"If this is not sufficient to explain the depopulation of the islands and the abandonment of industry, agriculture and commerce, then add 'the natives who were executed, those who left their wives and children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those who were sold into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them,' as Fernando de los Rios Coronel says; add to all this what Philip II said in reprimanding Bishop Salazar about 'natives sold by some encomenderos to others, those flogged to death, the women who are crushed to death by their heavy burdens, those who sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many who are executed and left to die of hunger and those who eat poisonous herbs * * * and the mothers who kill their children in bearing them,' and you will understand how in less than thirty years the population of the Philippines was reduced one-third. We are not saying this: it was said by Gaspar de San Agustin, the preeminently anti-Filipino Augustinian, and he confirms it throughout the rest of his work by speaking every moment of the state of neglect in which lay the farms and fields once so flourishing and so well cultivated, the towns thinned that had formerly been inhabited by many leading families! "How is it strange, then, that discouragement may have been infused into the spirit of the inhabitants of the Philippines, when in the midst of so many calamities they did not know whether they would see sprout the seed they were planting, whether their field was going to be their grave or their crop would go to feed their executioner? What is there strange in it, when we see the pious but impotent friars of that time trying to free their poor parishioners from the tyranny of the encomenderos by advising them to stop work in the mines, to abandon their commerce, to break up their looms, pointing out to them heaven for their whole hope, preparing them for death as their only consolation?"--(La Indolencia.--Rizal.) [75] "* * * Doubtless if we could see the whole character of the Spanish rule in those decades, we should see that the actual condition of the Filipino had improved and his grade of culture had risen. No one can estimate the actual good that comes to a people in being brought under the power of a government able to maintain peace and dispense justice. Taxation is sometimes grievous, corruption without excuse; but almost anything is better than anarchy. "Before the coming of the Spaniards, it seems unquestionable that the Filipinos suffered greatly under two terrible grievances that afflict barbarous society--in the first place, warfare, with its murder, pillage, and destruction, not merely between tribe and tribe, but between town and town, such as even now prevail in the wild mountains of northern Luzon, among the primitive Malayan tribes; and in the second place, the weak and poor man was at the mercy of the strong and the rich.