“There is scarce a Filipino, even the most enlightened, who does not tell marvelous things that have happened to him—wondrous visions, mute and speechless; ghosts, goblins, strange figures; dead people; dogs, and fabulous and never imagined animals; castles, and balls of fire, that have appeared to him; frightful noises of all sorts that have scared him; and, finally, the most improbable stories and bits of nonsense that could be invented by the most raving maniac.
“On hearing them recount so many of these extravagances, and seeing that they distinguish them from dreams, I have been unable to believe that they were deceits; and observing their faces very carefully during the narration, I have been convinced that they were intimately persuaded that they had seen the things that they described. Whence can this mental weakness come? It is not from ignorance, for I have noticed the same thing as in the others, in several clerics who have studied in the university for ten or twelve years. One day I was in a convent where the boards of the floor began to creak because of dryness, and the coadjutor became so frightened that he went away to sleep in another house; and the Christian reflections, jests, and anger of the Spanish cura could not restrain him.... The Filipino cura, Don J. Severiano Mallares, committed and caused to be committed fifty-seven assassinations, because he believed that he could by this means save his mother, who, he had persuaded himself, had been bewitched; and was hanged in the year 1840. The attorney on that cause talked in pathetic terms of the indescribable and barbarous prodigality of blood shed by that monster. Reflecting upon this phenomenon, I am inclined to think that it is based on their natural timorousness....”
[93] In D., “indolent.”
[94] From the word “islands” to this point, is omitted in D.
[95] “That they are tyrants, one over the other,” says Delgado (p. 311), “I do not deny. They inherited this peculiarity from their ancestors, and it has as yet been impossible to uproot it entirely, as many others which they learned from their ancestors. However, these vices are not so common as they were formerly. And not only would the Indians of these islands have been consumed if the Spaniards had not come hither, but they would have been conquered and enslaved by the neighboring nations, such as the Borneans, Chinese, and Japanese, as we see in the books of history.
” ... The principales were the aim of the popular wrath in the Ilocan insurrection in 1807. ‘Kill all the lords and ladies’ was the cry, while the people hastened toward the capital to petition for the abolition of the monopolies and the fifths. The same thing happened in the year 1814.” (Mas, p. 97.)
[96] M. omits “and bring it back as cold as ice.”
[97] This is a general statement that is not true, says Delgado (pp. 311, 312), for the example given is merely from boys; and, besides, it never freezes in Filipinas.
[98] This citation is missing in M. It is from Horace’s Satires, book i, ll, 106, 107. E. C. Wickham (Horace for English Readers; Oxford, 1903, p. 163), translates the passage as follows: “There is measure in everything. There are fixed limits beyond which and short of which right cannot find resting-place.”
[99] “That they need beatings and the rattan,” says Delgado (p. 312), “as examples prove, is a fact, and they confess it; but they resemble all other nations in this particular.... But it must be employed with prudence and moderation, as the discipline is employed by our fathers in our own lands, regarding them as sons and small children, and not as slaves or as our enemies. For God has brought us to their lands, in order to watch over them, and maintains us here for love of them. We must note that the Indians are not so bad as they seem to us.... It must also be observed that there are many Spaniards, and even ministers, who are melancholy and crabbed, and so ill-conditioned and moody, that everything wounds them, and they are contented with nothing. All the actions of the Indians displease them, and they even believe that the Indians do them purposely to make them impatient and to jest with them. From such ill-conditioned people the Indians suffer much, and tolerate and endure much, because of their respect for them. Consequently what the reverend father says below, namely ‘that it costs them more to be Christians than one would believe’ is a fact and true.”