The Spanish aristocrats in the Islands contributed to the general impulse to indolence. They posed as superior persons and exalted models, yet they did no work and despised all that labored. The vice of gambling, which the Spaniards deliberately encouraged in the natives, added to the general stagnation; not only cock-fighting (officially protected and a source of government revenue) but other gaming. It is a passion to which the Malay blood seems peculiarly susceptible, as the Chinese are to opium-smoking. Under government encouragement gambling became almost a native obsession wherever the Spanish rule was strongest. Having taught them to gamble, the Spaniards denounced the Filipinos as a race of gamblers; but this was again a species of injustice of which the Spaniard had no monopoly. It is easy to instance white communities that refuse to allow colored men to perform any but menial offices and then despise them as a race of menials. As to this practice in the United States of America, for example, reference may profitably be had to the pointed comments of Mr. George Bernard Shaw. Agriculture is the natural business of the Islands. Hebetudinous government in Rizal’s time did nothing to encourage or even to defend it. The farmer went his way, preyed upon by the most villainous system of interest pillage so far disclosed in human affairs, [138] and the Government gave him never so much as a friendly word. When crops failed, when typhoons wrought huge destruction, when the plague of locusts turned some great green valley to naked desolation, the Government looked on indifferently and sent another tax collector. It would not even seek a market for the insular products. “Add to this lack of material inducement,” says Rizal, “the absence of moral stimulus, and you will see how he who is not indolent in that country must needs be a madman or at least a fool.” The injustice with which the native was treated everywhere, merely because of his birth and his color, atrophied his energies; such were the windings and curlings of the vile snake of racial antipathy. Let the Filipino with whatsoever effort achieve whatsoever prize in fair competition with a white man, and the wreath he had won by worth would be snatched from him by trickery or plain theft. Why, then, should he strive? But still worse were the evils of what was called by way of euphony the educational system maintained under this dispensation.