In most of the provinces of these islands the gobernadorcillos are obliged, as are their [subordinate] officials, to accept, without their own choice, appointments to office; and as the cause of their shunning such appointments is the great expense of the year during which they serve, they suffer on this account great injuries in the provinces near Manila. It arouses pity in the hardest hearts to see and know by experience that nearly all the headmen enter office under compulsion from the alcalde-mayor, and, finding themselves perplexed to the utmost by the difficulties in rendering their accounts satisfactorily--either by the duplicate names on the registration lists, or the absences (which usually are many), or by the deaths [of those registered]--on account of the great poverty that is general in the villages these deficiencies fall back on the headmen, who are compelled to pay them or be imprisoned. This measure of imprisonment is carried out with so great rigor that many headmen are in prison, without any hope that they will be able to pay; and there are even cases in which the headmen have been imprisoned for many years for their indebtedness to the tributes in their charge, and, dying in prison, their burial was delayed for several days in order that their relatives might be able to find security for the dead man's tribute and debt. From this your Lordship can infer the excessive severity with which the officials proceed in the collections of the royal tributes; but in this no kind of severity can be proper, nor can it be decreed by the royal and liberal purpose of his Majesty. The works and preparations for the equipment [of ships] which are made on his Majesty's account often make necessary various repartimientos and bandalas for the supplies of oil and rice, and other products, which the provinces furnish; and it is the continual and well-founded complaint from all of them that the amount paid for the said products is not according to their just price and value, but much less, from which follow the most serious wrongs to the poor. Of this precedent many of the alcaldes-mayor avail themselves for [their own] advancement, to judge by their unrighteous profits, with lamentable injury to the poor, which is general and well known in the provinces.