Worse than all the others and the culminating cause, this was. The Filipino’s spirit sank under the alien yoke. It appears that he no longer cared; what was there to care for? Spanish polity offered him in exchange for his lost liberty here only the prospect of salvation in another life. The bargain was not stimulating. Salvation depended in no degree upon terrestrial industry; the idle were saved equally with the active. We think, besides, that a racial spring was touched too fine to be suspected by the trampling soldiers that Spain sent over to walk upon these bowed necks. The Malay responds to kindness; under blows, compulsion, or superior brute force he retires within himself into a sullen apathy. This now fell upon the native wherever the Spanish flag waved and to the extent that the Spanish methods prevailed. To go beyond Rizal’s able treatise and to record what even he could not have expected, the Americans, when their day came, noted with astonishment that the Filipinos of the South were more active, industrious, and resilient than their brothers in the North, although this was to reverse the usual order of nature. Some Americans ascribed the Southerner’s advantage to his religion and credited to Mohammedanism a virtue it hardly possessed. The real explanation, which abundantly confirms Rizal’s thesis, is that the Southerner had never gone under the lethal yoke of the Spanish conception of society. Even when actual slavery was not enforced upon the native, the returns for his labor and efforts were so meager and uncertain he had no longer an incentive to work. There was a kind of padrone or contractor called the encomendero to whom the people of a district were virtually delivered over that he might extract from them all available profit and steer back to Spain with both pockets stuffed with the gold he had wrung from their toil. Usually this person had no other interest than to make his exit as early as possible and as heavily laden, to the which ends conscience should be no hindrance. He robbed the natives of produce where he could not steal labor; he used false measures in buying and selling. The unhappy Filipinos had no appeal. In one town where a particularly brutal encomendero exacted additional tribute by using a steelyard twice as long as it should have been, they rose and tried to kill him—it appears, unfortunately, without success. [136]