The writer has endeavoured to describe the people as he found them. If his estimate of them is more favourable than that of others, it may be that he exercised more care in declining to do business with, or to admit to his service natives of doubtful reputation; for he found his clients punctual in their payments, and his employés, workmen and servants, skilful, industrious, and grateful for benefits bestowed. If the natives fared badly at the hands of recent authors, the Spanish Administration fared worse, for it has been painted in the darkest tints, and unsparingly condemned. It was indeed corrupt and defective, and what government is not? More than anything, it was behind the age, yet it was not without its good points. Until an inept bureaucracy was substituted for the old paternal rule, and the revenue quadrupled by increased taxation, the Filipinos were as happy a community as could be found in any colony. The population greatly multiplied; they lived in competence, if not in affluence; cultivation was extended, and the exports steadily increased. The natives were secured the perpetual usufruct of the land they tilled, they were protected against the usurer, that curse of East and West. In guaranteeing the land to the husbandman, the "Laws of the Indies" compare favourably with the law of the United States regarding Indian land tenure. The Supreme Court in 1823 decided that "discovery gives the dominion of the land discovered to the States of which the discoverers were the subjects." It has been almost an axiom with some writers that no advance was made or could be made under Spanish rule. There were difficulties indeed. The Colonial Minister, importuned on the one hand by doctrinaire liberals, whose crude schemes of reform would have set the Archipelago on fire, and confronted on the other by the serried phalanx of the Friars with their hired literary bravos, was very much in the position of being between the devil and the deep sea, or, as the Spaniards phrase it "entre la espada y la pared." Even thus the Administration could boast of some reforms and improvements. The hateful slavery of the Cagayanes had been abolished; the forced cultivation of tobacco was a thing of the past, and in all the Archipelago the corvée had been reduced. A telegraph cable connecting Manila with Hong Kong and the world's telegraph system had been laid and subsidized. Telegraph wires were extended to all the principal towns of Luzon; lines of mail steamers to all the principal ports of the Archipelago were established and subsidized. A railway 120 miles long had been built from Manila to Dagupan under guarantee. A steam tramway had been laid to Malabon, and horse tramways through the suburbs of Manila. The Quay walls of the Pasig had been improved, and the river illuminated from its mouth to the bridge by powerful electric arc lights.