II
“Until the end of the year 1863 in which was dictated the memorable royal decree, which established a plan of primary instruction in Filipinas, and which arranged for the creation of schools of primary instruction in all the villages of the islands, and the creation of a normal school in Manila, whence should graduate well-educated and religious teachers who should take the foremost places in those institutions, it might be said that there had been no legislation in regard to primary instruction in these islands. For, although it is certain that precepts directed to the attainment of education by the natives, and very particularly the teaching of the beautiful Spanish language, are not lacking (some of those precepts being contained in the Leyes de Indias, and in the edicts of good government), it is a fact that those precepts are isolated arrangements without conclusions, the product of the good desire which has always animated the Spanish monarchs and their worthy representatives in the archipelago for the advancement and prosperity of these islands, but without resting upon a firm foundation for lack of the elements for its existence.
“Before the above-mentioned epoch the reverend and learned parish priests of the villages came to fill in great measure and voluntarily the noble ends of propagating primary instruction throughout these distant regions by the aid of their own pupils, the most advanced of whom dedicated themselves to the teaching of their fellow citizens, although they received but very little remuneration for their work and care, and there was no consideration of teachers or titles which accredited them as such.”[12]
In fact the religious corporations in Filipinas were those who busied themselves with the interest which the matter deserved in primary instruction, which was abandoned almost entirely by the authorities until the year 1863, notwithstanding the repeated recommendations, orders, and laws of our monarchs and of the Councils of Indias. The religious were the first teachers of primary letters in Filipinas, as they were afterwards in secondary instruction, in the superior teaching with faculties, and in the principal arts and trades which the Indians learned. By the advice of the religious, the villages constructed the first schools. The religious directed the works; they gave the instruction, until they had pupils who could be substituted for them and leave them free for the spiritual administration of the faithful; and they, the religious, paid the wages of those improvised teachers, without official title or character as such, but sufficiently instructed to teach the tiny people their first letters, and to succeed in obtaining that seventy-five per cent of the inhabitants [of the Filipino village] might learn how to read and write correctly. Señor Hilarión,[13] archbishop of Manila, was able to say to the most excellent Ayuntamiento of that city when provincial of the calced Augustinians: “There are multitudes of villages, such as Argao, Dalaguete, and Bolhoon, in Cebú, and many in the province of Iloilo, in which it is difficult to find a single boy or girl who does not know how to read or write, an advantage which many cities of our España have not yet succeeded in obtaining.”
The pay that the religious could give to the teachers educated by them was moderate, but in faith none of the detractors of the monastic corporations of Filipinas had given as much, or even the half, for so beneficial a work. The religious not only provided large, roomy, and ventilated places for the primary instruction of the two sects, and acted as teachers until the most advanced pupils could use something of what was supplied them in teaching, but also provided the schools with the suitable and necessary furnishings in which the industry and genius of the parish-priest regular came to aid their pecuniary appeals and the absolute lack of the materials for teaching. There was no ink, paper, or pens. The first was not necessary for the new papyrus, which was no other than the magnificent leaf of the banana, and the pen was a small bit of bamboo cut in the manner of a pen. From each leaf of the banana they could get twenty or thirty pages of a larger size than those of Iturzaeta. On the other side of the leaf, covered with fine down and smooth as that of velvet, the Indians wrote their letters with the bamboo cut in the form of a pen or of the ancient stylus. What was thus written was not very permanent, nor was there any need that it should be, for the copy pages were not kept as a justification of the expenses of writing allowed by the teachers according to rule later, because of the distrustful or cautious official administration. Since the material was plentiful and free the children were allowed to write as many pages as they wished. More, in fact, they would be seen seated and writing at all hours of the day, not only in their houses, but also in the square, in the street, on the roads, for in all parts they had ready at hand bananas and bamboos, and a stone or any other kind of an object was used as a desk. And, since the aptitude of the native Filipino is so remarkable for imitation, and his patience so great, they did not stop their writing until they imitated ours with the greatest perfection. The religious also wrote the books and primers for their reading, formerly in manuscript, then printed in their own dialect, so that they might profit from the maxims and doctrine, and history and religion, in proportion as they became proficient in reading.
Notwithstanding, after 1863, when the government took charge of education, and the normal school directed by the Jesuit fathers provided the villages with normal teachers under official title and pay, the religious ceased to continue to foment education in their villages, yet not only as local supervisors, with which character they were invested by the memorable decree of that date—the foundation of all the circulars, decrees, and instructions which afterward fell upon that historical document in a vast jumble—but also since the boys and girls of the barrios distant from the villages twenty kilometers and sometimes more, were not able on account of the distance to be present at the official school, did the parish-priest religious, attentive and vigilant, hasten in their anxiety to supply with their pecuniary resources the official deficiencies in every barrio or visita. They had schools built of light materials but solid and well built, in which teachers, both male and female, appointed and paid by the parish priests, gave primary instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic; and sewing and embroidery to the girls. Finally, the parish priests also supplied them with paper, pens, ink, books, thread, needles, and all the other materials needed in teaching. The said schools were visited by the parish priests, if not periodically, yet whenever the duties of their ministries would permit. All the boys and girls of the nearby barrios attended those schools. Every Sunday after mass, masters and mistresses, with their respective scholars presented to their parish priests their copy books, sums, sewing, and embroidery, which they had made during the week. In order to comprehend the significance of all that has been set forth to this point, one must bear in mind that the population in Filipinas is found much scattered in groups of houses called barrios or visitas, more or less densely populated, and separated by a greater or less distance from one another. So true is this that of the fourteen thousand inhabitants of the village of Ogton, verbi gratia, scarcely four thousand lived within the radius of the village. This scattering of the inhabitants throughout the jurisdiction of the villages, if it were meet and convenient at the beginning of the conquest, in order that the barrios or the visitas might become the nucleus of future villages, yet had no reason for existence, during the last half of the past century in the very densely populated provinces like that of Iloilo and others. The inhabitants of the barrios distant from the village, from authority, and from the parish priests, could not be watched and attended to by the paternal solicitude of the latter, so much, or so well as those of the village, who lived under his immediate eye. Many of the priests themselves were suspected by the authorities as breeders of evil doers and criminals, for in the distant barrios people of evil life gathered, combined their thefts, and concealed the thefts. They were the pests of the civil guard and of the local authorities, and the constant preoccupation of the parish priests who saw that they were not fulfilling their religious duties as good Christians, and who, in order to administer the sacraments to them, had to go on horseback, by chair [horimon] or by hammock, whether it rained in torrents, or the equatorial sun melted their brains. Many times, and in distinct seasons and occasions, the superior authority of the islands ordered that the barrios be incorporated into the villages. Not being able to succeed in that, they ordered the small barrios to be fused into the greater, and roads to be opened which would put them in communication with the mother village. Not even this could they obtain because of the inborn passivity of the Indians. The one most harmed by that order of things was the parish priest who had the duty of watching over those scattered sheep, and giving them the food of the spirit to the danger of his health, and the exhaustion of his purse, by paying the wages of the teachers and for the materials used in teaching for the schools of the barrios.[14]
When the schools were already running with regularity, and the fruits which were produced under the accurate direction and immediate inspection of the parish priests were plentiful, the superior government of the islands took possession of the department of education, and in the above-mentioned decree of 1863, gave official character to the schools instituted by the parish priests. It conceded titles as teachers ad interim to those who were then in charge of the schools appointed by the religious. It assigned them a moderate pay, but one much greater than that received from the parish priests, whose resources were certainly very meager, and with which they had to attend to other duties which their ministry imposed on them. But the government left in most complete abandonment the settlement of the barrios composed generally of two-thirds of the total number of souls. We have already related how and in what manner the parish priests supplied the governmental omission. Teachers ad interim were gradually substituted by the normal teachers as they graduated from the normal school. Indeed in the last years of the past century there were but few schools not ruled over by teachers of the normal school. Did education gain much by the semi-academical title of the new teachers? Did the language of the fatherland become more general? At first, we must reply with all truth that while the normal teachers remained under the immediate supervision of the parish priests, authorized by the official rules to suspend them and fashion them suitably, education made excellent progress. But when they were emancipated from the supervision of the parish-priest religious by the decree of sad memory countersigned by Señor Maura in 1893, creating the municipalities to which passed the supervision and management of the schools and the teachers, education went into a decline.[15] The presence of the children became purely nominal in the triplicate report which the masters and mistresses sent monthly to the government of the province. That report had to be visoed by the parish priests, but the governors received and approved them without that requisite, disdaining and despising the signature of the parish priests. In that the latter understood that the visto bueno [i.e., approval] was a farce, which, taken seriously, lessened the reputation of and gained ill will for them, without any profit to the teachers and municipal captains. Consequently, it was all the same for the results whether they signed the said reports, or did not sign them. But if was painful to contemplate the empty benches in the school, from which those regular and interminable rows of four hundred or five hundred boys, and two other rows of as many or more girls, reduced afterwards to two or three dozen at the most, no longer went to the church after the afternoon class. That happened and we have seen it. It was one, and not of the least serious, misfortunes that came upon the country because of the unfortunate decree in regard to the Filipino municipalities.
