Chapter 9

BY JAMES A. LEROYThe “modern era” in the Philippine Islands—which indeed, in certain respects, did not really begin until after the establishment of American rule—coincides roughly with the last half of the nineteenth century. It is impossible to assign arbitrarily any date as precisely that of its commencement. One will be inclined to lay stress upon this or that circumstance, and to choose this or that date, as he places importance mostly upon matters connected with economic development, or with social progress, or with political reforms. The truth is that there was advancement in all these lines, as also there were hindrances to progress in each of them, and that only by surveying it in each of these phases of its development can we come to understand in how considerable a degree Philippine society was remade during this period.Looking primarily at the expansion of trade and foreign relations, we might date the new era in the Philippines from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Yet that event, while greatly stimulating trade and agricultural development, did not inaugurate themodern era in that respect. The presence of foreign traders, introducing agricultural machinery and advancing money on crops, was the chief stimulus to the opening of new areas of cultivation, the betterment of methods of tilling and preparing crops for the market, and the consequent growth of exports; indeed, one may almost say that certain American (United States) and English trading houses nurtured the sugar and hemp crops of the Philippines into existence. And their pioneer work in this respect was done before the opening of the Suez Canal brought the Philippines into vital touch with Europe by means of steam navigation—American influence being then, in fact, already on the wane. One might more readily, from this point of view, assign importance as a date to 1856, when Iloilo (and soon after Sebú) was opened to foreign trade (hitherto confined to one port of entry, Manila) and foreigners were permitted to open business houses outside of Manila and to trade and traffic in the provinces; or, even, to 1859, when the first steam sugar-mill was set up in Negros island. But the entering wedge had been driven by foreign traders into Spain’s policy of exclusion even before the cessation of the galleon-trade, the monopoly which confined Manila’s trade to a few Spaniards resident there and their backers in Mexico, who saw in Manila only a depot of exchange for Chinese and other Oriental commodities, and commonly despised the idea of giving any attention to the crude products of the Philippines or endeavoring to stimulate Philippine agriculture and exportation properly so called. From the date when this ruinous monopoly expired with the occupation by Mexican insurgents of Acapulco, the port to whichthe galleons brought their silks, cottons, etc., attention was perforce turned upon Philippine products as a source of trade, and Philippine exports began to grow.1Spanish 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 beingan 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.2The movement of Spaniards to the Philippineshad, indeed, begun before the opening of the Suez Canal. The inauguration of the Spanish-Philippine Bank in Manila in 1852 afforded evidencemuch 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 banks in their ways of extending credit to agriculturists, or were being aided by private bankers associated with them.3The loss of Spain’s colonies on the mainland, besides turning many loyal or proscribed Spaniards toward Cuba and the Peninsula, had in a small degree encouraged such emigration to the more distant Philippines, and the history of certain of the most prominent Spanish families in the Philippines dates from the decades immediately following the political upheavals in Spanish-America. In the main, however, such immigrants as came to the Philippines in this way were government employees who, being ousted from the American continent, must rest as pensioners on the home government if the latter could not find them places in the Spanish Antilles or the Philippines. Such immigration, it need not be said, was not altogether an unmixed good; and some of the various “administrative reforms” designed for the Philippines in the fifties and sixties showed the influence of this pressure to provide places for officeholders with a claim on the government. The number of Spaniards who came to the Philippines on their private initiative was very small until directsteam communication with the Peninsula was opened, and though it never became large during the last thirty years of Spanish rule, Spanish commercial interests in the islands gained relatively on those of foreigners after the opening of the canal. A direct steamship line from Barcelona was soon established under subsidy. The domestic shipping laws of Spain were even more fully extended over the Philippine archipelago, and the already existing preferential customs duties and regulations aided the growth of Spanish trade in the islands thereafter more than they had done before.4The opening of the Suez Canal and the entry of Spaniards into the archipelago in greater numbers marks an epoch even more in a social way than as respects trade and commerce. And the new social era then inaugurated was closely allied thenceforward with the discussion of political reforms, with the essay of some such reforms on the part of government, and finally with an organized Filipino propaganda for greater social and political freedom. When the Spanish revolution of 1868 occurred the Philippines were still far remote from the mother-country, with its disturbing agitations, wherein violence and utopianism were destined to prepare the way for the reaction; the new governor-general sent out by the reformers who expelled Isabel II came to Manila by the Cape of Good Hope, the old voyage which took four months or more to bring even the news of what was going on in Spain. The Constitution of 1868 had been proclaimed in the Philippinesbut a