To facilitate the understanding of the historical materials which will be collected in this series and to lay the foundation for a just and appreciative comparison of the institutions of the Philippines with those of other European dependencies in the tropics, it will be my aim now to bring into relief the distinctive features of the work wrought in the islands which raised a congeries of Malay tribes to Christian civilization, and secured for them as happy and peaceful an existence on as high a plane as has yet been attained by any people of color anywhere in the world, or by any orientals for any such length of time. Such a survey of Philippine life may well begin with a brief account of the government of the islands. This will be followed by a description of the commercial system and of the state of the arts and of education, religion, and some features of social life during the eighteenth century and in the first years of the nineteenth before the entrance of the various and distracting currents of modern life and thought. In some cases significant details will be taken from the works of competent witnesses whose observations were made somewhat earlier or later. This procedure is unobjectionable in describing a social condition on the whole so stationary as was that of the Philippines before the last half century. From the beginning the Spanish establishments in the Philippines were a mission and not in the proper sense of the term a colony. They were founded and administered in the interests of religion rather than of commerce or industry. They were an advanced outpost of Christianity whence the missionary forces could be deployed through the great empires of China and Japan, and hardly had the natives of the islands begun to yield to the labors of the friars when some of the latter pressed on adventurously into China and found martyrs' deaths in Japan. In examining the political administration of the Philippines, then, we must be prepared to find it a sort of outer garment under which the living body is ecclesiastical. Against this subjection to the influence and interests of the Church energetic governors rebelled, and the history of the Spanish domination is checkered with struggles between the civil and religious powers which reproduce on a small scale the mediæval contests of Popes and Emperors.