The pacto de retro is one of the most usual modes in which landed property passes from the possession of the natives to others. A considerable part of Pampanga, Bataan, Manila, Laguna, Batangas, and other provinces has, within a few years, changed owners in this way. Thus also do the inexpressibly cunning and thrifty mestizos usually acquire their landed possessions, the cultivation of which they then improve; but that does not prevent this custom from being detrimental to the public welfare. The native who possesses a piece of land through placing it under cultivation and actually occupying it, but almost never (or very seldom) by purchase from another owner, when he finds himself in pressing need of money offers his land as a pledge for the desired loan from a capitalist; but where he has no document to establish and prove his just claim, no foundation exists for a loan on mortgage under moderate conditions, since the applicant is free from all burdens and obligations. The capitalist therefore looks for his own security in immediate possession. The hypotheca is converted into an antichresis security (prenda pretoria), and as it is with great difficulty (or at least it very seldom occurs), that the Indian who receives the money consents to pay it back at the appointed time, and it is not to the lender's interest to force him to pay it, the result is, that for a sum corresponding to the secured loan--that is, for a half or a third of the value of the security--the piece of land finally changes proprietors. Not seldom it happens that the former proprietor remains on the land as a farmer (that is, as a laborer, in reality as a slave to his debts). Often the Indian is seduced into contracts of this sort by his passion for cockfighting and gambling. The laws of the country require the Indians to live in villages, uniting their farms into hamlets, so that they can be watched over and their tributes collected. In ordinary circumstances, the Indian builds for himself a hut in his field, where he lives while he is working his land, and goes on Saturday evenings to the village in order to hear mass on Sunday. His field has no great value for him, since he can always put another piece of land into cultivation, so great is the surplus of land in all the villages remote from the capital. The facility with which he can abandon one tract to take possession of another is very detrimental to the development of agriculture. A small landed proprietor, who has planted a bit of waste land with rice or potatoes without asking any one's permission, raises an outcry if his garden is entered by a cow or a horse that grazed there years ago; and, since the law stands in his favor, he is allowed to receive from the owner of the cattle payment for often imaginary damages, while the loss from such causes should be borne by him who cultivates a field without enclosing it.