few months back when, early in 1870, the first steamer arrived direct from Barcelona via Suez. Thenceforward, the capital of this remote Spanish outpost in the Orient was but one month distant from Barcelona for mail and passengers; soon after ocean cables to the ports of China (eventually extended to Manila) put the Philippines in daily touch, as it were, with important occurrences in Spain. The old régime of slumbering exclusion, already breaking down under the influence of trade, was ended.The influx of Spaniards from this time forward had in it, from the first to the last, more of “politics” than of individual initiative. More of them came out to take governmental positions than to engage in trade, or, less frequently, in agriculture, though many who lost their places by changes in administration stayed in the islands and occupied themselves in private enterprises. It was the “reformers” of the revolutionary period in Spain who first undertook to make a “clean sweep” of the offices in the Philippines, putting in their friends. Administrative reforms, and to a considerable extent a change of officials, was needed; but a more or less complicated bureaucracy was introduced along with some laudable reforms, and there was then inaugurated the pernicious custom of changing the lower Spanish officials in the Philippines, as well as the higher, with every change of administration in Spain—the “dance and counter-dance of employees,” as one writer has named it.5There is undoubtedly some truth in the charge made by the defenders of the Philippine friars that the entry of Spaniards, especially officeholders, during the latter part of the nineteenth century lowered the prestige of the Spanish name in the islands, and was a cause (the friars would make it the chief or sole cause) of the discontent, eventually the rebellion, of the Filipinos. Administrative reforms, some of which were highly beneficial, such as the abolition of the tobacco monopoly6and the reorganization of provincial governments, nevertheless had the chief effect, in the eyes of the Filipinos, of raising direct taxes and of burdening them with the support of new sets of officeholders, whose presence was not infrequently distasteful. By far too large a proportion of these officeholders, who came out to an unhealthful clime to take places which were miserably paid and might be taken away from them in two or three years, were concerned rather with the “pickings” than with the duties attached to their offices. Some were openly contemptuous of the natives, and thus helped to destroy the former good feeling between the races. The grievance of the friars was, however, far more frequently vented upon a class of Spanish officeholders quite different from those who gained odium through tyranny or corruption or both; the special hostility of the friars was visited upon their countrymen who gained great popularity withthe natives, because of their more democratic beliefs and manners. Such men were commonly of the anti-clerical party in Spain, and the bitterest element in home politics was thus transferred to the Philippines. One may recognize that such men were all too commonly quixotic and indiscreet, as Spanish Liberals notoriously are. To refuse to kiss the friar’s hand, and to speak contemptuously of him and all his kind (perhaps even to stir up scandal against them), may have seemed to such men a very natural and proper method of asserting their political beliefs and their sense of individual independence; yet the friars have rightly said that such actions, and the many things growing out of them, struck a blow at the very foundations of the structure upon which Spanish supremacy had been built in the islands. Hence it was that not infrequently a more far-seeing Liberal, after some years of experience in the islands, would come out as a defender of the Philippine friars and their views as to the political régime to be maintained there; he would perhaps explain it by saying that he was “a Liberal at home, but in the Philippines all ought to be Spaniards and only that.”Even if we give full faith to the complaints of the friars’ defenders on this score—and their representations of the last half of the nineteenth century are very one-sided—even if we admire and accept as truthful the picture they draw of a sort of Eden in the Philippines back of 1860, and particularly in the two preceding centuries, wherein the humble Filipino lived practically free of taxation, exempt from abuses from above, guileless of serious crime, and watched over by a paternal superior who directed his steps to the eternal bliss of the other world: still,accepting the friars’ case at its face value, it is plain that they asked for and expected the impossible when they fought to perpetuate medieval conditions in a country opened to trade and commerce and to modern thought and contact with the world at large. We may doubt that ignorance was bliss even in the “good old days;” but it was certain that those days must come to an end when the Philippines were awakened by steamships, telegraph lines, newspapers, and books (even though under clerical and political censorship). Clear-sighted prophecy was that of Feodor Jagor, the German scientist who traveled through the Philippines just before 1860, and who, though he found much to praise in the old paternal régime, said:“The old situation is no longer possible of maintenance, with the changed conditions of the present time. The colony can no longer be shut off from the outside. Every facility in communication opens a breach in the ancient system and necessarily leads to reforms of a liberal character. The more that foreign capital and foreign ideas penetrate there, the more they increase prosperity, intelligence, and self-esteem, making the existing evils the more intolerable.”7The echoes of Spanish partisanship and the talk of nineteenth-century reforms had been heard in the Philippines before the revolution of 1868 and theopening 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.8The 