On the creation of the normal school the government proposed as its principal object the rapid and quick diffusion of Castilian as the bond of union between the mother country and the colony. The end was good and praiseworthy, but a mistake was made in the means by which it was to be obtained, for those means were neither sufficient nor efficacious. Departing even from the false supposition that all the normal teachers constantly directed their efforts to teaching Castilian to the children, nothing serious and positive could be obtained. In the schools the children read and wrote in Castilian, learned the grammar by heart, and some teachers gave the explanation in Castilian also. The teacher asked questions in Castilian, and the scholars replied in certain dialogues, which they learned by heart.[16] But what was the result? The children did not understand one iota of the master’s explanation. They answered in the dialogue like parrots, and the few phrases which they learned in the harmonious language of Cervantes, they forgot before they reached home, if not in the very school itself, because they did not again hear them either when playing with their comrades or in their homes, or in the school itself. For the constant and daily presence in the school left much to be desired, especially during the last decade of Spanish rule. Before the creation of the municipalities to which Señor Maura gave the local supervision of the schools, the parish priests visited them frequently. Every afternoon when the boys and girls were dismissed from school they went to the church in two lines, and the parish priest observed and even counted the number of those who were present, and when many of them were absent, they asked the teachers for their report of the absent children, called on their parents, and with flattery, admonitions, or threats, succeeded in getting the latter to see that their children were punctual in attendance. Furthermore, they clothed at their expense the poor boys and girls who excused their non-attendance at school because they had no pantaloons, or were without a skirt with which to cover the body. Later, with the municipalities, neither the municipal captains nor anyone else took care of the daily attendance of teachers and scholars in the school. If primary instruction in Filipinas had gone on in this way for considerable time it would have pitifully retrograded.
We have already seen the intervention which the parish priests had in primary education before the decree of 63, after that date, and also after the never sufficiently-deplored decree in regard to the municipalities, proposed for the royal signature by the then minister of the colonies, Don Antonio Maura, in 1893. But, notwithstanding that, there are many Spaniards who blame the parish-priest religious for the ignorance of the Indians of Castilian. Why this charge, both gratuitous and unjust? Some have argued that the parish priests should personally teach Castilian to the native children. In order to understand the absurdity of so great a pretension, one need only bear in mind that the parish-priest regulars in Filipinas had in their charge the spiritual administration of the villages, the number of souls in the smallest of which was not less than six thousand, and for the greater part reached ten thousand, fourteen thousand, and even twenty thousand, and more. For that work only a few parish priests had a coadjutor, and those among the Tagálogs, two or three Indian coadjutors, who aided them in the administration of the sacrament to the well and sick. It was also the duty of the parish priest to reply to consultations, give advices, direct communications, exercise the duties of alcaldes, justices of the peace, decisions, etc.; for in all that they had to take action, as neither the municipal alcalde nor the justice of peace of the village understood Castilian, and least of all, understood the orders, reports, acts, and measures. And it is asked us, if, after attending to so varied occupations, some peculiar to their ministry, others imposed by charity and by necessity, the parish priests would have time, willingness, or pleasure, in officiating as masters of Castilian without pay; however, there is still more. The parish priests were the local presidents of the boards of health and of locusts, public works, industrial and urban contribution, citizen and tributary poll, etc., etc., and we are asked, I repeat, if with all these trifles and mummeries the parish priest would have time even to rest, at the very least.
Others carried their pretension even to meddling with sacred matters of the temple and interfering with the parochial dwelling, demanding from the parish priests that the theological moral preaching, and the explanation of the Christian doctrine be in Castilian, as if it were the duty of the parish priest to please four deluded people, and not to instruct his parishioners who, not understanding Castilian, would have obtained from the catechism and from the sermon that which the negro did from the story. The same is true of the demand that the religious should address their servants in our beautiful language. Seeing that the Indian servants did the reverse of what their Spanish masters ordered them, and seeing the desperation of the latter for the said reason, why should the religious have to be subjected to like impatience when they could avoid it by addressing their servants in their own language? So general was the opinion that the religious were opposed to the Indians learning Castilian that Governor-general Despujols, in his visits to the Ilonga capital, apostrophized the parish-priest religious harshly, who had gone in commission to salute him. “You,” he said to them, “are the ones who oppose the diffusion of Castilian in the country.” Such were the words of that Catalonian, who claimed that a colony separated from the mother country by thousands of miles, and almost abandoned for that reason until the opening of the isthmus of Suez, should know and speak the Castilian, which is not known or spoken as yet in Cataluña, or in other provinces of España. It was very convenient for the Spaniards who went to Filipinas on business or as employes, and even necessary for them to understand the Indians, and they demanded that the latter learn Castilian. It was also very convenient and comfortable for the religious, since the learning of a dialect of the country cost them at least a year’s study and practice. But was it not easier and more just that forty or fifty thousand Spaniards learn the language of the country since they needed it to live and do business in it, than to make six or seven millions of Indians, very few of whom needed to know it, learn Spanish?
Father Zúñiga[17] already declared in his time: “It has been ordered that books be not printed in the Tagálog language, that the Indians learn the doctrine in the Castilian language, and that the fathers preach to them in that language. The religious, in order to observe that command preached to them in Spanish and in Tagálog, but to ask them to confess some Indians who only knew the doctrine in a language which they did not understand and that the parish priests should be satisfied by preaching to their parishioners in a language of which the latter were ignorant, was almost the same as asking them for that which Diocletian asked from the Christians, and they would rather die willingly before fulfilling it.... In order that one may see the inconsistency of those who rule, it is sufficient to know their method of procedure in regard to plays. These Indians, as I have said, are very fond of plays, and the most influential people are those who become actors. Since such people do not generally know the Castilian language, they petition that they be allowed to play in their own language, and there is not the slightest hesitation in allowing plays in the Tagálog language in all the villages of this province, even in that of Binondo, which is only separated from the city [of Manila].
“And it is asked that the parish priests preach in Spanish!”[18]
In 1590, we find in the records of our province the following most note-worthy minute of the provincial chapter: “Likewise, it shall be charged upon all the ministers of the Indians that, just as the lads of the school are taught to read and to write, they also shall learn to talk our Spanish tongue because of the great culture and profit which follow therefrom (Archives of St. Augustine in Manila).” This was the rule made by the Augustinian fathers in 1590, and still there are some who accuse the religious of having been opposed to the diffusion of Castilian in Filipinas.
The decree in which the religious were charged to teach Castilian in the kingdoms of Indias is as follows: “By Don Felipe IV, in Madrid, March 2, 1634; and November 4, 1636, law v. That the curas arrange to teach the Indians the Castilian language and the Christian doctrine in the same language.
“We ask and charge the archbishops and bishops to provide and order in their dioceses the curas and instructors of the Indians, by using the gentlest means, to arrange and direct all the Indians to be taught the Spanish language, and that they be taught the Christian doctrine in that language, so that they may become more apt in the mysteries of our Catholic faith, and profit for their salvation, and attain other advantages in their government and mode of living.”—Book i, título xiii.
“We could cite other dispositions[19] but these are sufficient to cause the noble propositions of our governors-general and the first apostles of Christianity in that country to be appreciated. Apart from the fact that in former times the friar could not alone carry the weight of the extraordinary labor, which is inferred from the teaching of a language which can be contained in the head of but very few Indians, the aspiration that our language supplant the many which are spoken in Filipinas can be only completely illusory.”
