The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 51, 1801-1840: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century
History
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 51, 1801-1840: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century
Demarcation line of Alexander VI; Missions -- Philippines; Philippines -- Discovery and exploration; Philippines -- History -- Sources
an example to that neophyte people, while at the same time they make
fortunes for themselves. But even this point needs careful study,
and in regard to it I will present the following reflections.
Of the residence of European Spaniards in Filipinas
By a necessary and inevitable effect of certain causes, physical and
moral, which would take too long to explain here, the Spanish race in
the colonies--or the descendants of Europeans, and mestizos of these,
born and reared there--have from their birth political sentiments
which are entirely opposite to those of their ancestors and other
Europeans. They regard the Indian as an entirely passive being, the
European as a foreigner, and the land as exclusively their own. The
educational institutions which thus far have been founded in the
colonies, with the object of uniting their inhabitants, by means of
enlightening them, under the same principles of religion, morals,
and politics, have not been able to uproot those ideas; on the other
hand, recent events in the Americas have proved that the men who had
most education and acquaintance with the sciences were the party
leaders [corifeos] of revolution and independence. It ought to be
regarded as an incontestable truth that as soon as the Spanish race
in Filipinas reaches a greater number than that of the Europeans,
and with this increase acquires a certain degree of moral force,
a war for independence will be declared; and according to this idea
the educational institutions, when there is not sincerity in the
minds of the persons and in the laws that aim at encouraging this
class of population in the colonies, have a tendency hostile to the
preservation of the royal government in them. This class of Spanish
families is, for another reason, very unfortunate in Filipinas, and may
be regarded as condemned to perpetual slothfulness and misery. They
cannot devote themselves to agriculture, because in that burning
climate only the Indian resists labor so hard; nor to handicrafts,
because the wages which the Indian and the Sangley mestizo alike earn,
which is sufficient to meet their simple needs, is insufficient to
pay for another sort of food and clothing for the Spaniards. For these
same reasons, they cannot occupy themselves in the coasting trade; nor,
finally, in the commerce of the islands on a large scale, for lack of
sufficient capital, since by inheritance is divided among all the sons
the wealth which their European parents left to them; and the practice
of law is there a career to which resort is very unfortunate. All these
causes, added to the lassitude which the climate inspires, maintain
that class of people in such a condition of idleness and poverty,
especially the women, that it has been necessary to establish in
the capital alone six seminaries and beaterios in which to shelter
and educate Spanish girls; and that in the ordinance regarding the
Acapulco galleon his Majesty should grant to the Spanish widows of
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