay jurists carefully examined the criminal records of Europe. Why? Because, whenever an extraordinary or especially heinous crime was committed in the Philippine Islands, the Spaniards were accustomed to use it to confirm their conclusions as to the innate inferiority of the Malay race. "That could occur only among a people of inferior intelligence," was their standing phrase. Del Pilar and Ponce gathered the accounts of trials from the European journals, and were able to reply to the Spaniards quietly: "No, that is not so. All these crimes occur among you Europeans, and relatively more frequently than with us. Your conclusion is therefore false, or else you too have a defective intelligence such as you ascribe to us." Del Pilar, from his studies of the colonial enterprises of all peoples, came to the conclusion that "the Europeans founded most of their colonies at a time when the holding in vassalage of men of their own race by whites and the slavery of negroes and Indians were not regarded as offenses. If, now, we look at colonies in which, as in the Philippine Islands, agricultural populations are living with a civilization of their own, the development of the native races will depend on their religion. In a colony where Islam or a dogmatized heathen religion prevails no assimilation between Europeans and natives can take place. It is otherwise in countries like the Philippines, where the natives accepted Christianity at a time when religion had more importance among Europeans than now; a common basis was formed for the co-operation of both parts, the whites and the colored. But the circumstance that rulers and ruled had the same religion and the same official language may have led directly to another evil--that the colors became marks of condition, the whites being the Spartans, the mestizos the perioikoi, and the colored men the helots or servile people. So long as no pressure toward higher ambitions occurred from among those of the perioikoi and the helot grades, and so long as the whites were able to keep their prestige freely recognized by their dependents, the view of the whites, that the colored were both socially and intellectually a lower caste, seemed to be justified. The case has been different in the present century, especially in the second half of it. People of our (Philippine) race attended the high schools, appropriated to themselves the civilization and the knowledge of the whites, and still the brand of inferiority stuck to them. And this happened, too, when the quality of the whites had deteriorated. They were no longer exclusively _señors_, but there came bankrupted Spaniards or those of the lowest classes into the country, among them persons who could not read and write, who should be rated as beneath our school-trained people. And yet these illiterates claimed, by virtue of their color, to be respected as lords of the land, an absurdity which left the idea of 'European prestige' without