We cannot resist the desire to reproduce here some paragraphs of the Carta abierta [i.e., open letter] which was directed through the columns of La Época by Señor Retana to Don Manuel Becerra, who was then minister of the Colonies.[20]
“I do not see, Señor Don Manuel, that a single Spaniard exists who would not be delighted to know that peoples who live many leguas from ours use the Spanish language as their own language. Why should we not be proud when we are persuaded that in both Americas live about forty millions of individuals who speak our beautiful language? Consequently, I esteem as most meritorious that vehement desire of yours to effect that there in Filipinas the Malays abandon their monotonous and poor dialects, and choose as their language that which we talk in Castilla. Very meritorious is it in fact among us to sustain so fine a theory; and I say, among us, for if you were English and set forth your laudable propositions in the House of Lords, or the House of Commons, of diffusing the language of the mother-country among the natives of unequal colonies, you may be assured, Señor Becerra, that on all sides of the circle there would come marks and even cries of disapproval. For it is a matter sufficiently well known in Great Britain and in Holland; and in a certain manner in France also, it is not maintained, not even in theory, that it is advisable for the conquered races to know the language of the ruling race. The great Macaulay, a liberal democrat, freethinker, a sincere and enthusiastic man, published his desire that Christianity be propagated in India, but he never spoke of a propagation of the English language in the Hindoostan Empire.
“Think, Señor Don Manuel, and grant me that if it were possible to please all the Spaniards to have our language propagated in all quarters of the world, there may be some persons who, thinking like the English, may conceive that that propagation would be unadvisable, from the viewpoint of politics.
“But by deprecating such tiquis miquis[21] since I hold, so far as I am concerned, that today our fellow countrymen who think in the English fashion in this manner are exceptional, let us come to the real root of the matter. It is an easy thing for you, Don Manuel, to see that it is practicable in a brief space of time to place the Castilian in the head of seven millions of Filipino Indians. Permit me to make a citation which is of pearls. Not many months ago the director of the royal college of the Escorial, or, to be more explicit, Fray Francisco Valdés, a man of superior talent who has lived in Filipinas for eighteen or twenty years, said: ‘Our language cannot be substituted advantageously for the Tagálog, so long as the social education of that people does not experience profound and radical transformations.’ And the same author adds: ‘And since the total transformation of the customs and manner of living of a race is not the work of one year, much less of one century, hence, our firm conviction that great as may be our strength and much as the fondness of the Indian for Castilian may be exaggerated, the latter will never be the common idiom of Filipinas.’
“Do you think of tearing out the entrails of seven millions of individuals by giving them other new ones in this manner all at once? For the peculiar idiom is born in the peculiar country, and develops with the individual, and there is no human strength, which in many years can tear it out. At one step from us lie Cataluña and Vascongadas, where no success is had in making the speech of Cervantes common to individuals for whom the resonant drapery of our rich language is very loose, and whom it suffocates. Much less could it be so [in Filipinas]!
“Those who make the greatest propaganda are not, indeed, the masters. As many masters as there are in Cavite, there are in Bulacan, for example, or more, and in Cavite the people talk fairly good Castilian, while in Bulacan they scarcely talk any. Why? Because in Cavite there are many Spaniards who live there, while in Bulacan there are perhaps not fifty. For the rest another citation and the conclusion. The famous student of Filipinas, now the bishop of Jaca, Fray Francisco Valdés, says: ‘There are many Indians who come to know quite well the material of the Spanish word; but the internal signification and the logical character of our beautiful language is for them an undecipherable secret. Our meanings [giros] and phrases are opposed to their peculiar fashion of conceiving and correlating ideas. From this discrepancy in the association of ideas, they produce literary products as nonsensical as the one below. This example is chosen from among innumerable others of the same kind, as it is the work of a master who passed among those of his class and was really one of the best instructed. The matter is an invitation elegantly printed and gotten up on the occasion of the mass called vara which the gobernadorcillos usually cause to be celebrated with great pomp on that day when they receive from the governor the vara or staff of command. It is as follows: On the nineteenth day, in the morning, and of the present full moon, the mass of my vara will be held in this church under my charge, for God has gratuitously granted me this honorable charge. I invite you, therefore, to my house, so that from that moment the vacancy of my heart having been freed, it may become full by your presence, until my last hour sounds on the clock of the Eternal.’” Come now Don Manuel, what do you say to this?[22]
“We might extend our remarks to much greater length[23] in this important matter in order to prove that the ‘Ordeno y mando’[24] of those who govern always falls to pieces before insuperable difficulties, and therefore to accuse the religious of being the reason why Castilian is not popular in Filipinas when we have the most eloquent data that in the villages ruled by secular priests of the country, there is less Castilian spoken than in the parishes ruled over by the friars, is an immense simplicity into which only the malevolent can fall or those who do not know those races by experience.—Consult Barrantes’s La Instrucción primaria en Filipinas; and Father Valdés’s El Archipiélago Filipino.”[25]
If the Spanish government desired that the Castilian language be rapidly diffused in Filipinas, the normal school or the teachers who graduated from it were not the most efficient and suitable means, but the establishment in the Filipino villages of five hundred thousand Spanish families. The servants of those families, and familiarity and converse with the native families would have done in a short time, what never would have succeeded by means of the normal teachers, and which the other educational schools in which the native dialects would not be allowed to be spoken, would have taken centuries in obtaining. It was observed that in the ports and in the capitals where the Spanish element was numerous, almost all the Indians spoke Castilian. Consequently, this same thing would have happened in the villages in which fifty or one hundred Spanish families would have been settled. Neither was it the mission of the parish-priest religious to teach Castilian to the Indians, nor did they have time to dedicate themselves to it. Neither would they have succeeded in that in a long time, not even with all their prestige and competency. Nor did they need as parish priests that the Indian should know Castilian, although as Spaniards they desired it, and very greatly. For, very strongly did it come to them that language, religion, and customs, are strong chains which united mother countries to colonies.
No one could be in a position to know the needs of the country, to feel its forces and appreciate its progress as could the parish-priest religious. Individual members of respectable communities consecrated to the spiritual and material happiness of the Indians, passed, but the spirit which guided their footsteps toward so noble an end, without separating itself any distance from the preconceived plan, always existed. When the opportunity to give greater amplitude to education, and to open up new and vaster horizons to the studious youth of the country, came, the parish priests were the ones who recognized that need and satisfied it. By a royal decree of June 8, 1585, King Don Felipe II arranged for the foundation of the college of San José, which was destined for the education and teaching of the children of Spaniards resident in Filipinas. Lessons in Latin, rhetoric, and philosophy, were given in that college by distinguished Jesuit fathers. The restrictions placed as to the number and quality of the pupils did not satisfy the need for more centers of learning, which the Filipino youth urgently demanded within a little time. His Excellency, the archbishop of Manila, Señor Benavides, a Dominican, projected the foundation of the college of Santo Tomás, aided by his Excellency, Don Fray Diego de Soria of the same order, bishop of Nueva Segovia.[26] With the one thousand pesos fuertes donated by Señor Benavides and the four thousand by Señor Soria, and the acquisition of the libraries of both, the works were commenced in the year 1610. In 1617, the college was in condition of being admitted as a house by the province of the Dominican fathers in the islands. In 1620, having been provided with professors, it opened its halls to the Filipino youth without distinction of race. King Don Felipe IV took the college under his special protection by a royal decree of November 27, 1623. Some years later, its royal protector obtained from his Holiness, Pope Innocent X, the fitting bull given November 20, 1644, by which the said college was erected into a university, and the latter decorated with the honorable titles of Royal and Pontifical. By a royal decree of May 17, 1680, it was admitted solemnly under the royal protection, and his Majesty, the king, was declared its patron. By another royal decree of December 7, 1781, the statutes approved by the government of the colony, October 20, 1786, were formed. It continued and is at present in charge of its founders, the learned and virtuous Dominican fathers. That royal college and pontifical university has a rector religious, and all the professors except those of medicine and pharmacy are also Dominicans.