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.9From 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.In another way the return of the Jesuits is to be associated with the beginning of a new era in the islands. They were not permitted to resume the parochial benefices which their order had held priorto their expulsion in 1768, but were to engage in missions in Mindanao and in educational and scientific work. Their resumption of the old missions in Mindanao was accomplished at the expense of the order of Recollects, which was thereupon given the provision of certain parishes, including several wealthy parishes in Luzon, which had for greater or less intervals been held by the more prominent and able of the secular priests, Filipinos of pure native blood or half-castes.10The cabildo of the Manila cathedral, including the more notable of the secular priests, and the curates of the few conspicuous parishes (in central Luzon) which it fell to the lot of the secular clergy to occupy, had come to regard these benefices as their property, in a “corporate” sense, as it were, quite as each religious order felt that certain parishes, or whole provinces “belonged” to it as an order. It is significant that here, for the first time, one notes a feeling of solidarity among the Filipino secular clergy—for the demonstration of which feeling one has looked in vain, except in isolated cases, prior to that time, above all in connection with the effort (1770) of the Spanish archbishop Santa Justa y Rufina, to secularize the parishes and displace the friars with native priests. Only the bolder of the Filipino priests expressed the complaints of their fellows, even now, and open talk of a campaign for secularization of all the parishes wasscarcely heard until some courage was infused into these few and the small party of Filipino Liberals (mostly half-castes or Spaniards of Philippine birth) after the revolution of 1868 and the arrival of a governor-general who permitted public demonstrations in behalf of Liberal reforms. From the time of the execution of three Filipino priests for alleged complicity in the Cavite mutiny of 187211—the proofs of whose guilt the public has not seen, if the military courts which tried them did—there was added to the campaign for the expulsion of the friars12on account of their landed estates and of their stifling of intellectual freedom the demand that Philippine parishes be entrusted to a native priesthood. Only since American occupation has the demand for anationalclergy found full expression, but it had for a quarter of a century before that been an important phase of the sentiment of nationality, a sentiment that was growing steadily, though slowly and in the main secretly until 1896 in the Tagálog provinces and 1898 in the archipelago at large.The reactionary party had partially regained theupper hand when the mutiny occurred in Cavite in 1872. Instead of treating it as its comparative insignificance demanded, and as prudent statecraft would have counseled, they employed it as an excuse for vengeful violence, as a means for resuming full control of Philippine policy, and continued for twenty-five years thereafter to point to it as their most useful “horrible example,” as an evidence of what must follow the inauguration, even in the slightest degree, of a liberal policy in the government of the islands. Rightly or wrongly, the people of that and the succeeding generation in the Tagálog provinces, and to a less degree in the others, were schooled in racial resentment through the belief that the native priests had been done to death, upon a pretext of manufactured evidence, by the malevolence of the friars. The proscription of the more conspicuous of the then small Liberal element among the Filipinos had consequences of no less importance. Those who were sent into exile for alleged complicity in the Cavite mutiny were certain conspicuous half-castes and a few Spaniards of Philippine birth or of long residence in the islands. The native element proper was for the moment scarcely affected, even in Manila and its environs; and no one has ever demonstrated that the few more advanced men of Spanish blood who were moved by the revolution in Spain to take a stand for Liberal measures in the Philippines were engaged in anything but legitimate political discussion, or indeed that they talked of going so far in this direction in the Philippines as had already been done in the Peninsula. These proscriptions powerfully stimulated the idea of a “Filipino cause.” Some of the exiles escaped toHongkong, and there founded a Filipino colony. Others settled eventually in Europe; the more progressive and ambitious Filipinos began sending their sons to Madrid and Paris for education in contact with the thought of modern Europe; and in these capitals, and later in Japan, little Filipino colonies became centers of discussion of political reforms, and through letters, publications in the Liberal periodicals of Spain, and finally through their own books and periodicals of propaganda, greatly influenced the growth of a public opinion in the backward society of the Philippines. Spanish Masonry gradually extended the circle of its initiations and of its secret operations (necessarily secret to an extraordinary degree) in the islands. At first only Spaniards had been admitted to a few lodges, then mestizos were admitted, and finally natives of some degree of education without regard to race. In the eighties and nineties, there seems to be no doubt, a sort of independent Grand Lodge in Spain (asserted by some to be of spurious Masonry),13managed by zealous Liberal propagandists with whom certain of the Filipino propagandists in Barcelona had associated themselves, directed the active organization of lodges in as many Filipino towns as contained favorable material, for the purpose of fostering in the islands a demand for political reforms, of distributing the literature of the propaganda, and of collecting funds to support the campaign in Spain for the extension of greater social, political, and religious