This is the reason why, after so long a time, there is no other settlement of Spaniards than that of Manila; for in the provinces rarely or never does one see a Spaniard. And, pursuing the same reasoning, after the lapse of so many years we are as strange to the Indians as in the beginning, and even more so, as one can see in the history of the conquest compared with what we all saw during the war. I venerate, as I ought, the justness of the laws, (xxi and xxii, book vi, título iii, and law i, book vii, título iv, of the Recopilación) which prohibit, in the words of the laws, "Spaniards, negroes, mulattoes, or mestizos from living in the villages of the Indians, for it has been found that some of the first are restless fellows, of evil life, robbers, gamblers, and vicious and abandoned people." However, conceding for the present whatever crimes and stigmas these laws impute to the Spaniards, I declare and affirm that, with that ban, the regulars have committed more havoc in America and Filipinas than all the locusts together. These (the laws) the regulars order posted in the tribunal houses of the villages, and obey them with such rigor that if the laws concerning the missionaries were observed in the same way there would be no Christianity equal to that of those countries. Let the evil Spaniard be punished; that is but justice: but the good man cannot and ought not to be punished. The fact is that by means of the said laws the father puts all [the Spaniards] on the same footing, and persecutes and punishes all without distinction until he drives them out of the country. In this way, he is left alone in the village, and without witnesses for what only God knows, and the intelligent Catholics weep; and the Indian grows more alien every day, and becomes hostile to the Spaniard through the instruction which he receives from the father. If the Spaniard is very bad, let him be punished by all means. But, if this is proper, why do they not only not ask the same in regard to the Chinese (who without comparison is worse), but defend, protect, and aid him, on account of trade and whatever else offers? The Spaniard may be a robber, gambler, and vicious; but he is not an idolater, an apostate, or a traitor, a sodomite, and the father of all deceit, as is the Chinese. Nevertheless, the father keeps still about all this and shelters it, and reserves his hootings only for the poor Spaniard, who many times shames the father missionary himself by the regularity of his conduct. What consolation can there be for the Spaniard, prohibited so rigorously from entering the domains of his king, when he sees that the Chinese are not only not hindered from such entrance, but also that they are encouraged; and that they rove about, and come and go, with more freedom than in their own country? [90]