Magellan’s people testified that industriously the Filipinos tilled the soil, each man having his own field. It was a wealthy country: food-stuffs were abundant, the natives were well fed. Legaspi’s expedition (about 1591) reported again on their large variety of products, including manufactures of iron, porcelain and cloth. Nowhere was to be noted poverty or savagery; business had attained to an excellent growth. The natives knew something about the rest of the world; there were even among them, before a Spanish ship had ever anchored in Philippine waters, men that knew the Spanish language, having no doubt acquired it in their travels. When Cebu, a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants, was burned with all its food-supplies, its people did not suffer hunger, because the surrounding country quickly and intelligently organized to meet the emergency with abundant relief. All the histories of those first years, in short, abound in long accounts about the industry and agriculture of the natives: mines, gold-washings, looms, farms, barter, naval construction, raising of poultry and stock, weaving of silk and cotton, distilleries, manufactures of arms, pearl fisheries, the civet industry, the horn and hide industry, etc., are things encountered at every step, and, considering the time and the conditions in the Islands, prove that there was life, there was activity, there was movement. [130] He cites de Morga to show that indolence came upon the Filipinos after the Spanish domination and was not conspicuous before that time. De Morga’s seven years as lieutenant-governor of Manila should have instructed him about this, when he says that the natives under the Spaniards lost some of the trades in which they had been most successful. They had even forgotten much about farming, the raising of poultry, of live stock, of cotton, about the weaving of cloth as they used to weave it in their paganism and for a time after their country had been conquered. Other Spaniards of that period bore witness to the same decline; and generations later a German traveler, observing the differences between the habits of the natives under Spanish rule and of those that were still unsubdued, asked if the industrious free peoples would not in their turn become indolent when Christianity and Spain should be forced upon them. “The Filipinos,” Rizal justly concludes from these testimonies, “in spite of the climate, in spite of their few needs (they were less then than now), were not the indolent creatures of our time.” [131] What, then, brought them down from their normal standards of activity and enterprise? A fatal combination of causes, he finds.