The system of controlling the action of one public servant by appointing another under him to supervise his work has always found favour in Spain, and was adopted in this Colony. There were a great many Government employments of the kind which were merely sinecures. In many cases the pay was small, it is true, but the labour was often of proportionately smaller value than that pay. With very few exceptions, all the Government Offices in Manila were closed to the public during half the ordinary working-day,—the afternoon,—and many of the Civil Service officials made their appearance at their desks about ten oʼclock in the morning, retiring shortly after mid-day, when they had smoked their habitual number of cigarettes.
The crowd of office-seekers were indifferent to the fact that the true source of national vigour is the spirit of individual self-dependence. Constant clamour for Government employment tends only to enfeeble individual effort, and destroys the stimulus, or what is of greater worth, the necessity of acting for oneʼs self. The Spaniard (except the Basque and the Catalonian) looks to the Government for active and direct aid, as if the Public Treasury were a natural spring at the waters of which all temporal calamities could be washed away—all material wants supplied. He will tell you with pride rather than with abashment that he is an empleado—a State dependent.
National progress is but the aggregate of personal individual activity rightly directed, and a nation weakens as a whole as its component parts become dormant, or as the majority rely upon the efforts of the few. The spirit of Cæsarism—“all for the people and nothing by them”—must tend not only to political slavery, but to a reduction in commercial prosperity, national power, and international influence. The Spaniards have indeed proved this fact. The best laws were never intended to provide for the people, but to regulate the conditions on which they could provide for themselves. The consumers of public wealth in Spain are far too numerous in proportion to the producers; hence not only is the State constantly pressed for funds, but the busy bees who form the nucleus of the nationʼs vitality are heavily taxed to provide for the dependent office-seeking drones. It is the fatal delusion that liberty and national welfare depend solely upon good government, instead of good government depending upon united and co-operative individual exertion, that has brought the Spanish nation to its present state of deplorable impotence.
The Government itself is but the official counterpart of the governed. By the aid of servile speculators, a man in political circles struggles to come to the front—to hold a portfolio in the ministry—if it only be for a session, when his pension for life is assured on his retirement. Merit and ability have little weight, and the proteges of the outgoing minister must make room for those of the next lucky ministerial pension-seeker, and so on successively. This Colony therefore became a lucrative hunting-ground at the disposal of the Madrid Cabinet wherein to satisfy the craving demands of their numerous partisans and friends. They were sent out with a salary and to make what they could,—at their own risk, of course,—like the country lad who was sent up to London with the injunction from his father, “Make money, honestly if you can, but make it.”
From the Conquest up to 1844, when trading by officials was abolished, it was a matter of little public concern how Government servants made fortunes. Only when the jealousy of one urged him to denounce another was any inquiry instituted so long as the official was careful not to embezzle or commit a direct fraud on the Real Haber (the Treasury funds). When the Real Haber was once covered, then all that could be got out of the Colony was for the benefit of the officials, great and small. In 1840, Eusebio Mazorca wrote as follows:[8]—“Each chief of a province is a real sultan, and when he has terminated his administration, all that is talked of in the capital is the thousands of pesos clear gain which he made in his Government.”
Eusebio Mazorca further states:[9]—“The Governor receives payment of the tribute in rice-paddy, which he credits to the native at two reales in silver per caban. Then he pays this sum into the Royal Treasury in money, and sells the rice-paddy for private account at the current rate of six, eight or more reales in silver per caban, and this simple operation brings him 200 to 300 per cent. profit.”
The same writer adds:—“Now quite recently the Interventor of Zamboanga is accused by the Governor of that place of having made some ₱15,000 to ₱16,000 solely by using false measures ... The same Interventor to whom I refer, is said to have made a fortune of ₱50,000 to ₱60,000, whilst his salary as second official in the Audit Department[10] is ₱540 per annum.” According to Zúñiga, the salary of a professor of law with the rank of magistrate was ₱800 per annum.
Up to June, 1886, the provincial taxes being in the custody of the Administrator, the Judicial Governor had a percentage assigned to him to induce him to control the Administratorʼs work. The Administrator himself had percentages, and the accounts of these two functionaries were checked by a third individual styled the “Interventor,” whose duties appeared to be to intervene in the casting-up of his superiorsʼ figures. He was forbidden to reside with the Administrator. After the above date the payment of all these percentages ceased.
But for the peculations by Government officials from the highest circles downwards, the inhabitants of the Colony would doubtless have been a million or so richer per annum. One frequently heard of officials leaving for Spain with sums far exceeding the total emoluments they had received during their term of office. Some provincial employees acquired a pernicious habit of annexing what was not theirs by all manner of pretexts. To cite some instances: I knew a Governor of Negros Island who seldom saw a native pass the Government House with a good horse without begging it of him; thus, under fear of his avenging a refusal, his subjects furnished him little by little with a large stud, which he sold before he left, much to their disgust.
In another provincial capital there happened to be a native headman imprudently vain enough to carry a walking-stick with a chased gold-knob handle studded with brilliants. It took the fancy of the Spanish Governor, who repeatedly expressed his admiration of it, hoping that the headman would make him a present of it. At length, when the Governor was relieved of his post, he called together the headmen to take formal leave of them, and at the close of a flattering speech, he said he would willingly hand over his official-stick as a remembrance of his command. In the hubbub of applause which followed, he added, “and I will retain a souvenir of my loyal subordinates.” Suiting the action to the word, he snatched the coveted stick out of the hand of the owner and kept it. A Gov.-General in my time enriched himself by peculation to such an extent that he was at his witsʼ end to know how to remit his ill-gotten gains clandestinely. Finally, he resolved to send an army Captain over to Hong-Kong with ₱35,000 to purchase a draft on Europe for him. The Captain went there, but he never returned.