More beneficial for the country, more in accordance with the monastic traditions, more in harmony with the recommendations of our glorious founder, which were practiced by our virtuous ancestors, would have been the opening of schools of arts and crafts. In reality, although the Spanish government established a few of those schools in Manila, Pampanga, and Iloilo, it was so unseasonable that it was unable to gather the fruits which were promised in their founded hopes. Such is the scarcity of Indian artists and artisans, that of the former there are a few sculptors, engravers, and painters, etc., but of the latter, we can assert that almost all the trades are in the hands of the Chinese, and only carpentry, cabinet-making, architecture, masonry, and some other trades, are exercised by Indians, to whom the parish-priest religious taught them because they needed them for their works and constructions. It is known that the ancient monks divided their time among prayer, contemplation, study, and manual work. St. Anthony [115] and his five thousand monks, as well as all those who afterward imitated the monastic life or that of the desert, employed part of their day in labor with their hands, weaving mats, making shoes, oars, boats, or small skiffs, and other similar labors. Our father, St. Augustine, desired his monks to also devote some hours of the day to manual labor. Accordingly, our predecessors did it. It is true, that the spirit of the respective epochs changed the character of the bodily work, but the monastic corporations of Filipinas, which recognized the incapacity of the Indian for science and deplored the pernicious effects of science poorly digested by the natives, if they could not do away with the action of the governments, the influence of opinion, the pressure of the times, would have had to turn aside, by means of their parish-priest religious, the tendency of the Indians to the literary branches, and to have directed that tendency to those branches of pure imitation, for which it is necessary to recognize, and we do that gladly, that the Filipino Indian has exceptional abilities. At the same time that the university was founded, and the colleges provided, schools and workshops ought to have been established for the natives, which would have obtained the preference in those narrow, dull, and lazy minds, with greater benefits to the country and less harm to all. All the monasteries founded by St. Basil the Great [116] had in charge an elementary superior school, and another of arts and crafts joined to it. That ought to be the model of the religious orders in Filipinas, in spite of the governments of the mother country, of the demands of opinion manifestly gone astray on this point, and of the spirit of the epoch which could not have any influence in that country, most especially by their constitution, nature, customs, and government. Had the religious corporations, thoroughly permeated