"We believe that we have demonstrated that the backwardness of primary instruction in Filipinas is purely relative, and cannot be imputed to the country or to any class, and much less to the ecclesiastical corporations, but to the spirit and letter of the laws of Indias and the royal decrees, which did not succeed in giving legal life in that colony to a service which did not exist, or was not at that time understood, in the mother-country. "We have demonstrated that before 1865, primary instruction, properly so-called, was a vain shadow in the archipelago, since all the duties, all the administrative responsibilities of the department weighed upon public officials incompatible in purity with those duties and responsibilities; upon public officials, who, not being administrative, could and ought to drive out that imposition; upon public officials to whom no element or aid was given, while they were loaded with a leonine contract of an absurd and inconceivable character. And we have demonstrated this with the proof that the true responsibilities, in spite of the express text of the law, have not been exacted, because it was impossible to exact them or even the administrative public officials subject to them. "We have demonstrated that this confusion of principles could and ought to engender a struggle between classes in the eighteenth century, prejudicial at the bottom to primary instruction, whenever, in order to unburden itself mutually of unjust responsibilities, the administrative element threw the responsibilities upon the ecclesiastical element, accusing it of being hostile to the teaching of Castilian; and this element not being able, in its turn, to investigate the accusation, acted in such wise that it appeared to accept it." There are not schools in almost every village, and the identification of the Filipinos with the Spaniards has not progressed so far as has been declared, especially in the matter of intelligence; and "it is not certain that the condition of the institutions of teaching authorizes one to believe the Filipinos capable of making use of political rights so grave and so dangerous as the electoral right, in the form that they ask." [13] ORGANIZED EFFORT OF LEGISLATION [In his preface to his book La instrucción primaria en Filipinas (Manila, 1894) Daniel Grifol y Aliaga, who occupied an official post in the department of public instruction in the General Division of Civil Administration, and was secretary of the administrative board on school questions in the Philippine Islands, speaks as follows.]