A fatal combination of circumstances, some independent of the will
in spite of men's efforts, others the offspring of stupidity and
ignorance, others the inevitable corollaries of false principles, and
still others the result of more or less base passions has induced the
decline of labor, an evil which instead of being remedied by prudence,
mature reflection and recognition of the mistakes made, through
deplorable policy, through regret, table blindness and obstinacy,
has gone from bad to worse until it has reached the condition in
which we now see it. (14).
First came the wars, the internal disorders which the new change
of affairs naturally brought with it. It was necessary to subject
the people either by cajolery or force; there were fights, there was
slaughter; those who had submitted peacefully seemed to repent of it;
insurrections were suspected, and some occurred; naturally there
were executions, and many capable laborers perished. Add to this
condition of disorder the invasion of Limahong, add the continual
wars into which the inhabitants of the Philippines were plunged
to maintain the honor of Spain, to extend the sway of her flag in
Borneo, in the Moluccas and in Indo-China; to repel the Dutch foe:
costly wars, fruitless expeditions, in which each time thousands and
thousands of native archers and rowers were recorded to have embarked,
but whether they returned to their homes was never stated. Like the
tribute that once upon a time Greece sent to the Minotaur of Crete,
the Philippine youth embarked for the expedition, saying good-by to
their country forever: on their horizon were the stormy sea, the
interminable wars, the rash expeditions. Wherefore, Gaspar de San
Agustin says: "Although anciently there were in this town of Dumangas
many people, in the course of time they have very greatly diminished
because the natives are the best sailors and most skillful rowers
on the whole coast, and so the governors in the port of Iloilo take
most of the people from this town for the ships that they send abroad
............. When the Spaniards reached this island (Panay) it is
said that there were on it more than fifty thousand families; but
these diminished greatly; ........... and at present they may amount
to some fourteen thousand tributaries." From fifty thousand families
to fourteen thousand tributaries in little over half a century!
We would never get through, had we to quote all the evidence of the
authors regarding the frightful diminution of the inhabitants of the
Philippines in the first years after the discovery. In the time of
their first bishop, that is, ten years after Legazpi, Philip II said
that they had been reduced to less than two thirds.
Add to these fatal expeditions that wasted all the moral and material
energies of the country, the frightful inroads of the terrible pirates
from the south, instigated and encouraged by the government, first in
order to get complaint and afterwards disarm the islands subjected to
it, inroads that reached the very shores of Manila, even Malate itself,
and during which were seen to set out for captivity and slavery,
in the baleful glow of burning villages, strings of wretches who had
been unable to defend themselves, leaving behind them the ashes of
their homes and the corpses of their parents and children. Morga,
who recounts the first piratical invasion, says: "The boldness of
these people of Mindanao did great damage to the Visayan Islands,
as much by what they did in them as by the fear and fright which the
native acquired, because the latter were in the power of the Spaniards,
who held them subject and tributary and unarmed, in such manner that
they did not protect them from their enemies or leave them means with
which to defend themselves, AS THEY DID WHEN THERE WERE NO SPANIARDS
IN THE COUNTRY." These piratical attacks continually reduced the
number of the inhabitants of the Philippines, since the independent
Malays were especially notorious for their atrocities and murders,
sometimes because they believed that to preserve their independence
it was necessary to weaken the Spaniard by reducing the number of his
subjects, sometimes because a greater hatred and a deeper resentment
inspired them against the Christian Filipinos who, being of the their
own race, served the stranger in order to deprive them of their
precious liberty. These expeditions lasted about three centuries,
being repeated five and ten times a year, and each expedition cost
the islands over eight hundred prisoners.
"With the invasions of the pirates from Sulu and Mindanao," says
Padre Gaspar de San Agustin, [the island of Bantayan, near Cebu]
"has been greatly reduced, because they easily captured the people
there, since the latter had no place to fortify themselves and were
far from help from Cebu. The hostile Sulu did great damage in this
island in 1608, leaving it almost depopulated." (Page 380).
