[34] “The edifices and houses of the natives of all these Filipinas Islands are built in a uniform manner, as are their settlements; for they always build them on the shores of the sea, between rivers and creeks. The natives generally gather in districts or settlements where they sow their rice, and possess their palm trees, nipa and banana groves, and other trees, and implements for their fishing and sailing.” Ibid., p. 117.)
[35] Especially in La Indolencia de los Filipinos, in “La Solidaridad,” 1890, which develops the idea advanced by Sangcianco y Gozon.
[36] ”* * * As already seen, we must reject so often reiterated of late years that the early missionaries found nomadic or half-fixed clans and taught them the ways of village life. Village life there was already, to some extent, and it was upon this that the friars built. Doubtless they modified it greatly until in time it approached in most ways as closely to European village life as might be expected in tropical islands whose agricultural resources are not as yet well developed. From the first there would be a tendency to greater concentration about the churches, beginning with the rude structures of cane and thatch, which are replaced before 1700 in all the older settlements by edifices of stone, frequently massive and imposing, especially, so as they tower over the acres of bamboo huts about them, from the inmates of which have come the forced labor which built them. From the first, too, it was to the interest of the Spanish conquerors, lay and priestly, to improve the methods of communication between the communities which formed their centers of conversion or of exploration and collection of tribute. Yet to represent either the friars or the soldiers as great pathfinders and reconstructors of wilderness is the work of ignorance. When Legaspi’s grandson, Juan de Salcedo, made his memorable marches through northern Luzon, bringing vast acres under the dominion of Spain with a mere handful of soldiers, he found the modern Bigan a settlement of several thousand people; his successors in the conquest of the Upper Kagayan Valley, one of the most backward portions of the archipelago to-day, reported a population of forty thousand in the region lying around the modern Tuguegarao, and so it was quite commonly everywhere on the seacoasts and on the largest rivers. Some very crude deductions have been made as to the conquest period by writers of recent years who assume that the natives were at the beginning mere bands of wandering savages, and that all the improvements visible in their external existence to-day were brought about in these early years.” (James A. LeRoy, The Americans in the Philippines, Vol. I, pp. 8–10.)
“The friar missionaries did not bring about the first settlement and conquests under Legaspi; they did not blaze the way in wildernesses and plant the flag of Spain in outlying posts long in advance of the soldiers, the latter profiting by their moral-suasion conquests to annex great territories for their own plunder; they did not find bloodthirsty savages, wholly sunk in degradation, and in the twinkling of an eye convert them to Christianity, sobriety, and decency, * * *; they did not teach wandering bands of huntsmen or fishermen how to live peacefully in orderly settlements, how to cultivate the soil, erect buildings (except the stone churches), and did not bind these villages together by the sort of roads and bridges which we have today, though they had considerable share in this work, especially in later time; they did not find a squalid population of 400,000 to 750,000 in the archipelago, and wholly by the revolution wrought by them in ways of life make it possible for that population to increase by ten or twenty times in three centuries.” (Ibid., pp. 10–11.)
[37] Relación de las Islas Filipinas, Pedro Chirino, S. J., Roma 1604.—Bl. and Rb., Vol. 12, p. 188.
[38] Morga’s Sucesos.—Bl. and Rb., Vol. 16, p. 105.
[39] Census of the Philippine Islands, 1903, Vol. I, p. 329.
[40] In La Indolencia de los Filipinos, Rizal continues thus:
“And if this, which is deduction, does not convince any minds imbued with unfair prejudices, perhaps of some avail may be the testimony of the oft-quoted Dr. Morga, who was Lieutenant-Governor of Manila for seven years and after rendering great service in the Archipelago was appointed criminal judge of the Audiencia of Mexico and Counsellor of the Inquisition. His testimony, we say, is highly credible, not only because all his contemporaries have spoken of him in terms that border on veneration but also because his work, from which we take these citations, is written with great circumspection and care, as well with reference to the authorities in the Philippines as to the errors they committed. ‘The natives,’ says Morga, in chapter VII, speaking of the occupations of the Chinese, ‘are very far from exercising those trades and have even 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 WAS CONQUERED.’”
“The whole of Chapter VIII of his work deals with this moribund activity, this much-forgotten industry, and yet in spite of that, how long is his eighth chapter!