freedom to the Filipinos. The Spaniards associated with this movement were for the most part men of no standing and quixotic visionaries. Some of theFilipinos who figured in the propaganda abroad were quite as unpractical, being inexperienced and excitable youths, full of jealousy of each other, while some few of them, moreover, misused the funds raised for them by their fellows at home. The whole program for “assimilation” of the Philippines to Spain as a province of the Peninsula, giving a distant archipelago in the Orient with its widely different population, social status, and economic conditions and needs, a government just like that of European Spain was manifestly absurd and inimical to the interests of the Filipinos themselves, not to add that its realization was an utter impossibility. But these things should not have been allowed to hide the justice of the demand for such reforms and privileges as were practical and compatible with the needs and conditions of the archipelago and its people: for a spokesman or spokesmen of the Philippines in the Cortes at Madrid; for reforms in judiciary and fundamental laws, not blindly copied from those promulgated in Spain but adapted to the Philippines, or if necessary especially drafted for them; for administrative reforms, above all as to the civil service and looking toward an increasing recognition of the native element in government, and toward a decentralization that should be gradually extended as far as deeply rooted habits and long-standing customs would permit; and, finally, for greater individual and social freedom, both in a political and a religious sense. This last was really the crux of the whole situation, so far as the continuance of Spanish sovereignty should not come to depend purely on force. In the old days it had rested on religious teachings, on the friars in fact, with thesense of race-prestige in the background to support Spanish authority. It was futile for the friars to cry out for a return to the old conditions, and to denounce as dangerous any reforms in the direction of freedom of thought or of speech; the pages of history could not be turned back. The idea of future independence from Spain was, to be sure, in the minds of some at least of the Filipino propagandists. But their present campaign was for greater political liberty, and the measures they advocated, and even the methods they employed almost to the last, would have been legitimate in any free country—were, in fact, legitimate even then in the Peninsula itself, where they could advocate publicly what they must whisper among their fellows at home. The very fact that such organizations as these spurious Masonic lodges were under the ban, and that even to be suspected of belonging thereto was to invite the danger of deportation from home as a “conspirator,” is sufficient proof of the essential righteousness of the propagandists’ cause. And the campaign that began with a few Spanish-Filipinos in Manila and gradually extended to the more independent men of education in the provinces eventually, under half-educated leaders of the small middle class, reached in a perverted form the masses themselves, especially in central Luzon, and found expression at last in violence and an outburst of race-hatred. The Katipunan was not Masonic, as the friars asserted, only copying some of the Masonic formulæ; but it was a natural and logical outgrowth of the smothering of what had been a legitimate movement for the expression of Filipino reform sentiment.The title to these notes has indicated the year 1860 as marking in a general way the opening of the modern era in the Philippines, without reference to any one particular event. It is proposed to give here, briefly, such further notes as will afford a working bibliography on this period, while calling attention to some subjects and certain points that are commonly disregarded in the bibliographies and published works dealing with the last years of Spanish rule in the Philippines. No pretense to completeness is made. The aim is to call attention, under their proper heads, to the more distinctly useful (or, in some cases, the more unreliable, and hence to be avoided) titles already listed in the Philippine bibliography that is to be most readily obtained, and which is also the most complete and satisfactory work of this sort, viz., that published at Washington in 1903;14and also to supplement these titles with others there unnoticed and with other data not easily found. In the main, only such works are cited as the writer has himself consulted, though in some cases the notes or recommendations of others have been followed.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 othersare read, Jagor’s15is indispensable. Next to him, and in addition to the documents appearing in this series immediately preceding the present volume may be cited the 1842Informeof 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 hisTwenty 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 writerwho 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.It need hardly be said, for another thing, that it is not possible to make an absolute separation of this subject under the headings thus indicated. Such a thing cannot be done with any people in any period of history. In this particular case, one need only mention the Religious Question, with its phases as a contest between friars and native clergy, as a demand for modern freedom of thought and speech, and as an agrarian question, to show at once that matters social, economic, and political are here interwoven.So also the Spanish administration cannot be considered wholly apart from its bearing upon economic and social as well as purely political matters. No rigid classification is possible, but the student who approaches the history of this period—which, apart from its own interest, has had ever since 1898 the most vital bearing upon a public question of great importance in the United States today—will avoid confusion by giving consideration to these separate points of view.

