When rice is dear, they mix a certain amount of maize with it, and when it is really scarce they eat the seeds of the sorghum (Holcus saccharatus) instead of it. They also make an infusion of these seeds, which is not unlike barley-water. The camote (Impomoea batata) is the principal food of the more uncivilised tribes. All the natives find a great resource in the banana, which the Tagals called saguin. The following varieties are excellent: Bungulan, Lacatan, Ternate, and Tindoc. Wheat was formerly grown in northern Luzon. The late Archbishop of Manila, Fray Pedro Payo, informed me that, when he was a parish priest years ago, he always ate bread made from Philippine flour, which he thought far better and safer than the Californian flour that had superseded it. Tobacco is an important crop in the Philippines, and from the year 1781 was cultivated in Cagayan as a government monopoly. In the villages of that province the people were called out by beat of drum and marched to the fields under the gobernadorcillo and principales, who were responsible for the careful ploughing, planting, weeding, and tending, the work being overlooked by Spanish officials. Premiums were paid to these and to the gobernadorcillos, and fines or floggings were administered in default. The native officials carried canes, which they freely applied to those who shirked their work. In another part of the book I have referred to the series of abuses committed under the monopoly: how the wretched cultivators had to bribe the officials in charge of the scales to allow them the true weight, and the one who classified the leaves, so that he should not reject them as rubbish and order them to be destroyed; in fact, they had to tip every official in whose power it was to do them any injustice. Finally, they received orders on the treasury for the value of their tobacco, which were not paid for months, or, perhaps, for years. They sometimes had to sell their orders for 50 percent of the face value, or even less. However, even the Spanish official conscience can be aroused, and at the end of 1882 the monopoly was abolished. Here it is only right to honourably mention a Spanish gentleman to whom the natives of the Cagayan Valley in a great measure owe their freedom. Don Jose Jimenez Agius was Intendente General de Hacienda, and he laboured for years to bring about this reform, impressed with the cruelty and injustice of this worst form of slavery. The Cagayanes were prohibited from growing rice, but were allowed as an indulgence to plant a row or two of maize around their carefully tilled tobacco-fields. Possibly this circumstance has led the author of the circular I have before quoted to make the extraordinary statement: "Tobacco, as a cultivated crop, is generally grown in the same field as maize." Does he think it grows wild anywhere? In 1883, the "Compañia General de Tabacos de Filipinas" was established in the islands, the capital being raised in Paris and Barcelona.