The soil is fully sufficient—indeed, more than sufficient—to support this population, whose wants are of the most limited character. The land is exceedingly fertile and bears in abundance all tropical products, particularly rice, sugar, and the abaca, a variety of the banana-tree. The fibres of the abaca are employed in making the finest and most delicate fabrics, of which from three to four million dollars’ worth are exported annually. The exports of sugar amount to about four millions and a half, of gold to two millions and a half, and of coffee and tobacco close on to a million and a quarter each. The rice is consumed at home. It forms the staple food of the people, and nearly three million dollars’ worth is imported yearly. The husbandman cannot complain that his toil is inadequately rewarded. A rice plantation will yield a return of at least fifteen per cent.; if he plant his farm with sugar-cane he will realise thirty per cent., if not more. On the other hand, the price of labour is very low. An adult who gains a _real fuerte_ (about thirteen cents) a day, thinks he is doing well. In this archipelago of the Philippines, where races, manners, and traditions are so often in collision, the religious fanaticism of the Spaniards has, more than once, come into conflict with a fanaticism fully as fierce as that of the Mussulman. At a distance of six thousand leagues from Toledo and Granada, the same ancient hatreds have brought European Spaniards and Asiatic Saracens into the same relentless antagonism that swayed them in the days of the Cid and Ferdinand the Catholic. The island of Sulu, on account of its position between Mindanao and Borneo, was the commercial, political, and religious centre of the followers of the Prophet, the Mecca of the extreme Orient. From this centre they spread over the neighbouring archipelago. Dreaded as merciless pirates and unflinching fanatics, they scattered everywhere terror, ruin, and death, sailing in their light proas up the narrow channels and animated with implacable hatred for those conquering invaders, to whom they never gave quarter and from whom they never expected it; constantly beaten in pitched battle, they as constantly took again to the sea, eluding pursuit of the heavy Spanish vessels, taking refuge in bays and creeks where no one could follow them, pillaging isolated ships, surprising the villages, massacring the old men, leading away the women and the adults into slavery, pushing the audacious prows of their skiffs even up to within three hundred miles of Manila, and seizing every year nearly four thousand captives.