BY JAMES A. LEROY

The “modern era” in the Philippine Islands—which indeed, in certain respects, did not really begin until after the establishment of American rule—coincides roughly with the last half of the nineteenth century. It is impossible to assign arbitrarily any date as precisely that of its commencement. One will be inclined to lay stress upon this or that circumstance, and to choose this or that date, as he places importance mostly upon matters connected with economic development, or with social progress, or with political reforms. The truth is that there was advancement in all these lines, as also there were hindrances to progress in each of them, and that only by surveying it in each of these phases of its development can we come to understand in how considerable a degree Philippine society was remade during this period.

Looking primarily at the expansion of trade and foreign relations, we might date the new era in the Philippines from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Yet that event, while greatly stimulating trade and agricultural development, did not inaugurate themodern era in that respect. The presence of foreign traders, introducing agricultural machinery and advancing money on crops, was the chief stimulus to the opening of new areas of cultivation, the betterment of methods of tilling and preparing crops for the market, and the consequent growth of exports; indeed, one may almost say that certain American (United States) and English trading houses nurtured the sugar and hemp crops of the Philippines into existence. And their pioneer work in this respect was done before the opening of the Suez Canal brought the Philippines into vital touch with Europe by means of steam navigation—American influence being then, in fact, already on the wane. One might more readily, from this point of view, assign importance as a date to 1856, when Iloilo (and soon after Sebú) was opened to foreign trade (hitherto confined to one port of entry, Manila) and foreigners were permitted to open business houses outside of Manila and to trade and traffic in the provinces; or, even, to 1859, when the first steam sugar-mill was set up in Negros island. But the entering wedge had been driven by foreign traders into Spain’s policy of exclusion even before the cessation of the galleon-trade, the monopoly which confined Manila’s trade to a few Spaniards resident there and their backers in Mexico, who saw in Manila only a depot of exchange for Chinese and other Oriental commodities, and commonly despised the idea of giving any attention to the crude products of the Philippines or endeavoring to stimulate Philippine agriculture and exportation properly so called. From the date when this ruinous monopoly expired with the occupation by Mexican insurgents of Acapulco, the port to whichthe galleons brought their silks, cottons, etc., attention was perforce turned upon Philippine products as a source of trade, and Philippine exports began to grow.1Spanish 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 beingan 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.2The movement of Spaniards to the Philippineshad, indeed, begun before the opening of the Suez Canal. The inauguration of the Spanish-Philippine Bank in Manila in 1852 afforded evidencemuch 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 banks in their ways of extending credit to agriculturists, or were being aided by private bankers associated with them.3The loss of Spain’s colonies on the mainland, besides turning many loyal or proscribed Spaniards toward Cuba and the Peninsula, had in a small degree encouraged such emigration to the more distant Philippines, and the history of certain of the most prominent Spanish families in the Philippines dates from the decades immediately following the political upheavals in Spanish-America. In the main, however, such immigrants as came to the Philippines in this way were government employees who, being ousted from the American continent, must rest as pensioners on the home government if the latter could not find them places in the Spanish Antilles or the Philippines. Such immigration, it need not be said, was not altogether an unmixed good; and some of the various “administrative reforms” designed for the Philippines in the fifties and sixties showed the influence of this pressure to provide places for officeholders with a claim on the government. The number of Spaniards who came to the Philippines on their private initiative was very small until directsteam communication with the Peninsula was opened, and though it never became large during the last thirty years of Spanish rule, Spanish commercial interests in the islands gained relatively on those of foreigners after the opening of the canal. A direct steamship line from Barcelona was soon established under subsidy. The domestic shipping laws of Spain were even more fully extended over the Philippine archipelago, and the already existing preferential customs duties and regulations aided the growth of Spanish trade in the islands thereafter more than they had done before.4

The opening of the Suez Canal and the entry of Spaniards into the archipelago in greater numbers marks an epoch even more in a social way than as respects trade and commerce. And the new social era then inaugurated was closely allied thenceforward with the discussion of political reforms, with the essay of some such reforms on the part of government, and finally with an organized Filipino propaganda for greater social and political freedom. When the Spanish revolution of 1868 occurred the Philippines were still far remote from the mother-country, with its disturbing agitations, wherein violence and utopianism were destined to prepare the way for the reaction; the new governor-general sent out by the reformers who expelled Isabel II came to Manila by the Cape of Good Hope, the old voyage which took four months or more to bring even the news of what was going on in Spain. The Constitution of 1868 had been proclaimed in the Philippinesbut a few months back when, early in 1870, the first steamer arrived direct from Barcelona via Suez. Thenceforward, the capital of this remote Spanish outpost in the Orient was but one month distant from Barcelona for mail and passengers; soon after ocean cables to the ports of China (eventually extended to Manila) put the Philippines in daily touch, as it were, with important occurrences in Spain. The old régime of slumbering exclusion, already breaking down under the influence of trade, was ended.

