The total number of registered votes was 248,154 only, of whom slightly less than one-third had the above-mentioned qualifications. In Manila 14 per cent of the voters were illiterate, and in the provinces 70 per cent. This lack of education opened wide the door to fraud and was one of the chief reasons why there were 240 protested elections out of a total of 824, made up as follows: municipal, 709; provincial, 34; for delegate to assembly, 81.
The proportion of literate electors to total population in the territory in question was 1.47 per cent.
One of the easiest kinds of business to start in the Philippines, and one of the most profitable to conduct, is the establishment of a new religion.
We have recently had the “colorum,” with headquarters on Mt. San Cristobal, an extinct volcano. People visited this place and paid large sums in order to persuade the god to talk to them. A big megaphone, carefully hidden away, was so trained that the voice of the person using it would carry across a cañon and strike the trail on the other side. If payments were satisfactorily large the god talked to those who had made them in a most impressive manner when they reached this point in their homeward journey.
We have also had the Cabaruan fiasco in Pangasinán, in the course of which a new town with several thousand inhabitants sprang up in a short time. There was a place of worship where the devout were at prayer day and night. There was also a full-fledged holy Trinity made up of local talent. Unfortunately, some of the principal people connected with this movement became involved in carabao stealing and other forms of public disorder, and on a trip to Lingayen I saw the persons who had impersonated God the Son and the Virgin Mary in the provincial jail. We have had “Pope Isio” in Negros, who was in reality the leader of a strong ladrone band, and we have had various other popes elsewhere who occupied themselves in similar ways.
Hardly a year passes that miraculous healers do not spring into ephemeral existence in the islands, and the people invariably flock to them in thousands. Conspicuous among this class of imposters was the “Queen of Taytay,” whose exploits I have already narrated.
The belief of the common people in asuáng and in the black dog which causes cholera has also already been mentioned. A very large percentage of them are firmly convinced of the efficacy of charms, collectively known as anting-anting, supposed to make the bodies of the wearers proof against bullets or cutting weapons. Within the past year a bright young man of Parañaque, a town immediately adjacent to Manila, insisted that a friend should strike him with a bolo in order that he might demonstrate the virtues of his anting-anting, and received an injury from which he promptly died. Again and again the hapless victims of this particular superstition have gone to certain death, firm in the conviction that they could not be harmed.
The worst of it is that even the native press does not dare to combat such superstitions, if indeed those who control it do not still themselves hold to them.
A Strange Couple.