Before that criminal supposition and that groundless crimination it is fitting to ask: “Were those laws, given with the most just desire and the most holy finality, as is that of christianizing those idolatrous souls and guaranteeing them in the faith of Jesus Christ, suitable for the production of the desired ends? Were the means, which were proposed in those laws, conducive to the end which was being prosecuted? Nay, more, granting the sufficiency of those laws and the propriety of those means for the American districts, since those laws were given for them, was it within the bonds of reason to adapt them with equal propriety and sufficiency to Filipinas?” If it is impossible to grant the first, it is evidently impossible to assent to the second as certain.
It has been shown that law xviii was given in the year 1550, or fifty-eight years after the discovery of the New World. One hundred and forty-two years later that order was repeated by means of law v, of 1634, the fulfilment of which was recorded in 1686, or one hundred and ninety-four years after our arrival on the American coasts. Those laws had been, if not barren, of little fruit, whenever the cause for repeating that law was to banish the idolatries in which the majority of the Indians are now sunk, as they were at the beginning of the conversions. How can that development in instruction be acquired “with Indians who would like to learn, when taught by teachers without pay, and which, so that the teachers might not cost anything, could be well done by the sacristans,” who would immediately be Indians like the pupils, doubtless stupid in learning and incapable of teaching the Catholic doctrine in Castilian? Now then, if those laws were inefficient in the American districts, a country more compact, could they be more efficient in Filipinas, which is composed of many islands; could those means exercise more influence on the intellects of those islanders who are of less capacity than the Americans, and the latter were directly invaded by a constant and powerful stream of civilization, catechised and administered by a numerous pleiad of missionaries when the islands of Urdaneta and Legazpi did not receive more than the residues or crumbs, which, both of the former and the latter, came by way of Acapulco—in America with an invader who carried almost all before him, and who tended by his number to cause the pure primitive race to disappear, exactly the contrary to what occurs in the Filipino country, where the native race, in an imposing mass, is above all absorption, this idea being sufficient only so that not even with very many means more powerful than those hitherto placed in practice can they attain the effects which the laws demand?
Consequently, the laws were not adaptable to that country for which they were not made, and not even was that country known when law xviii was given. Neither have the means or factors which have been put in play since, been in relation, even remote relation, with the ends whose attainment is desired.
On one hand, the great scarcity of missionaries scattered among so numerous islands (each one occupying a most extensive territory, with scarcely any communication [with one another], with a work both arduous and multiple, in all the orders, especially in the learning of so diverse and most difficult languages, and the adaptation of these languages in regard to their characters, phonetics, pronunciation, etc., to our characters, spelling, etc., a knowledge attained afterward by prolonged and constant phonological and philological studies), abandoned to their own resources and energies, since it is known that for many dozens of leguas there was no other Spaniard than the missionary, occupied preferably in the administration of sacraments and evangelization and the conservation of so numerous fields of Christendom; on the other hand the means which the laws granted them, entirely null and void, as has been shown, as is also the result obtained by the last royal decree of 1686, by which it is newly ordered “that schools be established and teachers appointed for the Indians, in order to teach the Castilian language to those who would voluntarily wish to learn it, in the way that may be of less trouble to them and without expense;” and with this clause of voluntary instruction, without trouble and without expense, since the natives were scattered in so many and so distant villages or reductions, and had no teachers, not since they knew the Castilian language, but that they could not even know it except by a rudimentary method in their own language: was there any possibility even that that beautiful language whose knowledge would have freed the missionary from so many sorrows, from so painful labor, from so continual anxieties as the detractors of those orders cannot even imagine, could be taught? Notwithstanding, it will be proved by unassailable documents that those missionaries with some useless laws, most of them deficient, have obtained what no one else could have obtained. Those religious orders, then, have not been the enemies, but the great friends, of instruction. They Have not been opposed, nor only slight lovers of its development, but decided well-wishers, and even enthusiasts in its greater development; and in order to achieve that, the missionaries and parish priests have done that which very few, perhaps no one, could have done: namely, to create schools wherever they preached the gospel; to support them by all means, and even pay them from their scant savings; to bring to a head all classes of philological work; to compile methods, grammars, innumerable dictionaries, books of doctrine, of doctrinal discourses, and many others which besides illuminating the understanding, strengthened the souls in the faith, in accordance with the spirit of those laws.
Furthermore, do the detractors of the religious believe that, if the alcaldes, corregidors, and justices, threatened with very severe penalties by those laws, were convinced of the fact that the missionaries were opposed to the teaching in that part which was viable or feasible, they would not have used their authority to punish, correct, or prevent, that opposition? The ordinances above copied are a copy of the laws given for America, as already mentioned, and suffer in great measure from their peculiarity and lack of application, especially in what regards the teaching of Castilian.
It was in every point impossible that, with the elements possessed by the alcaldes-mayor, corregidors, and governors, they could have observed ordinance 52 of the marquis of Obando. That ordinance contains orders that are positively impracticable and even contradictory. On one side it is ordered “that schools be erected where the children of the natives may be educated (in primary letters in the Castilian language) seeing to it that in this language and not in that of the country, or in any other, they study, be taught, and educated, and that schools of another language be not erected or started under penalty of 500 [pesos?] applied at the will of this superior government.” This is ordered absolutely and without any limitation in immense districts where there is not a single school of Castilian, nor methods, nor grammars, nor dictionaries, nor any other method of teaching that language, nor teachers to teach it, nor scarcely any Indians who have been able to learn it, as they have not had any great familiarity with Spaniards who were prohibited by ordinance 29 from residing in the villages of the Indians. This happened in the year 1752. That prohibition was suppressed by the above-mentioned ordinance 52. By the same ordinance was prescribed the quota which the communal funds were to pay to the teachers, which makes one see immediately the contradiction of the finality of the preceding order with that stating “because as abovesaid, these languages must cease and shall cease in proportion as schools for the Castilian language shall be erected and established;” the only ones who were ordered to pay.
