This first period of Philippine history has been called its Golden Age. Certainly no succeeding generation saw such changes and advancement. It was the age of Spain's greatest power and the slow decline and subsequent decrepitude that soon afflicted the parent state could not fail to react upon the colony. This decline was in no small degree the consequence of the tremendous strain to which the country was subjected in the effort to retain and solidify its power in Europe while meeting the burden of new establishments in America and the Philippines. That in the very years when Spaniards were accomplishing the unique work of redeeming an oriental people from barbarism and heathenism to Christianity and civilized life, the whole might of the mother-country should have been massed in a tremendous conflict in Europe which brought ruin and desolation to the most prosperous provinces under her dominion, and sapped her own powers of growth, is one of the strangest coincidences in history. Bending every energy for years to stay the tide of change and progress, suppressing freedom of thought with relentless vigor, and quarantining herself and her dependencies against new ideas, conservatism grew to be her settled habit and the organs of government became ossified. Policies of commercial restriction which were justifiable or at least rationally explicable in the sixteenth century lasted on, proof against innovation or improvement, until the eighteenth century and later. Consequently from the middle of the seventeenth century at the period of the rapid rise of colonial powers of France, Holland, and England, the Spanish colonies find themselves under a commercial regime which increasingly hampers their prosperity and effectually blocks their advancement. The contrast between the Spanish possessions and those of the other maritime powers became more marked as time went on. The insuperable conservatism of the home government gave little opportunity for the development of a class of energetic and progressive colonial officials, and financial corruption honeycombed the whole colonial civil service. Such conditions: the absence of the spirit of progress, hostility to new ideas, failure to develop resources, and the prevalence of bribery and corruption in the civil service, insure abundant and emphatic condemnation at the present day for the Spanish colonial system. But in any survey of this system we must not lose sight of the terrible costs of progress in the tropical colonies of Holland, France, and England; nor fail to compare the _pueblos_ of the Philippines in the eighteenth century with the plantations of San Domingo, or Jamaica, or Java, or with those of Cuba in the early nineteenth century when the spirit of progress invaded the island.