Every new arrival proposes a new remedy: one, seasons of prayer, the relics of a saint, the viaticum, the friars; another, a shower-bath; still another, with pretensions to modern ideas, a transfusion of the blood [that is to say, an agricultural colony of Europeans]. It’s nothing, only the patient has eight million indolent red corpuscles [Filipinos]; some few white corpuscles in the form of an agricultural colony will get us out of the trouble.... [128] Yes, transfusion of blood, transfusion of blood! New life, new vitality! Yes, the new white corpuscles that you are going to inject into its veins, the new white corpuscles that were a cancer in another organism, will withstand all the depravity of the system, will withstand the blood-letting that it suffers every day, will have more stamina than all the eight million red corpuscles, will cure all the disorders, all the degeneration, all troubles in the principal organs. Be thankful if they do not become coagulations and produce gangrene; be thankful if they do not reproduce the cancer! He comes then to the central fact he has undertaken to establish. Here it is in the teeth of the plausible assertions of prejudice and the selfish interests that depreciate the natives: Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic, but not a hereditary malady. The Filipinos have not always been what they are. Witnesses to this statement are all the historians of the first years after the discovery of the islands. [129] Long before the coming of the Spaniards the Malayan Filipinos had an organized and outstretching commerce, foreign as well as domestic. A Chinese writer of the thirteenth century has recorded their intimate commercial relations with China, the probity and zeal of the Filipino merchants, the great extent of the trade they carried on. They exported cotton, cloth, pearls, tortoise-shell, betel-nuts, and other commodities the making or preparing or gathering of which meant industry. Pigafetta, a Spanish writer with Magellan, speaks of the great variety of the island products. The natives worked mines, produced and wrought in metals, made ingenious and effective weapons, wove silk into their artistic dresses, and even made false teeth of gold. Their agricultural products were of kinds not to be had without labor. The early Spaniards reported the Filipinos to be daring and indefatigable sailors, whose fleets of merchantmen covered the waters of the Islands and made far voyages, even regularly to Siam. Filipino soldiers fought in the wars of other countries. In 1539 they took part in the wars of Sumatra, and it was their valor that overthrew there a renowned potentate, the sultan of Atchin.