The studious youth who saw in the new center of teaching the glorious future which invited them by the golden laurels of learning, came in crowds to fill the cloisters of the new university, which, narrow and reduced for containing within their halls so many young men desirous of learning and instruction, begged the aid of another institution which should share with the university in the task of the teacher. The time urged, the necessity was pressing, there was no time to think of the construction of a new edifice for circumstances did not permit it. Then there was fitted up as a college the school of primary instruction instituted by the illustrious Spaniard, Don Gerónimo Guerrero, of glorious memory, whose name should pass to posterity so that he may be blessed eternally by Spaniards and Filipinos, since he dedicated his wealth, his labors, and his care to their instruction and education, not only instructing them in the primary letters, but also supporting them and clothing them with his own resources and with the alms which other charitable persons who were desirous of contributing in so deserving a work gave him. The efforts of that remarkable Spaniard deserved the protection of the government of the mother country and the support of the Council of Indias. The king remunerated them by granting him an encomienda in Ilocos as an aid in that blessed establishment, and God rewarded it by conceding him the religious vocation which induced him to take the habit in the order of the Dominican fathers. He ceded to the latter his schoolhouse, his encomienda, and all his goods, with the sole condition that the said fathers were to take charge of the gratuitous education and teaching of the poor Spanish and native boys. The condition having been accepted by the Dominican fathers the schoolhouse of the worthy Spaniard and now virtuous religious was erected into a college under the advocacy of San Juan de Letrán, July 18, 1640, by license from the governor-general and from the archbishop. Since that college was a school, it had also as its object the elemental instruction and education of abandoned and poor children, in order to make of them good citizens and excellent military men for the defense of the plaza of Manila, and the colony. Erected into a college, the students continued therein the study of philosophy, theology, and canons, in order that those who showed aptitude and merited that dignity, might be ordained as priests. Later, all the young men who cared to devote themselves to the study of secondary education were admitted as pensioned inmates. At the end of that course, and after they had taken their degree, they went to the university of Santo Tomás to take up the higher branches. The above-mentioned college was always very useful and commendable. A blessed asylum in its origin, it has always been until today the institution of secondary teaching in which the Dominican fathers, subjecting themselves rigorously to the urgent, although ancient plan of studies, have been able to mold themselves to the peculiar capacity of the natives, directing with exquisite prudence, their native qualities to the professional studies which most harmonize with them.
Thus, in proportion as the necessities for education were exacting, the monastic orders, ever attentive to every movement which could be of interest to the colony, continued to create centers of instruction: the Jesuit fathers in the Ateneo and in the normal school in Manila; the Dominicans in the university, Letrán, and Dagupan; the Franciscans, in Camarines; the Augustinian Recollects, in Negros; the calced Augustinians founded in Iloilo colleges of secondary education directed by themselves, which promised to be the dawn of a new era of civilization and culture, if the last Indian rebellion, provoked by the obstinate governors and supported by the Americans had not caused its ruin with a secular work, the wonder of the world, with the colleges, with the Spanish domination, with the country, and with all the existing things gained quietly yet at the cost of great hardships, and of enormous sacrifices in self-denial and virtue.[27]
The weak sex also were attended to according to their merits by the religious orders. From before the middle of the eighteenth century dates the institution of the school of Santa Rosa, or of Mother Paula, as its foundress was called. She was a religious of the tertiary branch of St. Dominic, who went from Cataluña to Manila to consecrate herself to the welfare of her own class. Having arrived at Manila, she saw that the greatest benefit which her flaming charity could produce was the education and instruction of the young Indian women. In reality, she labored with pious and burning zeal, until she obtained a house, in which she made the foundation of the beaterio school in which the young Indian women received a Christian education. In the holy fear of God, they learned the doctrine and exercised themselves in the labors peculiar to their sex, in order to later dedicate themselves to God and to the moral education of their sex, or to become married, in which estate they gave application and example of the excellent maxims and sane principles which they learned from their glorious foundress. Mother Paula endured many persecutions which she suffered with resignation and patience. She gave her name to the beaterio, which continued as an educational institution and as a retreat for the girls who desired to embrace it temporarily.
Before the beaterio of Santa Rosa, or of Mother Paula, was founded that of Santa Catalina de Sena. The former was the complement of the latter, which in its beginning only took charge of the education of young Spanish women, It is said that its foundation was due to a certain number of women of the tertiary branch of St. Dominic who retired to a house in order to devote themselves to pious exercises, and from which they went out only to hear mass. Others attribute the foundation of that beaterio school in 1696 to the solicitude of Mother Francisca del Espiritu Santo, and to the reverend father, Fray Juan de Santo Domingo. The illustrious author, Fray Joaquin Martinez de Zúñiga, recognizes as foundress of that beaterio in 1694, Doña Antonia Esguerra, but from any of those three opinions which we follow it will always result that the said beaterio school of Santa Catalina de Sena was dedicated from its beginning to the education and teaching given by women religious to the Spanish girls primarily, and admitted afterwards into its classes Indian and mestizo girls. All learned to read, write, reckon, and the work peculiar to their sex.
The prodigious increase of the Filipino population and of the general prosperity of the country, and even more the advanced extension made by culture in all social classes made the above-mentioned beaterio schools insufficient, and, just as other monastic orders came to the aid of the Dominican fathers when the needs of the times demanded it, so also, the sisters of charity came to the aid of the tertiary mothers, and founded the schools of Luban and Concordia in Manila, in Tuguegarao, Pangasinan, Camarines, Iloilo, Cebú, and Ilocos-Sur.
The monastic orders, charged with the superior rule of almost all the literary profession, directors of the scientific movement of the country, could not have forgotten one class of the greatest utility at any time of the scarcity of religious, although it never corresponded as it ought to the desires of its professors, or to that which the high spiritual interests of the Church and of the faithful demanded and hoped from it. The bishops of the country all proceeding from the monastic cloisters founded the conciliar seminaries directed by religious of all the orders, in which the native clergy was educated, instructed, and formed, as an aid to the regular clergy in the beginning, and as parish priests and administrators after the missions and ministries surrendered to the miters by the religious orders.
All the above-mentioned centers of education gave a suitable increase for the end for which they were created. All attained in a short time so high a degree of splendor, that but seldom or never is seen in cultured Europa. They counted their regular pupils by hundreds, and their day pupils by thousands. The confidence of the families in the solid instruction and morality of the religious professors, in the method and facility in the explanation by expert professors who knew the qualities and defects of the scholars, and even the language of the country, and in the moral and religious regimen to which they rigorously submitted both regular and day pupils contributed to so happy a result.
With respect to the condition of education in the last third of the past century, some affirm that it was highly satisfactory, while others have asserted that its backward state and abandonment were pitiful. If we consider that the courses were made, if not by the rule of the statutes approved by the general government of the colony, October 20, 1786, at least by a plan of almost as respectable an antiquity, the secondary and university education had to result as deficient for modern times. If we add the small capacity of the Indians for the sciences, the chronological defects will show up more clearly through the little gain of the scholars in spite of the enlightened efforts of the eleven doctors, and eighteen licentiates of the royal and pontifical university of Santo Tomás.
As if led by the hand we have now come to touch upon one of the Filipino problems discussed so often and with so great heat, and yet without result to the satisfaction of all. We speak of the aptitude and capacity of the Indians for the letters and sciences.
Has the Filipino Indian that aptitude and sufficiency?
Before entering fully upon the question, we ought to advise that we have lived in several Visayan villages for the space of twenty-three years; that we speak the language fluently; that, as a parish priest, we have necessarily had among our duties to treat with Indians of all social classes, from the most enlightened to the rudest; that we have merited their confidence; that we have studied them and observed them at their domestic fireside and in public life; that we know their customs, their passions, their defects, and their good qualities. And if all this, and much more which we could add, is not sufficient to form an exact and definite judgment on the nature of the Indian, we will say that we have consulted the experience of our predecessors, and the parish-priest religious brothers of the habit, friends, and associates who took part in the sacred ministry in villages of other provinces, and we have found our opinions upon this particular in accord with their more valuable opinions. We will say also, in order that our opinion may not be censured as partial, that by the divine grace we wear the habit of our glorious founder, St. Augustine, the wisest and most universal of the holy fathers, the great figure of the fourth century, the wonderful ancient author, the admiration of the moderns, from whom we have inherited our love for study and the sciences, which with prayer and contemplation constitute the foundation and essence of our institute, as it was founded by a saint consecrated all his life to letters and converted to the faith by means of a book: Tolle lege; tolle, lege.[28] Lastly, we advise that the Order of St. Augustine, to which I have the good fortune to belong, also built a school in Iloilo, dedicated to secondary education, in which it spent huge sums to make it the equal of the best schools of Europa.
