[3] Recopilacion de Leyes de las Indias, lib. VIII., titulo 45, ley 78.
[4] Montero y Vidal: Historia de Filipinas, vol. I., p. 460.
[5] Relacion de la Entrada del Sultan Rey de Jolo, in Archivo del Bibliófilo Filipino, vol. I.
Chapter XI.
The Philippines During the Period of European Revolution. 1762–1837.
The New Philosophy of the Eighteenth Century.—The middle of the eighteenth century in Europe was a time when ideas were greatly liberalized. A philosophy became current which professed to look for its authority not to churches or hereditary custom and privilege, but to the laws of God as they are revealed in the natural world. Men taught that if we could only follow nature we could not do wrong. “Natural law” became the basis for a great amount of political and social discussion and the theoretical foundation of many social rights. The savage, ungoverned man was by many European philosophers and writers supposed to live a freer, more wholesome and more natural life than the man who is bound by the conventions of society and the laws of state.
Most of this reasoning we now know to be scientifically untrue. The savage and the hermit are not, in actual fact, types of human happiness and freedom. Ideal life for man is found only in governed society, where there is order and protection, and where also should be freedom of opportunity. But to the people of the eighteenth century, and especially to the scholars of France, where the government was monarchical and oppressive, and where the people were terribly burdened by the aristocracy, this teaching was welcomed as a new gospel. Nor was it devoid of grand and noble ideas—ideas which, carried out in a conservative way, might have bettered society.
It is from this philosophy and the revolution which succeeded it that the world received the modern ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity, and democracy. These ideas, having done their work in America and Europe, are here at work in the Philippines today. It remains to be seen whether a society can be rebuilt here on these principles, and whether Asia too will be reformed under their influence.
Colonial Conflicts between the Great European Countries.—During the latter half of the eighteenth century there culminated the long struggle for colonial empire between European states which we have been following. We have seen how colonial conquest was commenced by the Portuguese, who were very shortly followed by the Spaniards, and how these two great Latin powers attempted to exclude the other European peoples from the rich Far East and the great New World which they had discovered.