Malate, the superior of the calced Augustinians, Fray Hilarion Diez, made a representation; but the archbishop, Don Fray Juan Zulaybar, was interested in complying with the decrees of the Madrid government. In 1826, order was given to return that curacy to the religious, and all [others] that they had, and what was declared to them by the decree of 1776; and that the secularization of any curacy should not be proceeded with except by express order of the king. I am going to insert what Don Tomas de Comyn said about the religious of Filipinas in a book which has not had the appreciation that it merits, and which is already rare. "The valor and constancy with which Legaspi and his worthy companions conquered these natives would have been of little use, had not the apostolic zeal of the missionaries aided in consolidating the undertaking. The latter were the true conquerors--who, without other weapons than their virtues, attracted the good-will of the natives, made them love the Spanish name, and gave the king, as by a miracle, two millions more of submissive and Christian vassals. They were the legislators of the barbarous hordes who inhabited the islands of this immense archipelago, thus realizing with their persuasive mildness the allegorical prodigies of Amphion and Orpheus. "As the means, then, which the missionaries employed to reduce and civilize the Indians, were their preaching and other spiritual instruments, and as, although they were scattered and working separately, they were at the same time subject to the authority of their superiors--who as chiefs, directed the great work of the conversion--the government primitively established in these provinces must necessarily have shared much of the nature of the theocratic; and there is no doubt that it so continued until, the number of the new colonists, as well the effective force of the royal authority, increasing with the lapse of time, it was possible to make the governing system uniform with that which rules in the other ordinary establishments of Espana.