Nothing, indeed, in the native character is more remarkable than its unvarying decorum. Here the happy crowd has been standing for three hours, agape with delight, drinking in the rude splendors of tinsel potentates.
Here, too, they would be willing to stand for several hours more; but it is nearly midnight, and a sudden illumination on the other side of the square announces that the time for departure is almost at hand. It is seen that the villagers have constructed a miniature castle, now ablaze with fire-works. Various designs are traced by the spreading glow, and scores of rockets shoot into the sky, dropping a shower of brilliant stars. Ever and anon, at some unusual display, a murmur of applause rises from the admiring throng. Entranced, they stay until the last rocket has been drowned in the vast ocean of Night. Then all leave as silently as they came, and the village square is soon deserted; while the lamps and lanterns are allowed to burn till their glow is quenched in the brightness of the morrow’s sun.
History of Commerce in the Philippines.
The Spanish Policy.
Commerce has its two forms, the extensive and the intensive; one that considers the world at large, and one that seeks to confine itself to the interests of a nation. The latter, before the nineteenth century, was everywhere the type of colonial commerce. The nations held their colonies in leading strings; cramped and crowded them in their natural growth, and so checked their development that they lost the benefit that they might have gained from a more liberal policy. Of all the nations, Spain pursued this short-sighted policy most rigidly. Not only in commerce, but in everything else, she cramped her colonies. Foreign trade was so sternly prohibited that, in her period of supremacy, she put to death any alien merchant that ventured into one of her ports. Her colonies were her cows; no one could milk them but herself; but she milked them so dry as to starve them of their natural yield.