As a sign of their allegiance and to meet the expenses of government every Indian family was assessed a tribute of eight reals, about one dollar, and for the purpose of assessment the people were set off in special groups something like feudal holdings (encomiendas). The tribute from some of the encomiendas went to the king. Others had been granted to the Spanish army officers or to the officials. [33] The "Report of the Encomiendas in the Islands in 1591" just twenty years after the conquest of Luzon reveals a wonderful progress in the work of civilization. In the city of Manila there was a cathedral and the bishop's palace, monasteries for the Austin, Dominican, and Franciscan Friars, and a house for the Jesuits. The king maintained a hospital for Spaniards; there was also a hospital for Indians in the charge of two Franciscan lay brothers. The garrison was composed of two hundred soldiers. The Chinese quarter or Parián contained some two hundred shops and a population of about two thousand. In the suburb of Tondo there was a convent of Franciscans and another of Dominicans who provided Christian teaching for some forty converted Sangleyes (Chinese merchants). In Manila and the adjacent region nine thousand four hundred and ten tributes were collected, indicating a total of some thirty thousand six hundred and forty souls under the religious instruction of thirteen missionaries (ministros de doctrina), besides the friars in the monasteries. In the old province of La Pampanga the estimated population was 74,700 with twenty-eight missionaries; in Pangasinán 2,400 souls with eight missionaries; in Ilocos 78,520 with twenty missionaries; in Cagayán and the Babuyan islands 96,000 souls but no missionaries; in La Laguna 48,400 souls with twenty-seven missionaries; in Vicol and Camarines with the island of Catanduanes 86,640 souls with fifteen missionaries, etc., making a total for the islands of 166,903 tributes or 667,612 souls under one hundred and forty missionaries, of which seventy-nine were Augustinians, nine Dominicans, forty-two Franciscans. The King's encomiendas numbered thirty-one and the private ones two hundred and thirty-six. [34]
Friar Martin Ignacio in his Itinerario, the earliest printed description of the islands (1585), says: "According unto the common opinion at this day there is converted and baptised more than foure hundred thousand soules." [35]
This system of encomiendas had been productive of much hardship and oppression in Spanish America, nor was it altogether divested of these evils in the Philippines. The payment of tributes, too, was irksome to the natives and in the earlier days the Indians were frequently drafted for forced labor, but during this transition period, and later, the clergy were the constant advocates of humane treatment and stood between the natives and the military authorities. This solicitude of the missionaries for their spiritual children and the wrongs from which they sought to protect them are clearly displayed in the Relacion de las Cosas de las Filipinas of Domingo de Salazar, the first bishop, who has been styled the "Las Casas of the Philippines." [36]
That it was the spirit of kindness, Christian love, and brotherly helpfulness of the missionaries that effected the real conquest of the islands is abundantly testified by qualified observers of various nationalities and periods, [37] but the most convincing demonstration is the ridiculously small military force that was required to support the prestige of the Catholic king. The standing army organized in 1590 for the defense of the country numbered four hundred men! [38] No wonder an old viceroy of New Spain was wont to say: "En cada fraile tenía el rey en Filipinas un capitan general y un ejercito entero"— "In each friar in the Philippines the King had a captain general and a whole army." [39] The efforts of the missionaries were by no means restricted to religious teaching, but were also directed to promote the social and economic advancement of the islands. They cultivated the innate taste for music of the natives and taught the children Spanish. [40] They introduced improvements in rice culture, brought Indian corn and cacao from America and developed the cultivation of indigo and coffee, and sugar cane. Tobacco alone of the economic plants brought to the islands by the Spaniards owes its introduction to government agency. [41]
The young capital of the island kingdom of New Castile, as it was denominated by Philip II, in 1603 when it was described by Morga invites some comparison with Boston, New York, or Philadelphia in the seventeenth century. The city was surrounded by a wall of hewn stone some three miles in circuit. There were two forts and a bastion, each with a garrison of a few soldiers. The government residence and office buildings were of hewn stone and spacious and airy. The municipal buildings, the cathedral, and the monasteries of the three orders were of the same material. The Jesuits, besides providing special courses of study for members of their order, conducted a college for the education of Spanish youth. The establishment of this college had been ordered by Philip II in 1585 but it was 1601 before it was actually opened. [42] Earlier than this in 1593 there had been established a convent school for girls, [43] the college of Saint Potenciana. In provisions for the sick and helpless, Manila at the opening of the seventeenth century was far in advance of any city in the English colonies for more than a century and a half to come. [44] There was first the royal hospital for Spaniards with its medical attendants and nurses; the Franciscan hospital for the Indians administered by three priests and by four lay brothers who were physicians and apothecaries and whose skill had wrought surprising cures in medicine and surgery; the House of Mercy, which took in sick slaves, gave lodgings to poor women, portioned orphan girls, and relieved other distresses; and lastly, the hospital for Sangleyes or Chinese shopkeepers in the Chinese quarter. [45] Within the walls the houses, mainly of stone and inhabited by Spaniards, numbered about six hundred. The substantial buildings, the gaily-dressed people, the abundance of provisions and other necessaries of human life made Manila, as Morga says, "one of the towns most praised by the strangers who flock to it of any in the world." [46] There were three other cities in the islands, Segovia and Cazeres in Luzon, and the city of the "most holy name of Jesus" in Cebú, the oldest Spanish settlement in the archipelago. In the first and third the Spanish inhabitants numbered about two hundred and in Cazeres about one hundred. In Santisimo nombre de Jesús there was a Jesuit college.
