De San Agustin gives these practices as the reason why the gold-mines of Panay, once “very rich,” had ceased to be worked; the natives preferred to live in poverty rather than to work under the conditions imposed upon them. Exploitation was the business of the Spaniard (from the governor down), and the only business that seems to have been attended to with diligence. To get rich quickly and to get home to spend the money was the real inspiration, an impulse not unknown in other parts of the earth where with his trusty rifle the white man has imposed his peculiar civilization upon his dark-skinned brother. In some places the dark brother under these ministrations lies down and dies; in the Philippines he ceased to work except under the lash or when he was fomenting an insurrection. Reviewing these facts the superior wisdom supposed to lurk mysteriously under the white skin seems to require much explanation. Rizal points out that while in his time the pirates had ceased from troubling and the Dutch colonists were at rest, the other causes of the Filipino uneasiness went on undiminished to a loud chorus of denunciation from the elements responsible for these evils. As usual, names had shifted, the essentials of exploitation were unchanged. The encomendero was no longer the commanding figure in the process of extracting and coining the toilers’ sweat; it was now the local governor, the friar, or both, but the machinery in use was the same. He quotes a French traveler of his own time that observed with astonishment the operations of a typical governor in whose hands “the high and noble functions he performs are nothing more than instruments of gain. He monopolizes all the business and instead of developing the love of work, instead of stimulating the natives to overcome the too natural indolence, he with the abuse of his powers thinks only of destroying all competition that may trouble him or attempt to participate in his profits. It matters little to him that the country is impoverished, without commerce, without industry, if only the governor is quickly enriched.” [137] The whole story deserves the attention of mankind; the debacle and its causes. It is a simulacrum of exploitation and exploitation’s fatal results. To do business in the Philippines, as we understand business, was almost impossible, year of grace 1890, so numerous were the obstacles, documents, papers, signatures, tangles of red tape to be unwound, officers to be bribed. If there is no commerce, how can there be industry? If there is no industry what shall the masses of people do but idle? “The most commercial and most industrious countries have been the freest,” says Rizal; “France, England, and the United States prove this. Hong-Kong, while it is not worth the most insignificant of the Philippines, has more commercial movement than all these Islands together because it is free and well governed.”