The influx of Spaniards from this time forward had in it, from the first to the last, more of “politics” than of individual initiative. More of them came out to take governmental positions than to engage in trade, or, less frequently, in agriculture, though many who lost their places by changes in administration stayed in the islands and occupied themselves in private enterprises. It was the “reformers” of the revolutionary period in Spain who first undertook to make a “clean sweep” of the offices in the Philippines, putting in their friends. Administrative reforms, and to a considerable extent a change of officials, was needed; but a more or less complicated bureaucracy was introduced along with some laudable reforms, and there was then inaugurated the pernicious custom of changing the lower Spanish officials in the Philippines, as well as the higher, with every change of administration in Spain—the “dance and counter-dance of employees,” as one writer has named it.5

There is undoubtedly some truth in the charge made by the defenders of the Philippine friars that the entry of Spaniards, especially officeholders, during the latter part of the nineteenth century lowered the prestige of the Spanish name in the islands, and was a cause (the friars would make it the chief or sole cause) of the discontent, eventually the rebellion, of the Filipinos. Administrative reforms, some of which were highly beneficial, such as the abolition of the tobacco monopoly6and the reorganization of provincial governments, nevertheless had the chief effect, in the eyes of the Filipinos, of raising direct taxes and of burdening them with the support of new sets of officeholders, whose presence was not infrequently distasteful. By far too large a proportion of these officeholders, who came out to an unhealthful clime to take places which were miserably paid and might be taken away from them in two or three years, were concerned rather with the “pickings” than with the duties attached to their offices. Some were openly contemptuous of the natives, and thus helped to destroy the former good feeling between the races. The grievance of the friars was, however, far more frequently vented upon a class of Spanish officeholders quite different from those who gained odium through tyranny or corruption or both; the special hostility of the friars was visited upon their countrymen who gained great popularity withthe natives, because of their more democratic beliefs and manners. Such men were commonly of the anti-clerical party in Spain, and the bitterest element in home politics was thus transferred to the Philippines. One may recognize that such men were all too commonly quixotic and indiscreet, as Spanish Liberals notoriously are. To refuse to kiss the friar’s hand, and to speak contemptuously of him and all his kind (perhaps even to stir up scandal against them), may have seemed to such men a very natural and proper method of asserting their political beliefs and their sense of individual independence; yet the friars have rightly said that such actions, and the many things growing out of them, struck a blow at the very foundations of the structure upon which Spanish supremacy had been built in the islands. Hence it was that not infrequently a more far-seeing Liberal, after some years of experience in the islands, would come out as a defender of the Philippine friars and their views as to the political régime to be maintained there; he would perhaps explain it by saying that he was “a Liberal at home, but in the Philippines all ought to be Spaniards and only that.”

Even if we give full faith to the complaints of the friars’ defenders on this score—and their representations of the last half of the nineteenth century are very one-sided—even if we admire and accept as truthful the picture they draw of a sort of Eden in the Philippines back of 1860, and particularly in the two preceding centuries, wherein the humble Filipino lived practically free of taxation, exempt from abuses from above, guileless of serious crime, and watched over by a paternal superior who directed his steps to the eternal bliss of the other world: still,accepting the friars’ case at its face value, it is plain that they asked for and expected the impossible when they fought to perpetuate medieval conditions in a country opened to trade and commerce and to modern thought and contact with the world at large. We may doubt that ignorance was bliss even in the “good old days;” but it was certain that those days must come to an end when the Philippines were awakened by steamships, telegraph lines, newspapers, and books (even though under clerical and political censorship). Clear-sighted prophecy was that of Feodor Jagor, the German scientist who traveled through the Philippines just before 1860, and who, though he found much to praise in the old paternal régime, said:

“The old situation is no longer possible of maintenance, with the changed conditions of the present time. The colony can no longer be shut off from the outside. Every facility in communication opens a breach in the ancient system and necessarily leads to reforms of a liberal character. The more that foreign capital and foreign ideas penetrate there, the more they increase prosperity, intelligence, and self-esteem, making the existing evils the more intolerable.”7

The echoes of Spanish partisanship and the talk of nineteenth-century reforms had been heard in the Philippines before the revolution of 1868 and theopening 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.8The 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.9From 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.

