foresighted system, to conciliate the minds of people, and to put
an end to that pernicious mistrust that has been introduced between
the peninsular Spaniards and the sons of the country [i.e., the
Spaniards born in the Philippines], which is so contrary to the common
interest. [The government must not be partial to any one class of men,
for each class contains good men who should be rewarded and advanced,
and bad men who should be closely watched and punished. Merit should
be the only cause for advancement. In closing Matta says that his
private life in the islands and his long public service have given him
abundant opportunity to observe and study people and conditions. This
memorial is dated Manila, February 25, 1843.] [47]
THE PHILIPPINES, 1860-1898--SOME COMMENT AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
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 the modern 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 which the
galleons brought their silks, cottons, etc., attention was perforce
turned upon Philippine products as a source of trade, and Philippine
exports began to grow. [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
banks in their ways of extending credit to agriculturists, or were
being aided by private bankers associated with them. [50] The 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 direct steam 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. [51]
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 Philippines
but 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. [52]
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 monopoly [53] and 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 with the 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." [54]
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.
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 prior to
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. [57] The 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 was scarcely 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 1872 [58]--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 friars
[59] on 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 a national clergy 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.