The echoes of Spanish partisanship and the talk of nineteenth-century reforms had been heard in the Philippines before the revolution of 1868 and the opening of the Suez Canal, though it was only after these events that the people generally began to be stirred, and then only in the most populous districts. Because the clerical influence was all-powerful anyway, and the whole fabric of Philippine government reposed upon it, Carlism was felt in the islands before 1850 rather as an influence in certain military mutinies and as a source of strife between rival sets of civil officials than as involving primarily a defense of ecclesiastical privilege. Foremost among the events of the decade preceding the revolution of 1868 may be put the return of the Jesuits to the islands in 1859 (allowed by decree of 1852) and the beginning of educational reform with the decrees of 1863 ordering the establishment of a normal school and of primary schools under government control and supported directly by the local governments. [55] The Jesuits had already opened a secondary school in Manila, introducing for the first time something besides merely theoretical instruction in natural sciences, and more modern methods of instruction generally. Their secondary school was subsidized by the city government of Manila, their meteorological observatory was subsidized by the insular government, which also employed them to inaugurate and conduct the new normal school. [56] From this time forward the Society was both directly and indirectly a stimulus to educational progress in the Philippines, was influential both in diffusing more generally primary instruction and in improving methods and widening curriculums of higher instruction. In a large degree, the educational program remained to the end of Spanish rule a pretentious but most superficial thing, more sounding brass than solid achievement. But we may fairly date a new epoch in this respect from the return of the Jesuits and the decrees of 1863.