Many believe that to prohibit the alcaldes from trading would be useless, because they would do it by all means through a second person. There might be some fraud, but there is no doubt but that the evil would be remedied, if not wholly, in great measure, especially if any contract in regard to business interests signed by the alcaldes in Filipinas be declared null and void; for it is very difficult to find in the country persons to whom to hand over a capital and be sure of their good faith, and it is not easy to take them with him from España. And even leaving aside these disadvantages, it will always result from the prohibition that the agent of the alcalde will have to manage his money with great secrecy and as if it were his own, in which case there would be no trouble. The government of India was a few years ago entirely commercial, but since the commerce was prohibited, none of its dependents engage in it. Those who have savings deposit them in one of the banks or in one of the good commercial houses there at four or five per cent, or indeed they buy public stock or speculate with them. Alcaldeships in my opinion ought to be divided into three classes and given to individuals, all of them advocates, who would form a body of civil employes. When an alcaldeship of the first class fell vacant, it would be given to the senior advocate in charge of those of the second class, and so on. The regulation that alcaldes were to remain in the country only six years was founded certainly on the fear that they might acquire a dangerous influence over the country. To the degree that the precaution is not unfounded, the term is very short for so long a distance, for among other obstacles it contains the one that when a chief is beginning to know the country he has to leave it. Fifteen or twenty years would be a more fitting time. In English India all the civil and military employes know the language of the country. That extreme, however advantageous it be, and is, in fact could be brought about here only with difficulty. It would have been easy if one of the dialects of the islands had been established from the beginning as the language of the government and of the courts; for a Visayan learns Tagálog very quickly, and any other idiom of the country, and the same thing is true of the other natives.