Although the Indians possessed an alphabet before the arrival of the Spaniards and the knowledge of reading and writing was fairly general they had no written literature of any kind. [47] A Jesuit priest who had lived in the islands eighteen years, writing not far from 1640, tells us that by that time the Tagals had learned to write their language from left to right instead of perpendicularly as was their former custom, but they used writing merely for correspondence. The only books thus far in the Indian languages were those written by the missionaries on religion. [48]
In regard to the religious life of the converted Indians the Friars and Morga speak on the whole with no little satisfaction. Friar Martin Ignacio in 1584 writes: "Such as are baptised, doo receive the fayth with great firmenesse, and are good Christians, and would be better, if that they were holpen with good ensamples." [49] Naturally the Spanish soldiers left something to be desired as examples of Christianity and Friar Martin relates the story of the return from the dead of a principal native—"a strange case, the which royally did passe of a trueth in one of these ilandes,"—who told his former countrymen of the "benefites and delights" of heaven, which "was the occasion that some of them forthwith received the baptisme, and that others did delay it, saying, that because there were Spaniard souldiers in glory, they would not go thither, because they would not be in their company." [50]
Morga writing in 1603 says: "In strictest truth the affairs of the faith have taken a good footing, as the people have a good disposition and genius, and they have seen the errors of their paganism and the truths of the Christian religion; they have got good churches and monasteries of wood, well constructed, with shrines and brilliant ornaments, and all the things required for the service, crosses, candlesticks, chalices of gold and silver, many brotherhoods and religious acts, assiduity in the sacraments and being present at divine service, and care in maintaining and supplying their monks, with great obedience and respect; they also give for the prayers and burials of their dead, and perform this with all punctuality and liberality." [51] A generation later the report of the Religious is not quite so sanguine: "They receive our religion easily and their lack of intellectual penetration saves them from sounding the difficulties of its mysteries. They are too careless of fulfilling the duties of the Christianity which they profess and must needs be constrained by fear of chastisement and be ruled like school children. Drunkenness and usury are the two vices to which they are most given and these have not been entirely eradicated by the efforts of our monks." [52] That these efforts were subsequently crowned with a large measure of success is shown by the almost universal testimony to the temperate habits of the Filipinos.
This first period of Philippine history has been called its Golden Age. Certainly no succeeding generation saw such changes and advancement. It was the age of Spain's greatest power and the slow decline and subsequent decrepitude that soon afflicted the parent state could not fail to react upon the colony. This decline was in no small degree the consequence of the tremendous strain to which the country was subjected in the effort to retain and solidify its power in Europe while meeting the burden of new establishments in America and the Philippines. That in the very years when Spaniards were accomplishing the unique work of redeeming an oriental people from barbarism and heathenism to Christianity and civilized life, the whole might of the mother-country should have been massed in a tremendous conflict in Europe which brought ruin and desolation to the most prosperous provinces under her dominion, and sapped her own powers of growth, is one of the strangest coincidences in history.
Bending every energy for years to stay the tide of change and progress, suppressing freedom of thought with relentless vigor, and quarantining herself and her dependencies against new ideas, conservatism grew to be her settled habit and the organs of government became ossified. Policies of commercial restriction which were justifiable or at least rationally explicable in the sixteenth century lasted on, proof against innovation or improvement, until the eighteenth century and later. Consequently from the middle of the seventeenth century at the period of the rapid rise of colonial powers of France, Holland, and England, the Spanish colonies find themselves under a commercial regime which increasingly hampers their prosperity and effectually blocks their advancement.