Whether when all is said the general balance-sheet of the Spanish occupation shows more net advantages or disadvantages for the Filipino can be argued plausibly either way. In such a welter of conflicting testimonies the fair-minded will be slow to judge. We shall have to deal again with the question when we come to see how in his mature years José Rizal reacted to it and how his analyses disposed of the commonest of the Spanish claims. Considering it here in its due historic place, we may first remind ourselves that with all her faults Spain had at least one great virtue. She pretended no altruism. On a sordid impulse she took the Islands; she kept them merely as goods. As to this debated point the findings of Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera seem clear. [12] “Those that are wont to depreciate civilization and material development to the point of being inexact,” he says, “cite the voyage of Magellan as an enterprise motived only by religious ideals and by sincerest and purest charity. They misrepresent or forget two incontestible facts. First, the voyage of Magellan was proposed to and accepted by the King of Spain, was approved by his ministers and was carried out by Magellan and his companions for the mercantile purpose of discovering, by sailing westward, a route to the Moluccas and thus wresting from the hands of Portugal the rich commerce that pertained to those, the Spice Islands. This and nothing else was the origin, inspiration and object of that famous expedition. Second, such a purpose could be realized precisely because the Spaniards had achieved a material development that inspired the enterprise and made it possible.” The more honor, then, to the Spaniards, who, having in view only the purposes of a bargain, still added much to the equipment of the Islanders. They erected better buildings than the Filipinos had ever known, made better roads, introduced, with whatsoever cruelties, a better coördination, something like uniform laws, something like a welded and coherent polity; they discouraged piracy when it could no longer serve to subdue the natives; they gave money for schools, whether these were efficient or otherwise; they made some connection, however frail, between the culture of the Islands and that formerly existing in the rest of the world. Yet, aside from the labors of the missionaries, the other boons that followed their red trail are doubtful. Accepting these at the Spanish valuation, the fact still seems to protrude that Spain found an industrious population and managed to leave it indifferent and indolent, [13] found one style of civilization and left another.