claim no payment nor temporal interest whatever, because this I neither desire nor demand; but I do only my duty, and that I do with all my might. I could send your Majesty good and sufficient proofs of everything which I have said here; for I certify, in all truth, that everyone to whom I have shown these decrees has crossed himself in surprise that there should be a person or persons who would dare to make such malicious reports to your Majesty. It suffices me to say that, if credit be not given me, not much time will pass before this truth will be revealed, beyond all possibility of hiding. May our Lord guard the royal person of your Majesty, and preserve you many years. At Manila, the twenty-fourth of June, one thousand five hundred and ninety. _Fray Domingo_, Bishop of the Filipinas. [_Endorsed_: "To the king our lord, in his royal Council of the Indias. Filipinas. 1590. The bishop; June 24." "Received and read, June 19, of the year 1591. It is unnecessary to respond thereto."] Sire: The letter which your Majesty ordered to be written to me from San Lorenço el Real [i.e., the Escorial], on the seventeenth of August of eighty-nine, I received by the hand of the secretary of the governor, Gomes Perez Dasmarinas, in the village of Tabuco, outside of this city, on the first of June of this year ninety. And for one so beset with afflictions, labors, and difficulties as I am, the favor which your Majesty therein shows me was no little comfort; for I have been freed by it from the pains of conscience, which I continually bore in my soul, at seeing the course of affairs in this land. I held myself obliged by conscience to go in person to inform your Majesty of these matters, as it appeared to me that my letters were accomplishing little, in accord with my hope that your Majesty would at once amend what you knew stood in need of betterment. And this thought gave me more anxiety because, as at other times I have written your Majesty, among the calamities and misfortunes under which this land suffers, none the least is that your Majesty must get information of them through the very men who have destroyed this land, and who work for their private interests rather than for the common good. As the reports are made by such persons, your Majesty can well see the result. Therefore this land has come to its present misery; and the new governor will have no small task if he maintains it, and saves it from ruin, and it is even now all but lost. I am emboldened to say this because hitherto there have been made to your Majesty many perverse reports; and by this ship we have received the decrees, by which it clearly appears that false reports were given your Majesty, because of the provisions made in these decrees, as I shall explain elsewhere.