It results, therefore, quite evidently, both from the context of the latter ordinance and from ordinance 17 of Arandía, and 25 and 93 of Raón, that in the Filipino provinces and districts there were no means of establishing instruction in Castilian; and that the only schools which were ordered to be paid from the communal funds were those which should be established with that instruction. Consequently, neither the alcaldes and other justices threatened with very severe penalties, and “the anger of the superior tribunals” nor the teachers “condemned to make restitution of the pay which they had received,” and punished according to the order of the alcaldes, could make in their promises and villages those laws, given in the Peninsula and in the official residence of the first authority of the islands, viable or practicable. How many laws are there which are very good and of elevated ends, but barren and unpractical, as they lack practical meaning! However, in the midst of so many contradictions and difficulties, in the midst of a work so toilsome and without rest, in spite of the penury and scarcity which God alone can, and knows how to, appreciate, in constant struggle with the elements and the Moros, having to create it and conserve it all, it can be no less than contemplated with pride by every good Spaniard that those heroic and humble sons of España attended from the beginning of the conquest to teaching with a zeal worthy of all praise.
A precious testimony of this is that mentioned by the erudite father Augustín María, O.S.A. in his Historia del Insigne convento de San Pablo de Manila [i.e., History of the glorious convent of San Pablo in Manila], which is preserved unedited in the archives of said convent, when he says: “In the same year (1571) was founded this convent and church of San Pablo, which is the chief one of this province, the capitular house for novitiates, and of studies in grammar, arts, theology, and canons for Indians and creoles, until the Jesuits came and opened public schools.” Passing by those teaching centers created in Manila by the religious orders scarcely yet born in those islands, omitting the introduction of printing, a powerful means for progress, by those orders, some decades after their establishment in the islands, and limiting ourselves only to the creation of schools and the progress of primary instruction, we do not fear to affirm that before our legislators occupied themselves in giving laws for teaching in Filipinas, laws had been proclaimed in the assemblies of the religious orders. Before the famous ordinances of Obando and of Raón had been published, the printing houses of the said orders had already printed works entitled: Práctica del Ministerio que siguen los religiosos del orden de N. P. S. Agustín en Philippinas [i.e., Practice of the ministry followed by the religious of the order of our father St. Augustine in Philippinas]; and the Práctica de párrocos dominicana [i.e., Practice of the Dominican parish priest]. Before treating of one or the other it is a duty of historical justice to discard the two above-cited laws given for the New World, the first in 1550, fifteen years before the conquest of Filipinas, and the second in 1634, and both recorded in the royal decree of 1686,[3] given likewise for América and all extended to the archipelago of Legazpi. Now then, much before those last dates, the Augustinian order in its tenth provincial chapter, held May 9, 1596, in which the reverend father, Fray Lorenzo de León, was elected provincial, among the acts and resolutions which it established, which are capitular laws, compulsory on all the religious of the province, was the following: “It is enjoined upon all the ministers of Indians, that just as the schoolboys are taught to read and write, they be taught also to speak our Spanish language, because of the great culture and profit which follow therefrom.” That document was providentially conserved in the secretary’s office of the convent of San Pablo in Manila, notwithstanding the devastation which that convent suffered and the loss of precious documents during the English invasion.
They did not cease to hope for the abundant fruits which resulted from such wise rules as the above, and the schools were created and continued to increase in a remarkable manner. In order that there might be uniformity in the method of teaching, in the Augustinian provincial chapter, held in Manila in August 1712, the practice of the ministry prescribed in the [provincial] chapter of April 19, 1698, was ordered to be observed in definite terms. That was directed even in the chapter held May 17, 1716, in which it was ordered by minute 21 that the provincial elect, reverend father Fray Tomás Ortiz “should make a Práctica del Ministerio” [i.e., Practice of the Ministry] and after it was made to send it through the provinces, “so that all the religious might observe it;” he did that, signing the circular which accompanied said Práctica, at Tondo, August 10, of the abovesaid year. From this Práctica, we copy the following paragraph in regard to the schools: “Number 79. Not only by a decree of his Majesty, but also by his own obligation, the minister must use all diligence and care in promoting and conserving the schools for children in the villages. And when he encounters difficulty in this, it will be advisable, and many times necessary, for him to make use of the alcaldes-mayor, so that they may obtain by their influence what the ministers could not obtain in this matter by their own efforts. And if the parents refuse to send their children, the ministers shall also be able to inform the alcaldes-mayor [i.e., sub-alcaldes] of it in order that the latter may force them to do it. And above all, the minister ought to be very happy in contriving to conserve the schools, and in suffering with patience the great resistance which is found among the natives to the schools. It will be well to care for them with some expenses for their conservation, for they are very useful and necessary.” Beyond this valuable paragraph are prescribed the days for school and the hours and exercises in which the children are to be employed.
This same Práctica del Ministerio remarkably increased by its author, the reverend father Fray Tomás Ortiz, was printed in “Manila, in the convent of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles [i.e., Our Lady of the Angels], in the year 1731,” and we copy from it, for the eternal and most valuable testimony in proof of our assertion, the principal paragraph, which reads as follows: