For a very long period the elements of discord among the authorities have been numerous for lack of a special and analogous legislation, enacted with regard to the genius and circumstances of the various peoples inhabiting these islands and the enormous distance separating them from the mother-country. During these latter years, there have been heaped up on this unfavorable foundation the elements emanating from the civil war which has covered the mother-country with mourning, and those of our own political dissensions; the development and tendencies of the revolutionary principles common to all the colonial possessions of the world, and which only force, supported by the interest of self-preservation, is capable of restraining; and lastly the impressions which it has been impossible to keep from transmission to the natives and other races, in proportion as the knowledge of our language becomes general to them, and as they become civilized, and contract our tastes and necessities through the increase of commerce and industry, and observe from anear the confusion resulting from our lack of harmony. This is, in my opinion, the chief cancer of this body politic, and will finish it very speedily unless your Excellency, acting with the discretion and the energy so strongly charged in the laws, and especially in the royal order of April 25, 1837, apply the remedy peremptorily demanded by our situation. [Discord and confusion and the spirit of resistance are rife throughout the provinces. The events of 1820 and 1823, the sedition of Apolinario in October, 1841, and the mutiny of the troops, although different in their origin, all exhibit the "perfidy and ferocity that always accompany movements of color in Ultramar." The prestige of the government is weakened, which formerly was, with religion, the chief foundation of Spanish domination. The political factions that have arisen in the last six years, and which are now perfectly organized, are greatly to blame. The Peninsulars and Spanish Filipinos will end by destroying each other if the fitting remedy is not speedily applied. In a report made to the government after the sedition of Apolinario had been put down, Matta said that the origin of the confraternity consisted "only in the character of the superstition which distinguishes these natives, who most readily believe whatever is presented to them under the veil of religion and of the marvellous; asserted that it became fanaticism as soon as measures were taken against Apolinario and his confreres, and that it became a declared sedition when the unfortunate Ortega attacked them in Ygsaban with more valor than prudence; and that from that time presenting the appearance of a near insurrection in the neighboring provinces, it is to be feared that it would have been converted into a revolution capable of compromising the conservation of these important possessions had not the seditious ones been promptly defeated and severely punished