The conviction that the government should be pre-eminently military was not held by governors alone. Fernando de los Ríos Coronel, procurator of the Philippines at the Court of Madrid in 1597, urged that the government should be of a military character and that the practice of sending soldiers to govern the Islands should be continued. [458] This opinion was also advanced by Fray Alonso Sánchez, procurator of the Islands at Madrid in 1589, and the emissary whose arguments were chiefly instrumental in bringing about the suppression of the audiencia. [459] Francisco Leandro de Viana, the most efficient fiscal that the Islands ever had, and afterwards councillor of the Indies, recognized the military attributes of the governor's position. He urged a separation of the spheres of the governor and the audiencia, recommending that the former should attend solely to war and government, while the latter should confine itself to matters of justice. [460] This opinion was shared by Juan José Delgado, the able Jesuit historian, who expressed the conviction that the "islands need disinterested military governors, not merchants; and men of resolution and character, not students, who are more fit to govern monasteries than communities of heroes." [461] Delgado recommended that governors of the Philippines should be picked men, selected for their military qualities. The distance and isolation of the colony and its proximity to the great empires of China and Japan made defense the first requisite. Delgado believed that a soldier would be less amenable to bribes and that commercial ventures would be less attractive to him. [462] He recommended that governors should be absolute in affairs of government and war and that all departments and officials of the government should be subject to him. While most of the independent commentators writing on the subject seem to have conceived of the duties of the governor as savoring more of war than of peace, we may note that Manuel Bernáldez Pizarro, for many years a resident and official in the Philippines, writing in 1827, urged that the governors there should be efficient administrators rather than soldiers. It must be remembered, however, that the political conditions in the Philippines during his period were widely different from those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the Islands were constantly exposed to the attack of outside enemies and liable to insurrections within. The chief problems of the nineteenth century were administrative, rather than military. He pointed out that governors had already exhibited too much of the militant spirit in dealing with the problems of government, "not heeding the opinions and customs of the country, but depending on the force of arms," or their asesores. [463] This had the effect of causing dissensions between the governor and audiencia, and the resultant discord had furnished a very bad example for the natives and residents of the colony.