Now then, having set forth these preliminaries, we enter upon the question. More than two centuries ago, the university and the colleges of San José, and San Juan de Letrán, in Manila, opened their halls to the Filipino youth. The Indians annually matriculated by thousands in the various courses which were taught by erudite professors. How many scientific notabilities have resulted from the natives up to the present from the university cloisters? How many Indian theologues, canons, philosophers, moralists [have graduated] from the conciliar seminaries? Not even one by exception, which usually is found in any general rule. At the most we have heard of some good advocate, of some regular theologue, of some mediocre canon, of some advanced pharmacist, or of some clever physician. But those whom we can consider as exceptions to the rule, never reach the top rank of their equals in other countries. This lack is not attributed to the professors, for they were always picked men, and in the university of Manila, the present bishop of Oviedo, Señor Vigil, his Excellency, the lately deceased Cardinal Ceferino, the archbishop of Manila, Father Nozaleda, the illustrious Father Orias, and very many other Dominican fathers who were the honor of their order, of their country, and of all the monastic orders, shone pre-eminently for their learning. We recognize more sufficiency in the European mestizo and the Sangley or Chinese mestizo, than in the pure-blooded Indian; and the mestizos of those races are the ones who distinguish themselves, some notably, as authors, advocates, physicians, canons, and among other literary professions, in which not one single pure-blooded Indian has been found. What does this signify, if not that the deficiency exists in the race, and not in the professors or in the books.[29]
When we have tried to demonstrate to them some abstract truth, a mystery, a catholic dogma, some philosophical thesis, with the greatest simplicity, clearness, and precision, we have observed that the attention of the Indian, excited and sustained at the beginning, gradually diminished, his eyes wandered, his distraction was manifest. Giving another turn and another form to the exposition, we have succeeded in awakening those sleepy or tired minds, but always for only a few moments. By one example we obtain more than by the most exact dissertations, and by the most clear explanations; for their childish minds, their excessively acute sensibility needs something palpable to bring some light to the darkness of their understandings. We have observed that phenomenon also in the rude as well as the instructed Indians who had learned to reason by logic, and have cultivated the mind by study as far as their mental strengths can go. It must be inferred then that the Filipino Indian is a grown-up child. As a child he cannot go beyond the elemental in the sciences, for his most limited understanding cannot mount in its flight to the heights of the metaphysical. Examples, similes, and metaphors are the indirect means to make him understand the intangible, the spiritual, and the abstract. There can be no luminous philosophical dissertations, or brilliant theories, or abstruse problems, but examples, many examples to make him perceive the truth and the essence of things, causing him to touch, feel, and perceive, with eyes, ears, touch, and the other bodily senses.
There have not been lacking those who have attributed the incapacity and insufficiency of the Indians to intellectual laziness which corresponds to the laziness peculiar to an equatorial country, where the burning rays of fiery sun enervates the physical and intellectual forces. We neither affirm nor deny this, since it might well happen that the Indians possess, like children, in the beginning in potentiality intellectual faculties in their germ equal and even superior to those of the white race, but we incline to the belief that the Indian of pure blood can never reach in scientific culture to the level of the European. If he ever attains anything in the field of science, it must be because another blood inoculates in his own blood the divine breath of wisdom, and then he will be able to advance somewhat when the cross whitens his olive-colored face, has lowered his prominent cheek-bones, and elevated his flat nose a trifle. Until that time comes, the Indian will always be a grown-up child, as simple, as ignorant, and as credulous as a child, but with all the passions, vices, and defects of the adult.
“In regard to the nature and understanding of the Indians,” says Retana, “speaking in general, they are more clever than the American Indians.[30] They readily learn any art, and with the same readiness they imitate any work which is placed before them. They make fine clerks and are employed in the accounting offices and other offices in that duty. For, besides the fact that they write well, they are excellent accountants, have capacity for directing a lawsuit, and very sharp in getting the parties to the lawsuit all tangled up. There are good stonemasons, and musicians among them. But in all these things, they only reach a certain degree which they never surpass, either because of laziness, or for the lack of intellect, which we must suppose to be sufficiently limited. For they never invent anything, and all is reduced to their skill of imitation. Those who give themselves to the sciences never surpass a mediocrity in their comprehension.
“He who has had to do with the Indians of Filipinas can do no less than assent to this truth. We find them more clever than ourselves in learning any mechanical work, but more stupid in whatever depends upon the understanding or on the imagination. In so brief a time do they learn the trade of artists, musicians, embroiderers, cobblers, tailors, and whatever is reduced to the mechanical, that they exercise it fairly well in little time. If they are not satisfied with it, they readily give it up and learn another trade. There are Indians who have gone through all those trades, and they have filled them all well. But not one of them has ever surpassed mediocrity. There has never been an artisan who has invented any improvement in the trade which he learned. They are most ingenious in imitating what they see, but they never invent anything. If those men had the talents of Europeans, why is it possible that one cannot find in three hundred years one who has added anything to what was taught him?
“I can affirm of the Filipinos with whom I have lived for more than sixteen years, that they are handy in every kind of mechanism which is shown to them. They are capable of imitating the most curious works, but they can invent nothing, for they lack imagination and fancy, and are very obtuse in the abstract sciences because they lack understanding.
“Some try to attribute this to the subordination in which the Spaniards hold them. I will ask such people why does not that subordination and submission prevent them from making any mechanical work with a sufficient perfection? The soldiers learn the military exercise quicker than do the Spaniards; the children learn to read readily; most of them write an excellent hand. The girls easily imitate the laces and embroideries of Europa. Why do they not imitate equally well our philosophers, our mathematicians, and our poets? Why do they not make any advance in painting, in music, and in the other sciences which require imagination and understanding?[31] More than half of the seculars of the Manila archbishopric are Indians. There are some who have become alcaldes-mayor, officers in the royal army, and advocates in the royal Audiencia. Why have none of them gone beyond a very moderate mediocrity in the sciences to which they have dedicated themselves? Just as among Europeans individuals are found for all kinds of abstract sciences, it must be confessed that in the same manner nations are found who, because of the climate in which they have lived for a long series of generations, have contracted a certain tangency of understanding which disposes them very little to receive metaphysical and spiritual ideas.”[32]
This gives us the key to the fatal results obtained in education in Filipinas. Of the hundreds of students who matriculated annually in the colleges, fifteen per cent did not succeed in obtaining the degree of bachelor, and if those who gained a professional title in the university scarcely reached ten per cent, and of them the greater number were advocates without clients, and physicians without patients, they, united with those who abandoned their books and mutilated their career, were in the villages the greatest calamity that befell the country. They all pompously called themselves pilósopos for filósofos [i.e., philosophers], and they were no more than ignorant and presuming fellows, pettifoggers, intriguers, and lazy, haughty, and vain fellows, who neither could nor would work, or aid their parents in work or trade, but could dress as those in Manila, prink themselves out like women, censuring everything, even the religious acts, in order that they might be esteemed sages. They were, through their vices, a grievous weight to the parish priests; by their laziness and viciousness, an insupportable burden to their families; by their lewdness and intrigues the mine which furnished suits to the lawyers, and for the disaffected and filibuster, as they were almost all of them affiliated with freemasonry, a danger to the government and to the nation.[33] All those evil students learned all the evil of the capitals and laden with vices, evil ideas, and morals, they were in the villages a scandal for the majority, a snare for some, and mischievous for all.
“Those deserters from the university,” says Escosura, “half instructed with incomplete notions of the sciences which, belonging to the superior education, require to be studied by persons of consideration and social prestige, and above all to be upright, in order that they may not be dangerous to the public safety; those deserters from the university form, I repeat, a class in Filipinas, and are, above all, insatiable leeches who devour the substance of the Indians, so many other founts of lawsuits and quarrels among their fellowcitizens.”
Perhaps I shall be asked at this point: “Why since you [religious] see and know all this, why did your religious devote themselves to, and encourage, education?” Because it is very difficult to separate oneself from the influence of the time; for it is impossible to oppose the conquering current of opinion, as the monastic orders of Filipinas did not arrange means to free themselves from the pressure of the government, and to reply to the unjust charge of having retrograded, which those who did not know the country even on the map fulminated against them; and lastly to avoid greater evils. The regular province of the Augustinian fathers was the last to devote itself to superior education among the Indians. When did it do that, and why? When Señor Becerra was minister of the colonies in the years 1887 and 1888, and that minister of sad memory planned an official institute in the capital of Iloilo, the Augustinian fathers saw in the plan of the minister a most grave danger for the country, and they went ahead to ward it off. All we parish-priest regulars of Filipinas saw with pain the advances which freemasonry was making in the country by means of the abandoned advocates and physicians, unfit students, ambitious caciques, wealthy fellows, ruined by their vices or by play—we know the works of the spade against the foundation of Spanish domination which were based on religion, prestige, and superiority of race. We all recognized and experienced the apathy and indifference of the authorities who were not ignorant of the frauds and plans of the lodges; and there were even governors of the provinces who protected them. And if to all that which we knew, recognized, and could not remedy, we had consented that Señor Becerra establish in Iloilo an institute of secondary education with professors who might have been freemasons or atheists, the catastrophe would have been certain and imminent, for such institute would be a seeding place for filibusters and insurgents. In order to avoid that, the Augustinian order planned and constructed at its own expense an edifice which it resolved to dedicate as an institute. That could not be carried out, for the last revolution of ’98 came upon them before it was inaugurated.
