The first essential to a study of this period is a fair and comprehensive survey of Philippine conditions in the years just preceding--the "old régime," as we may call it, though it was then breaking down in certain particulars. One book alone will serve the student's purpose in this respect; and, whatever others are read, Jagor's [62] is indispensable. Next to him, and in addition to the documents appearing in this series immediately preceding the present volume may be cited the 1842 Informe of the Spanish diplomat in the Orient, Sinibaldo de Mas, and the two-volume treatise of 1846 by the Frenchman, J. Mallat. In certain respects, the latter has closely followed Mas; but his is no mere translated plagiarism, like that of John Bowring (1859), who was only a temporary visitor entertained by Spanish officialdom in Manila. The work of Paul de la Gironière, not his Twenty Years in the Philippines, but his more serious work of 1855 (Aventures d'un gentilhomme breton aux îles Philippines), merits attention as containing the observations of a cultivated foreigner who had the advantage of years of residence in Manila and a neighboring province. As was indicated at the beginning of these notes, to make a thorough study of this period, we should consider it under three heads, viz., economic development, social development, and political development. Not only has there been no comprehensive review of the period as a whole, but there exists no review of it under any one of these heads, nor even any group of writings which can be offered to the inquirer as covering the field of inquiry in any one of these respects. For one thing, we must draw mainly upon Spanish sources of information, official and private, and rare indeed is the Spanish writer who does not either proceed regardless of the economic point of view, or else give entirely secondary consideration to the vital matter concerned in the economic and social progress of a people independently of political forms and governmental influences. The result is that Spanish writers, with them the Filipinos, and to a great extent the writers of Philippine treatises in other languages (drawing hastily upon Spanish sources), have over-emphasized the political history of this Philippine period. Of course, in Spain and the Spanish countries long-standing habit makes it the tendency to look to government for everything, and to think of all amelioration of evils and all incitements to progress as coming from above; while social and economic conditions in the Philippines are such as to emphasize this tendency, the aristocracy of wealth and education standing apart from the masses and being, to the latter, identified in the main with the government, with the "powers above." Nevertheless, it is to be insisted that social and economic progress in the Philippines during the last half-century should be considered separately and studied more particularly than they have been thus far.