In another way the return of the Jesuits is to be associated with the beginning of a new era in the islands. They were not permitted to resume the parochial benefices which their order had held priorto their expulsion in 1768, but were to engage in missions in Mindanao and in educational and scientific work. Their resumption of the old missions in Mindanao was accomplished at the expense of the order of Recollects, which was thereupon given the provision of certain parishes, including several wealthy parishes in Luzon, which had for greater or less intervals been held by the more prominent and able of the secular priests, Filipinos of pure native blood or half-castes.10The cabildo of the Manila cathedral, including the more notable of the secular priests, and the curates of the few conspicuous parishes (in central Luzon) which it fell to the lot of the secular clergy to occupy, had come to regard these benefices as their property, in a “corporate” sense, as it were, quite as each religious order felt that certain parishes, or whole provinces “belonged” to it as an order. It is significant that here, for the first time, one notes a feeling of solidarity among the Filipino secular clergy—for the demonstration of which feeling one has looked in vain, except in isolated cases, prior to that time, above all in connection with the effort (1770) of the Spanish archbishop Santa Justa y Rufina, to secularize the parishes and displace the friars with native priests. Only the bolder of the Filipino priests expressed the complaints of their fellows, even now, and open talk of a campaign for secularization of all the parishes wasscarcely heard until some courage was infused into these few and the small party of Filipino Liberals (mostly half-castes or Spaniards of Philippine birth) after the revolution of 1868 and the arrival of a governor-general who permitted public demonstrations in behalf of Liberal reforms. From the time of the execution of three Filipino priests for alleged complicity in the Cavite mutiny of 187211—the proofs of whose guilt the public has not seen, if the military courts which tried them did—there was added to the campaign for the expulsion of the friars12on account of their landed estates and of their stifling of intellectual freedom the demand that Philippine parishes be entrusted to a native priesthood. Only since American occupation has the demand for anationalclergy found full expression, but it had for a quarter of a century before that been an important phase of the sentiment of nationality, a sentiment that was growing steadily, though slowly and in the main secretly until 1896 in the Tagálog provinces and 1898 in the archipelago at large.