More beneficial for the country, more in accordance with the monastic traditions, more in harmony with the recommendations of our glorious founder, which were practiced by our virtuous ancestors, would have been the opening of schools of arts and crafts. In reality, although the Spanish government established a few of those schools in Manila, Pampanga, and Iloilo, it was so unseasonable that it was unable to gather the fruits which were promised in their founded hopes. Such is the scarcity of Indian artists and artisans, that of the former there are a few sculptors, engravers, and painters, etc., but of the latter, we can assert that almost all the trades are in the hands of the Chinese, and only carpentry, cabinet-making, architecture, masonry, and some other trades, are exercised by Indians, to whom the parish-priest religious taught them because they needed them for their works and constructions.
It is known that the ancient monks divided their time among prayer, contemplation, study, and manual work. St. Anthony[34] and his five thousand monks, as well as all those who afterward imitated the monastic life or that of the desert, employed part of their day in labor with their hands, weaving mats, making shoes, oars, boats, or small skiffs, and other similar labors. Our father, St. Augustine, desired his monks to also devote some hours of the day to manual labor. Accordingly, our predecessors did it. It is true, that the spirit of the respective epochs changed the character of the bodily work, but the monastic corporations of Filipinas, which recognized the incapacity of the Indian for science and deplored the pernicious effects of science poorly digested by the natives, if they could not do away with the action of the governments, the influence of opinion, the pressure of the times, would have had to turn aside, by means of their parish-priest religious, the tendency of the Indians to the literary branches, and to have directed that tendency to those branches of pure imitation, for which it is necessary to recognize, and we do that gladly, that the Filipino Indian has exceptional abilities. At the same time that the university was founded, and the colleges provided, schools and workshops ought to have been established for the natives, which would have obtained the preference in those narrow, dull, and lazy minds, with greater benefits to the country and less harm to all. All the monasteries founded by St. Basil the Great[35] had in charge an elementary superior school, and another of arts and crafts joined to it. That ought to be the model of the religious orders in Filipinas, in spite of the governments of the mother country, of the demands of opinion manifestly gone astray on this point, and of the spirit of the epoch which could not have any influence in that country, most especially by their constitution, nature, customs, and government. Had the religious corporations, thoroughly permeated with their Christian and civilizing mission, proceeded in that manner, the contingent of sons with the three pointed design of the square and apron,[36] who left the halls of the colleges and became the petty leaders and chief revolutionists who betrayed the mother country and were also the greatest enemies of those who had taught them the little good that they knew, would not have been so numerous.
The cholera, which made ravages in the Filipino Archipelago in 1882, left in the saddest orphanage many children of both sexes and of all the races. They, abandoned, and without resources, wandered through the streets begging public charity. The Spanish women, moved by the disconsolate spectacle, which so many ragged and hungry children offered, formed a society, from which a committee was chosen, which went to the governor-general to beg for food and shelter for those abandoned children. The governor summoned the provincials of the monastic order, as being the natural protectors of the destitute, and creators of the centers of education and learning in the country. He petitioned them for support and aid. The father provincial of the Augustinians, representing his order, took under charge of the province of Santísimo Nombre de Jesús, the support, education, and teaching of the abandoned and orphaned children. The Augustinian fathers assigned for that purpose local sites provisionally in the avenue of San Marcelino, where they gathered the children who were wandering through the city of Manila, and gave them shelter in the temporary barracks. But since the latter had no hygienic conditions, and were not large enough, they transferred the children to the lower parts of the convent of Guadalupe, which were spacious and well ventilated. There they opened workshops of sculpture and ceramics, painting, and modeling, and there they remained until the year 1892, when the schools, workshops, and children were transferred to the building of the new plant constructed for that purpose in the village of Malabon. That place united all the desirable conditions of solidity, decoration, size, and even elegance, which could be desired. There the Augustinian fathers taught the orphans, in addition to their primary letters, painting, designing, sculpture, and modeling, printing, and binding, and indeed the printing plant was bought by the voluntary donation of some religious, through the economies practiced in the missions by dint of privations and of a life of poverty and mortification. We know one of those religious, respectable for his exemplary virtue, who gave for that purpose all his savings, consisting of two thousand pesos. We feel that his humility has prohibited us from placing his name here, so that he may be blessed by all who should hear of a charity and liberality peculiar to the sons of a St. Augustine, who gave even his death-bed to the poor, and suitable also to those of Santo Tomás de Villanueva, father of the poor. That asylum of the orphans, and of the unfortunates abandoned by its founders who had to flee from the ingratitude of the revolutionists, was burned by the shells which the Americans threw to dislodge the Indian rebels who had made forts of it, and being looted afterward by pillaging Chinese who took away even the paving-stones of the lower floor, a cargo of which was surprised by the North American police in the Pasig River, and returned to the Augustinian fathers—the only indemnity which they have received up to date.
The Augustinian fathers also extended their charity to orphan girls. For that purpose they caused sisters of their tertiary branch to go from the Peninsula, who took charge of the education and instruction of the children in the orphanage that was built in Mandaloya at the expense of the said Augustinian fathers. More than three hundred Indian mestizo and Spanish girls received a fine education there, so much so that their work in embroidery, sewing, and the manufacture of artificial flowers, took the prize in the expositions at Madrid and Manila.
So excellent and fine was the education that the orphan girls received in Mandaloya, that it was necessary to accede to the repeated requests of influential families who begged that the Augustinian tertiary mothers receive as pensioners the daughters of many Peninsulars and Spanish mestizos.
[1] See this decree in VOL. XLV, pp. 184–186, where it is dated June 20, 1686. [↑]
[2] Tomás G. del Rosario, cited often in these notes, says (Census of Philippines, iii, pp. 594, 595): “A decree of the general government, issued October 6, 1885, provided for a competition to be followed by prizes for the best grammars written in Visayan, Cebuano, Ilocano, Bícol, Pangasinán, and Pampango, there being one already in Tagálog. Naturally these grammars, which were written in different dialects and taught in the public schools, made it more difficult (and that was the object) for the Spanish language to become general. Matters reached such a stage that teachers were punished and threatened with deportation, and some were actually deported, for teaching Spanish.”
