And for their patriotic significance. Apart from their essentially religious character, the regulars of the archipelago have another significance that makes them odious to the separatists. They are the only permanent and deeply-rooted Spanish institution in the islands, with a suitable and rigorous organization, perfectly adapted to these regions. While the other Peninsulars live here in the fulfilment of their duty more or less time, as is convenient to their private interests, and with no other bond that follows them to Filipinas than their own convenience, being ignorant of the language of the country and having no other relations with the natives than those of a superficial intercourse, we religious come here to sacrifice our whole life. We form as it were a net of soldiers of religion and of the fatherland in the archipelago, scattered even to the remotest villages of the islands. Here we have our history, our glories, the ancestral house, so to speak, of our family. Bidding an eternal farewell to our native soil, we condemn ourselves voluntarily, by virtue of our vows, to live forever consecrated to the moral, religious, and political education of these natives, for whose defense we have in all ages waged campaigns, which, without the pious boastings [crudezas] and exaggerations of Las Casas, [192] have constantly reproduced in Filipinas the figure of the immortal defender of the American natives. Craftiness of the insurgent leaders of filibusterism. In this point it must be confessed that the insurgent leaders of filibusterism are logical. "Do the regulars," they have asked themselves, "who are the Spaniards most deeply-rooted and most influential in the country, and the most beloved and respected by the people, agree to, or will they ever agree to our projects? Then let us petition their expulsion, and their disappearance in one way or another. If we do not succeed in it, let us destroy them. Since there are many peninsulars, who, influenced by modern errors or carried away by ignorance or evil passion, lend ear to those who inveigh against the religious, let us inveigh loudly. Let us form a powerful cry against them. Let us conspire in lodges and political clubs. Let us petition at any risk measures looking to the lowering and destruction of the regular clergy. Those peninsulars will listen to us without us having any fear that they will hold us as filibusters. It will be said of us that we are liberals, that we are reformers, that we are democrats, that we are even masons and free-thinkers: but that does not matter. Many peninsulars are the same. They also inveigh against the religious. They also petition freedom of thought, freedom of the press, freedom of association, secularization of education, ecclesiastical disamortization, suppression of the privileges of the clergy. They also inveigh against the terrible theocracy, and do not cease to defame the religious and to impute to them all sorts of crimes."