The reactionary party had partially regained theupper hand when the mutiny occurred in Cavite in 1872. Instead of treating it as its comparative insignificance demanded, and as prudent statecraft would have counseled, they employed it as an excuse for vengeful violence, as a means for resuming full control of Philippine policy, and continued for twenty-five years thereafter to point to it as their most useful “horrible example,” as an evidence of what must follow the inauguration, even in the slightest degree, of a liberal policy in the government of the islands. Rightly or wrongly, the people of that and the succeeding generation in the Tagálog provinces, and to a less degree in the others, were schooled in racial resentment through the belief that the native priests had been done to death, upon a pretext of manufactured evidence, by the malevolence of the friars. The proscription of the more conspicuous of the then small Liberal element among the Filipinos had consequences of no less importance. Those who were sent into exile for alleged complicity in the Cavite mutiny were certain conspicuous half-castes and a few Spaniards of Philippine birth or of long residence in the islands. The native element proper was for the moment scarcely affected, even in Manila and its environs; and no one has ever demonstrated that the few more advanced men of Spanish blood who were moved by the revolution in Spain to take a stand for Liberal measures in the Philippines were engaged in anything but legitimate political discussion, or indeed that they talked of going so far in this direction in the Philippines as had already been done in the Peninsula. These proscriptions powerfully stimulated the idea of a “Filipino cause.” Some of the exiles escaped toHongkong, and there founded a Filipino colony. Others settled eventually in Europe; the more progressive and ambitious Filipinos began sending their sons to Madrid and Paris for education in contact with the thought of modern Europe; and in these capitals, and later in Japan, little Filipino colonies became centers of discussion of political reforms, and through letters, publications in the Liberal periodicals of Spain, and finally through their own books and periodicals of propaganda, greatly influenced the growth of a public opinion in the backward society of the Philippines. Spanish Masonry gradually extended the circle of its initiations and of its secret operations (necessarily secret to an extraordinary degree) in the islands. At first only Spaniards had been admitted to a few lodges, then mestizos were admitted, and finally natives of some degree of education without regard to race. In the eighties and nineties, there seems to be no doubt, a sort of independent Grand Lodge in Spain (asserted by some to be of spurious Masonry),13managed by zealous Liberal propagandists with whom certain of the Filipino propagandists in Barcelona had associated themselves, directed the active organization of lodges in as many Filipino towns as contained favorable material, for the purpose of fostering in the islands a demand for political reforms, of distributing the literature of the propaganda, and of collecting funds to support the campaign in Spain for the extension of greater social, political, and religious freedom to the Filipinos. The Spaniards associated with this movement were for the most part men of no standing and quixotic visionaries. Some of theFilipinos who figured in the propaganda abroad were quite as unpractical, being inexperienced and excitable youths, full of jealousy of each other, while some few of them, moreover, misused the funds raised for them by their fellows at home. The whole program for “assimilation” of the Philippines to Spain as a province of the Peninsula, giving a distant archipelago in the Orient with its widely different population, social status, and economic conditions and needs, a government just like that of European Spain was manifestly absurd and inimical to the interests of the Filipinos themselves, not to add that its realization was an utter impossibility. But these things should not have been allowed to hide the justice of the demand for such reforms and privileges as were practical and compatible with the needs and conditions of the archipelago and its people: for a spokesman or spokesmen of the Philippines in the Cortes at Madrid; for reforms in judiciary and fundamental laws, not blindly copied from those promulgated in Spain but adapted to the Philippines, or if necessary especially drafted for them; for administrative reforms, above all as to the civil service and looking toward an increasing recognition of the native element in government, and toward a decentralization that should be gradually extended as far as deeply rooted habits and long-standing customs would permit; and, finally, for greater individual and social freedom, both in a political and a religious sense. This last was really the crux of the whole situation, so far as the continuance of Spanish sovereignty should not come to depend purely on force. In the old days it had rested on religious teachings, on the friars in fact, with thesense of race-prestige in the background to support Spanish authority. It was futile for the friars to cry out for a return to the old conditions, and to denounce as dangerous any reforms in the direction of freedom of thought or of speech; the pages of history could not be turned back. The idea of future independence from Spain was, to be sure, in the minds of some at least of the Filipino propagandists. But their present campaign was for greater political liberty, and the measures they advocated, and even the methods they employed almost to the last, would have been legitimate in any free country—were, in fact, legitimate even then in the Peninsula itself, where they could advocate publicly what they must whisper among their fellows at home. The very fact that such organizations as these spurious Masonic lodges were under the ban, and that even to be suspected of belonging thereto was to invite the danger of deportation from home as a “conspirator,” is sufficient proof of the essential righteousness of the propagandists’ cause. And the campaign that began with a few Spanish-Filipinos in Manila and gradually extended to the more independent men of education in the provinces eventually, under half-educated leaders of the small middle class, reached in a perverted form the masses themselves, especially in central Luzon, and found expression at last in violence and an outburst of race-hatred. The Katipunan was not Masonic, as the friars asserted, only copying some of the Masonic formulæ; but it was a natural and logical outgrowth of the smothering of what had been a legitimate movement for the expression of Filipino reform sentiment.

The title to these notes has indicated the year 1860 as marking in a general way the opening of the modern era in the Philippines, without reference to any one particular event. It is proposed to give here, briefly, such further notes as will afford a working bibliography on this period, while calling attention to some subjects and certain points that are commonly disregarded in the bibliographies and published works dealing with the last years of Spanish rule in the Philippines. No pretense to completeness is made. The aim is to call attention, under their proper heads, to the more distinctly useful (or, in some cases, the more unreliable, and hence to be avoided) titles already listed in the Philippine bibliography that is to be most readily obtained, and which is also the most complete and satisfactory work of this sort, viz., that published at Washington in 1903;14and also to supplement these titles with others there unnoticed and with other data not easily found. In the main, only such works are cited as the writer has himself consulted, though in some cases the notes or recommendations of others have been followed.

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 othersare read, Jagor’s15is indispensable. Next to him, and in addition to the documents appearing in this series immediately preceding the present volume may be cited the 1842Informeof 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 hisTwenty 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 writerwho 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.

It need hardly be said, for another thing, that it is not possible to make an absolute separation of this subject under the headings thus indicated. Such a thing cannot be done with any people in any period of history. In this particular case, one need only mention the Religious Question, with its phases as a contest between friars and native clergy, as a demand for modern freedom of thought and speech, and as an agrarian question, to show at once that matters social, economic, and political are here interwoven.So also the Spanish administration cannot be considered wholly apart from its bearing upon economic and social as well as purely political matters. No rigid classification is possible, but the student who approaches the history of this period—which, apart from its own interest, has had ever since 1898 the most vital bearing upon a public question of great importance in the United States today—will avoid confusion by giving consideration to these separate points of view.

Back to Index Next