Speaking on the same subject, LeRoy (“Friars in Philippines,” in Political Science Quarterly, for December, 1903, p. 673) says: “In proclaiming the law of 1893 [the Maura law], Governor-general Blanco instructed the municipal councils to employ ‘the most practical means for the diffusion of the Spanish language.’ The common assertion that the friars did teach the natives Spanish is contradicted by these provisions and by the numerous decrees from 1585 on; those who frankly admit that they did not spread Spanish, and who hold that it is impracticable to make the natives accept either Spanish or English, have a fair argument to present.” [↑]
[3] See this decree in VOL. XLV, pp. 184–186. [↑]
[4] This is given by Barrantes, Instrucción primaria, pp. 69–71. [↑]
[5] For this and following citations of the regulations, see ante. [↑]
[6] Speaking of the legislation of 1863, LeRoy (Philippine Life, pp. 202, 203) says: “Most significant of all, local school boards of a civil and lay character were ordered established, a feature of the decree which had not by any means been realized when the municipal reform of 1893 was decreed, and which that reform itself did not accomplish. Theoretically, the friars were left in supervision only of religious instruction in the public schools; practically, in four towns out of five, they managed everything about the schools to suit their own will, down almost to the last hours of Spanish rule.” [↑]
[7] The Tagálog insurrection broke out prematurely through betrayal of the plot in August, 1896. [↑]
[8] Patricio de la Escosura, formerly minister and ambassador in Berlin, member of the Royal Spanish Academy, went to the Philippines about 1863, as royal commissary. His Memoria is important and worth consultation for the history of the islands. It has a prologue by Cañamaque. The first chapter on the teaching of Spanish argues that Spanish be taught the Filipinos. Chapter viii is on the creation of a school of physicians and surgeons. The various chapters of this book, although written as letters to the President of the Council of Ministers, in 1863, were not published until 1882. See Pardo de Tavera’s Biblioteca filipina. [↑]
[9] See VOL. XVII, p. 333. The Cuadrilleros occupied in a certain sense, the position occupied now by the constabulary. [↑]
[10] The author of this book was Manuel del Rio, who went to the Philippines in 1713, where he labored many years in various villages of Pangasinán. He was procurator-general of his order, definitor, and provincial; and was bishop-elect of Nueva Segovia at his death. A fuller title of his book is as follows: “Instrucciones morales y religiosas para el govierno, direccion, y acierto en la practica de nuestros ministerios. Que deben observar todos los religiosos de esta nuestra Provincia de el Santo Rossario de Philipinas del Orden de Predicadores.” See Peréz and Güemes’s Adiciones y continuacion (Manila, 1905), p. 114. [↑]
[11] The opening of the Suez Canal, as much probably as any other factor promulgated modern ideas in the Philippines, because of the vastly shorter route thus brought about between them and the mother country. [↑]
[12] The above citation is from Daniel Grifol y Aliaga’s prologue to his book La instrucción primaria en Filipinas (note by Zamora, p. 235). [↑]
[13] Fray Hilarion Diez, O.S.A., who was consecrated archbishop of Manila, October 21, 1827. His death occurred May 7, 1829. See Ferrando’s Historia, vi, pp. cliii, cliv. [↑]
[14] Zamora, speaking in his chapter ix of the intervention of the friar, and discussing in general the accusations against the religious orders, says (pp. 408–452): “The Spaniards in admiration of the sanity of life, of the austerity and purity of the morals of the religious; thankful for their good offices as intermediaries among themselves in their disputes, and among the Indians during rebellions; convinced of the efficacy of their word, and of their intervention in all things; of the necessity of their active and diligent coöperation for the conservation and consolidation of the colony: began to respect, venerate, and recognize in them spontaneously, a certain right to intervene in their affairs, to settle their differences, submit to their judgment their quarrels, and respect their decisions with more submission and conformity than would proceed from the legitimately constituted authority. The governors themselves could not leave the religious out of account in all that they undertook.” The Indian learned to distinguish, says Zamora, between the peaceful and helpful friar, who sought only his welfare, and the often brutal and harsh encomendero. “Not otherwise was the origin of the prestige of the religious among Indians and Spaniards;” and the lapse of time furthered it. The governors made use of the friars as ambassadors, counsellors, and in other capacities connected with the government. “The religious were the ones who formed the villages and made a record of their parishioners on the tribute and citizen list.” As the friars were the only ones who understood the native dialects and the natives were ignorant of Spanish, the authorities were forced to work through the former, and consequently, the friars had the right of “visé” of the tribute and citizen lists. They became the presiding officers of all local boards, and so had all the power. In the provinces the dwelling of the parish priest was open to strangers who lodged there as in a hotel. The envy and maliciousness of certain people, however, conspired to take away the power of the parish priest, a reform that was rather agreeable than otherwise to him, as it left him more time for his ministry; but he deplored it as it seemed to threaten the country at no distant future. “The vigilant, noble, and disinterested intervention of the parish priests in all matters was the chief and necessary wheel of the gubernatorial, administrative, and judicial mechanism, in their multiple and complicated attributes and duties. That was exercised with regularity, until, in the last years of Spanish dominion in that country, the impelling force restrained the impulse.” The fruit of the “reform” was the contempt of the natives for the Spaniards. “If the religious orders were the cause for the loss of these islands, they were so unconsciously and ignorantly, or consciously and maliciously.” Zamora argues that they were not in any way the cause for the loss of the country. “The religious communities knew that the ruin of the country was their own ruin, the end of the Spanish domination, the end even of their existence in Filipinas.” “On three bases rested the Spanish domination in Filipinas with its institutions and organisations: religion; the prestige of the parish-priest regulars; and the superiority of race in so great accord with Spanish nobility.” To freemasonry was due the destruction of the high ideal of religion, and also the idea of the superiority of race; and to freemasonry is due, then, the loss of the colony. The friars have not committed the abuses with which they have been credited, and were not the cause of the revolution. They were always the upholders of Spanish sovereignty, and protected the natives. [↑]
[15] The municipal reform of 1893, the “Maura law,” in conferring a considerable degree of local autonomy on Philippine towns, made the newly created municipal councils also school boards. It was a further step in taking from the padre the power to “visé” and supervise everything done, small and great, in a town. In promulgating the law, Governor-general Blanco (popular with the Filipinos for his liberal measures) took pains to explain that the priest’s school-inspecting powers, so far as religious teaching went, were to be the same as ever. As a matter of fact, this reform of Minister Maura, sent forth amid much accompaniment of proclamas in Spain and the islands, was virtually made a dead-letter under succeeding governors. Its non-enforcement, except in a few towns, was one of the complaints of the insurgents in 1896. See LeRoy “Friars in the Philippines,” in Political Science Quarterly for December, 1903, pp. 672, 673. [↑]
[16] Victor S. Clark (Bulletin of the Bureau of Labor, no. 58, May, 1905; Labor Conditions in the Philippines), says (p. 854): “Practically all the Christian population of Mindanao spoke Spanish in 1883, which indicates that the statistics probably did not cover the remoter Jesuit mission stations among the Moros. In that year about 21 per cent of the total population reported for the islands could read, but less than 5½ per cent could speak Spanish. In other words, 75 per cent of the persons able to read could do so only in the Malay dialects.” [↑]
[17] Estadismo, chapter xiv (Retana’s ed.; note by Zamora). [↑]
[18] Zúñiga (Estadismo, Retana’s ed., i, pp. 299, 300), says of the natives of Tondo province: “The language of these Indians is somewhat corrupted, because a great number of Spanish words have been introduced. That is the only benefit which they have derived from living near Manila, since there are very few who know Spanish. In the suburbs themselves, as well as in Binondo and Santa Cruz, the Tagálog language is spoken. The Spaniards cast the blame on the religious for the Indians not knowing the Spanish language. But let them examine the villages of the seculars, and they will find whether they know more than those of the regular curacies. We cannot succeed in getting them to learn the doctrine, and it is wished that we teach them the Spanish language. There are some Spaniards who believe that we are opposed to them learning it, but this calumny was clearly destroyed in the time of Señor Anda, when it was ordered that no one could become a gobernadorcillo unless he knew Spanish; and it was necessary in almost all the villages to take the servants of the fathers. Now even, if there is any Indian who knows Spanish in the villages, it is because he has served some religious or some Spaniard in Manila. I know very well the method of introducing the Spanish language into Filipinas; but since I know that my plan will not be observed, I shall say only that hitherto, certain absurd means which would not have been used among barbarians, have been taken.” [↑]
[19] Estadismo, appendix A (note by Zamora). This citation is from vol. ii, pp. 59*, *60. [↑]
[20] The issue of June 5, 1891 (note by Zamora). [↑]
[21] An expression used in ridicule, like the English folderols. It might be translated “utter nonsense.” [↑]
[22] The Spanish for this invitation is as follows: “El día diecinueve de su mañana y del presente plenilunio tendrá lugar la misa de mi vara en esta Iglesia de mi cargo que Dios gratuitamente me ha concedido esta carga honorosa. Invito á Vd. tanto como á mi casa que desde luego se llenará el vacio acendrado de mi corazón en su asistencia hasta resonar mi última hora en el relox del Eterno.” Some of the words are taken in the wrong acceptation. [↑]
[23] This letter is given by Retana in his edition of Zúñiga’s Estadismo, ii, pp. *60–63*. [↑]
[24] Literally, “I ordain and command”—the form of opening often used in decrees, edicts, etc. [↑]
[25] This last paragraph is not a part of Retana’s letter to Becerra, but it is taken from Retana’s words following the letter in his edition of the Estadismo, ii, pp. 63*, *64. [↑]
[26] The friars virtually controlled secondary and higher instruction in the islands until they were lost to Spain in 1898. The reaction that followed the liberal measures (some of them practical, some foolish) of 1863 to 1870 really strengthened the hold of the friars upon superior education (though one must take into account the competition from the Jesuits in Manila with which the disturbed Dominicans had to deal in increased degree each year). See LeRoy’s Philippine Life, p. 205. [↑]
[27] “The friars maintained control of secondary and higher instruction till the islands were lost to Spain in 1898. A reaction from the liberal policy of 1863 to 1868 was stimulated by the appearance of a radical party in the Philippines, and by an insurrectionary movement at Cavite, in 1872. The friar party declared these to be the natural consequences of ‘reform’ and when the government changed, as it soon did, the projects of educational reorganization were speedily nullified.” James A. LeRoy in Political Science Quarterly, December, 1903, pp. 673, 674. [↑]
[28] i.e., “Take and read.” [↑]
[29] The comments of Victor S. Clark, in his Labor Conditions in the Philippines (Bulletin no. 58, of Bureau of Labor), in regard to Filipino workmen, are interesting, and show a somewhat different side than that presented by Zamora.