These rough attacks, coming from without, produced a counter effect,
in the interior, which, carrying out medical comparisons, was like
a purge or diet in an individual who has just lost a great deal
of blood. In order to make headway against so many calamities, to
secure their sovereignty and take the offensive in these disastrous
contests, to isolate the warlike Sulus from their neighbors in the
south, to care for the needs of the empire of the Indies (for one of
the reasons why the Philippines were kept, as contemporary documents
prove, was their strategic position between New Spain and the Indies),
to wrest from the Dutch their growing colonies of the Moluccas and
get rid of some troublesome neighbors, to maintain, in short, the
trade of China with New Spain. it was necessary to construct new
and large ships which, as we have seen, costly as they were to the
country for their equipment and the rowers they required, were not
less so because of the manner in which they were constructed. (16)
Fernando de los Rios Coronel, who fought in these wars and later
turned priest, speaking of these King's ships, said: "As they were
so large, the timber needed was scarcely to be found in the forests
(of the Philippines!), and thus it was necessary to seek it with great
difficulty in the most remote of them, where, once found, in order
to haul and convey it to the shipyard the towns of the surrounding
country had to be depopulated of natives, who get it out with immense
labor, damage, and cost to them. The natives furnished the masts for
a galleon, according to the assertion of the Franciscans, and I heard
the governor of the province where they were cut, which is Lacuna de
Bay, say that to haul them seven leagues over very broken mountains
6,000 natives were engaged three months, without furnishing them food,
which the wretched native had to seek for himself!"
And Gaspar de San Agustin says: "In those times (1690), Bacolor has
not the people that it had in the past, because of the uprising in
that province when Don Sabiniano Manrique de Lava was Governor of
these islands and because of the continual labor of cutting timber
for his Majesty's shipyards, WHICH HINDERS THEM FROM CULTIVATING THE
VERY FERTILE PLAIN THEY HAVE." (17)
If this is not sufficient to explain the depopulation of the islands
and the abandonment of industry, agriculture and commerce, then
add "the natives who wore executed, those who loft their wives and
children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those who were sold
into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them," as Fernando de los
Rios Coronel says; add to all this what Philip II said in reprimanding
Bishos Salazar about "natives sold by some encomendoros to others,
those flogged to death, the women who are crushed to death by their
heavy burdens, those who sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse
their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many who are
executed and left to die of hunger and those who eat poisonous herbs
............ and the mothers who kill their children in bearing them,"
and you will understand how in less than thirty years the population
of the Philippines was reduced one-third. We are not saying this:
it was said by Gaspar de San Agustin, the preeminently anti-Filipino
Augustinian, and he confirms it throughout the rest of his work by
speaking every moment of the state of neglect in which lay the farms
and fields once so flourishing and so well cultivated, the towns
thinned that had formerly been inhabited by many leading families!
How is it strange, then, that discouragement may have been infused
into the spirit of the inhabitants of the Philippines, when in the
midst of so many calamities they did not know whether they would see
sprout the seed they were planting, whether their field was going to
be their grave or their crop would go to feed their executioner? What
is there strange in it, when we see the pious but impotent friars of
that time trying to free their poor parishioners from the tyranny
of the encomenderos by advising them to stop work in the mines,
to abandon their commerce, to break up their looms, pointing out to
them heaven for their whole hope, preparing them for death as their
only consolation? (18)
Man works for an object. Remove the object and you reduce him to
inaction The most active man in the world will fold his arms from
the instant he understands that it is madness to bestir himself, that
this work will be the cause of his trouble, that for him it will be
the cause of vexations at home and of the pirate's greed abroad. It
seems that these thoughts have never entered the minds of those who
cry out against the indolence of the Filipinos.
Even were the Filipino not a man like the rest; even were we to suppose
that zeal in him for work was as essential as the movement of a wheel
caught in the gearing of others in motion; even were we to deny him
foresight and the judgment that the past and the present form, there
would still be left us another reason to explain the attack of the
evil. The abandonment of the fields by their cultivators, whom the
wars and piratical attacks dragged from their homes was sufficient
to reduce to nothing the hard labor of so many generations. In the
Philippines abandon for a year the land most beautifully tended and
you will see how you will have to begin all over again: the rain will
wipe out the furrows, the floods will drown the seeds, plants and
bushes will grow up everywhere, and on seeing so much useless labor
the hand will drop the hoe, the laborer will desert his plow. Isn't
there left the fine life of the pirate?
Thus is understood that sad discouragement which we find in the friar
writers of the 17th century, speaking of once very fertile plains
submerged, of provinces and towns depopulated, of products that
have disappeared from trade, of leading families exterminated. These
pages resemble a sad and monotonous scene in the night after a lively
day. Of Cagayan Padre San Agustin speaks with mournful brevity: "A
great deal of cotton, of which they made good cloth that the Chinese
and Japanese every year bought and carried away." In the historian's
time, the industry and the trade had come to an end!
It seems that these are causes more thorn sufficient to breed indolence
even in the midst of beehive. Thus is explained why, after thirty-two
years of the system, the circumspect and prudent Morga said that the
natives "have forgotten much about farming, raising poultry, stock
and cotton, and weaving cloth, as they used to do in their paganism
and FOR A LONG TIME AFTER THE COUNTRY HAD BEEN CONQUERED!"
Still they struggled a long time against indolence, yes: but their
enemies were so numerous that at last they gave up!