[48] Spanish traders being too few, and utterly untrained in the ways of competition, and Spanish ships being scarce in the Orient, foreign traders and foreign ships gathered the bulk of the business even in the face of useless and annoying restrictions, until finally these foreigners had broken down the barriers sufficiently to enter and take a hand in actively fostering agricultural development in the Philippines. Hence, the opening of the Suez Canal only gave a new turn and a great acceleration to a movement that, as regards Philippine internal development, may more logically be dated from 1815, the year of the last voyage of the galleon. In one sense, indeed, the opening of the Suez Canal tended to lessen, relatively, the influence of foreign business and banking houses in the development of the Philippines, in that it led to direct steamship connection with Spain, awakening interest at home in this hitherto neglected colony and bringing to the Philippines for the first time in three hundred years more than a mere handful of Spaniards. After the early adventurers and encomenderos had disappeared, the number of Spanish civilians in private life was few indeed, numbering the favored merchants who had shares in the galleon trade-monopoly, and an occasional planter, descended perhaps from a family of encomenderos rooted in the Philippines, or being an ex-army officer who had remained in the islands. Moreover, the small army maintained in the islands was to a considerable extent officered by Mexican creoles or half-castes, its soldiers being mostly Filipinos and Mexicans. The list of civilian officials was itself small, the governor (alcalde mayor) of a province combining with his executive functions and (very commonly) his command of the troops garrisoned therein, the powers of a superior judge for both civil and criminal jurisdictions. The members of the religious orders constituted the largest numerically, as well as the most influential, element of Spaniards in the Philippines. Outside of this class, the Spanish population of the archipelago, always very small even in its total, was mostly gathered in a few places, Manila containing by far the greater proportion. The general rule in the provinces was that only one white man, the friar-curate, was to be found in a town, a number of the smaller towns, moreover, not having a friar-curate, but a Filipino secular priest. [49] The movement of Spaniards to the Philippines had, indeed, begun before the opening of the Suez Canal. The inauguration of the Spanish-Philippine Bank in Manila in 1852 afforded evidence much less, however, of the growth of Spanish commercial interests than of a desire to foster the growth of such interests by supplying credit facilities more nearly up to date than those hitherto available (at ruinous rates of interest) from the old "pious funds" [obras pías] of various sorts, especially since the foreign trading houses were virtually performing the functions of