Zamora has left out of account the Filipino patriot, Dr. José Rizal, who was executed by order of the Spanish government, December 30, 1896. Rizal was a pure-blooded Tagálog, and attained highest rank in the Orient as an eye specialist. In addition he was a poet, a sculptor, and a novelist of more than average ability, a wonderful linguist, a widely-read man, and a clear thinker. He studied in the Ateneo Municipal and in Santo Tomás. The two following selections, the first from his novel Noli me tangere, often called the “Filipino bible,” and the second from El Filibusterismo (both taken from LeRoy’s Philippine Life in town and country, pp. 210–213, and 207, 208) are interesting criticisms of the education of the friars. The first is the reflections of the village philosopher, the second apropos of the teaching of physics in the University of Santo Tomás.
“The country is not the same today as it was twenty years ago.... If you do not see it, it is because you have not seen the former state, have not studied the effect of the immigration of Europeans, of the entrance of new books, and of the going of the young men to study in Europe. It is true that the Royal and Pontifical University of St. Thomas still exists, with its most wise cloister, and certain intelligences still busy themselves in formulating the distinctions and threshing out to the final issue the subtleties of scholasticism. But where will you now find that metaphysical youth of our times, with an archaic education, who tortured his brain and died in full pursuit of sophistries in some remote part of the provinces, without ever having succeeded in understanding the attributes of being, or settling the question of essence and existence, concepts so lofty that they made us forget what was essential in life, our own existence and individuality? Look at the youth of today. Full of enthusiasm at the view of wider horizons, it studies History, Mathematics, Geography, Literature, Physical Science, Languages, all subjects that in our time we heard of with horror as though they were heresies; the greatest freethinker of my time declared all these things inferior to the classifications of Aristotle and the laws of the syllogism. Man has finally comprehended that he is man; he refuses to give himself over to the analysis of his God, to the penetration of the imperceptible, into what he has not seen, and to give laws to the phantasms of his brain; man comprehends that his inheritance is the vast world, dominion over which is within his reach; weary of a task that is useless and presumptuous, he lowers his gaze to earth, and examines his own surroundings.... The experimental sciences have already given their firstfruits; it needs Only time to perfect them. The lawyers of today are being trained in the new teachings of legal philosophy; some begin to shine in the midst of the shadows which surround our courts of justice, and point to a change in the course of affairs.... Look you: the press itself, however backward it might wish to be, is taking a step forward against its will. The Dominicans themselves do not escape this law, but are imitating the Jesuits, their implacable enemies; they give fiestas in their cloisters, erect little theatres, write poesies, because, as they are not devoid of intelligence in spite of believing in the fifteenth century, they comprehend that the Jesuits are right and will continue yet to play a part in the future of the young peoples that they have educated.
“But are the Jesuits the companions of Progress? Why, then, are they opposed in Europe?”
“I will answer you like an old scholastic.... One may accompany the course of Progress in three ways, ahead of her, side by side with her, and behind her. The first are those who guide the course of Progress; the second are those who are borne along by her; the last are dragged along, and among them are the Jesuits. Well would they like to direct her course, but, as they see her in the possession of full strength and having other tendencies, they capitulate, preferring to follow rather than be smothered or be left in the middle of the road without light. Well now, we in the Philippines are traveling along at least three centuries behind the car of Progress; we are barely commencing to emerge from the Middle Ages. Hence, the Jesuits, reactionary in Europe, when seen from our point of view represent Progress; the Philippines owe to them their dawning system of instruction, and to them the Natural Sciences, the soul of the nineteenth century, as it has been indebted to the Dominicans for Scholasticism, already dead in spite of Leo XIII—no Pope can revive what common sense has judged and condemned.... The strife is on between the past, which cleaves and clings with curses to the waning feudal castle, and the future, whose song of triumph may be faintly heard off in the distant but splendorous glories of a dawn that is coming, bringing the message of Good-News from other countries.”
“The walls were entirely bare; not a drawing, nor an engraving, nor even any kind of a representation of an instrument of physics. On occasions there would be lowered from heaven an instrumentlet to be shown from afar to the class, like the Holy of Holies to the prostrate faithful: ‘Look at me, but don’t touch me.’ From time to time, some complacent professor came, a day of the year was assigned for visiting the mysterious ‘cabinet,’ and admiring from afar the enigmatic apparatus arranged inside the cases. Then no one could complain; that day there were seen much brass, much glass, many tubes, disks, wheels, bells, etc. And the show stopped there, and the Philippines were not turned upside down. For the rest, the students are convinced that these instruments were not bought for them; merry fools would the friars be! The ‘cabinet’ was made to be shown to foreigners and to high officials from Spain, that, on seeing it, they may nod in approbation, while their guide smiles as if saying: ‘You have been thinking you were going to find a lot of backward monks, eh? Well, we are at the height of the century; we have a cabinet!’
“And the foreigners and high officials, obsequiously entertained, afterward wrote in their voyages or reports: ‘The Royal and Pontifical University of St. Thomas, of Manila, in charge of the illustrious Dominicans, possesses a magnificent cabinet of physics for the instruction of youth.... There annually take this course some two hundred and fifty students; but, be it on account of the apathy, indolence, scanty capacity of the natives, or through any other cause whatsoever, ethnological or unperceivable, up to date there has not developed a Lavoisier, a Secchi, or a Tyndall, even in miniature, from the Philippine-Malay race!’” [↑]
[30] See p. 801 of Victor S. Clark’s article in Bulletin no. 58, ut supra, for a comparison between the Filipino and the Central and South American Indians. [↑]
[31] Retana’s praises of Rizal, a full-blooded Tagálog, in all these lines, as seen in his Vida y escritos del Dr. José Rizal, a series just concluded (October, 1906), in the Madrid review, Nuestro Tiempo, are the best answer to his own question. [↑]
[32] See Retana’s Estadismo, appendix A (note by Zamora). [↑]
[33] According to Eduardo Navarro, O.S.A., the first freemason lodge established in the Philippines was the one called Luz Filipina, about 1860, which was established in Cavite under the Gran Oriente Lusitano. It was in immediate correspondence with the Portuguese lodges of Macao and Hongkong. Shortly after another lodge was created in Zamboanga of Peninsulars and creoles resident in Mindanao. Some time after 1868, must have occurred the creation of another lodge composed of foreigners and dependents of the lodge of Hongkong, of the Scottish rite. Into this lodge were admitted some Peninsulars and Filipinos. Shortly after this many other lodges were created under the Grañ Oriente de España. See Navarro’s Asuntos filipinos (Madrid, 1897), pp. 221–277. Manuel Sastron (Insurrección en Filipinas, Madrid, 1901, p. 41), who represents the friar standpoint, says: “We believe and affirm in good faith, that, in our opinion, the origin, the primitive cellule of the insurrection of 1896 in Filipinas, is to be found in masonry.” The masonic movement was by 1890 widespread in the islands. See also Sawyer’s Inhabitants of Philippines, pp. 79–83. [↑]
[34] St. Anthony the Great, who was an Egyptian, born A.D. 356. His day is January 17. See Baring Gould’s Lives of the Saints, i, pp. 249–272. [↑]
[35] St. Basil the Great was a native of Cappadocian Cæsarea. His death occurred A.D. 379. His day is celebrated on June 14, except by the Greeks who keep January 1 in his memory. See Baring Gould’s Lives of the Saints, vi, pp. 192–202. [↑]
[36] Referring to the Katipunan, or Kataas-taasan Kagalang-gálang Katipunan Nang Mañga Anac Nang Bayan, “Sovereign Worshipful Association of the Sons of the Country.” This society, of which it is yet too early to have definite and detailed information, was due in the main to Andrés Bonifacio, a warehouse keeper in the employ of Fressel and Co., of Manila, who became its third president, although primarily founded by Marcelo Hilario del Pilar. This society enrolled in its ranks the common people among the Tagálogs. It is more than likely that the plan of the organization was copied from the masonic lodges, but the analogy stops here. The Katipunan was not masonry. See Sastron’s Insurrección, pp. 51–59; Sawyer’s Inhabitants, pp. 82, 83; and The Katipunan (Manila, 1902), purporting to be by one Francis St. Clair, although it is claimed by some to have been written by or for the friars. [↑]