The majority of the young are abandoned entirely to the Indian servants, who soon familiarize them with all that is vicious. They know but little of their parents more than as the master and mistress of the house, whose hand they must kiss, kneeling, every morning and evening. By five years of age they smoke cigars, ride out at night by moonlight, abuse the Indians, and not unfrequently their parents. At 12 they are debauched. At 18 or 20 they marry, and then form the citizens for which such an education has prepared them. They are seldom or ever taught any useful employment or profession. This the majority of them would look upon with the utmost contempt: “Soy gracias a Dios, de sangre noble,”[119] is their reply to any advice of this kind; and this is a passport to a cadetship in the army or colonial marine; which, though attained at the age of 12 or 13, seldom finds them with any vice unlearnt. The girls are educated nearly in the same manner, as far as to the acquirement of any useful knowledge. They are sent to the nunneries till 12 or 14 years, and from thence married. Of household duties they know little or nothing, and of any thing else, still less.
The manner of living is nearly as follows: The gentlemen rise about six or seven, and take chocolate. They then lounge about in their shirts and trowsers (the former often outside of the latter) till nine, when they dress, and dictate a letter or two to their writers (they rarely write for themselves); at 10 they breakfast, after which they go out in their carriages to transact any business they may have in town. At 12 or 1 they dine, and from table retire to sleep the siesta, till 4—at 4 chocolate[120]—at 5 drive on the esplanade, or into the country, till 6 or 7, when visits are received or made till 10 or 11; supper is served hot at this hour, and at midnight they retire to sleep. Some of these evening parties (tertulias) are lively and pleasant, but at most of them gambling is carried on with great avidity. Both ladies and gentlemen smoke at these, as well as at balls and other assemblies. They drink but little wine or strong liquors, their ordinary beverage being water, which is handed round in large glasses with sweetmeats, which are always eaten before drinking water.
Society in Manila is at a very low standard: in a community, the majority of which are men of inferior classes, no very select assemblies can be expected; and those whose character and education might have given another tone to it, are here, from necessity, amalgamated with the crowd. There are in fact only a few houses where a respectable society can be met with; at others the stranger is disgusted with a coarseness of manners, and with unfeeling or often excessively indelicate conversation, and an ignorance of the most common branches of knowledge that must be heard to be credited.
Hence, exclusive of some of the civil and military officers of government, the agents of the Company, and a few respectable merchants and priests, the remainder are but little qualified for select society, and there exists amongst them a want of moral discrimination, a toleration of publicly known vicious characters of both sexes, that is not a little embarrassing to the stranger. This is more particularly the case with the female part of society, with many of whom “era tentada la pobrecita por el demonio!” [i.e., “The poor woman was tempted by the devil”] appears to be a salvo, both at confession and in society, for failings which in Europe inevitably and justly entail expulsion from it.
Such is the society of Manila, and such its manners: from them the general character of those who compose it may be easily imagined; they are polite in offering every thing—but do but little or nothing:—they affect great decency of manners and a religious deportment in all their actions; but any thing but this is to be found in the conduct of the generality; and a common remark amongst themselves, “Esta no es tierra para un hombre de bien,”[121] is worth a chapter on the subject.
This may be thought an exaggerated, or at least a highly coloured picture, and it is natural that it should be so. A recital of a well-known custom may add an evidence to these assertions, premising that it is not the only, though the most prominent one that attracts the notice of the stranger: I allude to that of promiscuous bathing. This shamefully indecent custom could exist in no country where the common decencies of life were held in due consideration. Imagine the members of a large family, the father, mother, children, young and old, any visitors who may be in the house and often part of another family, all assembled in a large bath, built out on the river with bamboos, the women with only a petticoat and a gauze chemise, and the men with a thin pair of drawers, and this continuing for one or two hours. This is a Manila bath, to which it is no uncommon thing for an acquaintance to be asked, and in which ⅘ths of all the families in Manila indulge. It may be said in extenuation, that from its frequency no evil arises from it: this may be the case, but it is not the less indecent on that account.
The policy of Spain towards the Phillippines appears to have been to preserve them—no matter how, as it afforded occasion to remark, “that the sun never set in the dominions of his Catholic majesty.” Its neglect of so rich a colony can only be supposed to arise from ignorance, or from a mistaken determination to sacrifice it to the Americans: from which, this is not the place to enquire. It will suffice to observe, that in Spain it has been at all times considered as the “ne plus ultra” of expatriation: a natural consequence of this was the state of society which has been shewn to exist.[122] Nor is this idea confined to Spain alone: Mr. Whitbread, when addressing the House on the tyranny of Ferdinand to the liberal party, concluded in the following manner: “Some have perished on the scaffold—others in the dungeons of Ceuta—and others, still more horrible to relate, have been sent to linger out their days amidst the savages of the Phillippine islands!”
The islands have suffered too from another cause, the adoption of the Spanish language as that of the courts of justice, &c. &c. and the consequent neglect of that of the natives amongst the higher classes of Europeans. Hence they are ignorant of the feelings and prejudices of the people they govern, and who look to them for example, or at least for precept; and not a little of the extensive influence of the priesthood may be owing to their intimate knowledge of the language, and the mutual confidence which results from this. The Indian, meanwhile, has not neglected the language of his masters; and as from the Indian writers, who transact all business, every thing is known, it follows, while both mistakenly consider their interests as separate, the natives and creoles have much the advantage. Both despise and detest the Spaniards, the majority of whom, divided into factions of Andaluces, Montaneses, Serviles, and Liberales,[123] abuse each other cordially; while the few who know and feel that there are other and higher duties owing from them to the Indian, must look on with regret, or complain to be disregarded or insulted. The disaffected, and those who have nothing to fear and every thing to hope from a popular commotion, do not lose sight of these advantages; and are rapidly spreading doctrines gleaned from the works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Tom Paine; &c. and stimulating them with songs of liberty and equality; as unfit for them as they were for the creoles and slaves of St. Domingo, to whose fate the Phillippines are fast verging, and from which nothing but some extraordinary event can save them.[124]
The 9th of October, 1820, has given a fatal blow to the power of Spain in this country; for much as has been written and said on the subject, it is questionable whether there exists any country of black men, where the white is not looked upon as an intruder; and “the country belongs to the Indians,” “La tierra es de los Yndios,” is a common remark, even amongst the lower orders. Moral or political injustice seldom fails to recoil on the head of the oppressor; and when the government of Manila allowed an indiscriminate massacre and pillage of European foreigners by the mob, and by their shameful lenity gave a tacit sanction to it, they taught the Indian, that he might with equal impunity attack them. The plunder then obtained is a premium to future violence; and perhaps the day is not far distant, when they may bitterly repent the hour in which they allowed the Indian to feel his physical superiority.
This he is now hourly taught, and the doctrine of “El Pueblo Soberano” [i.e., “the sovereign people”] is hourly echoed in his ears by those who are least capable of managing him when once aroused. “La Constitucion” is made the pretext for every thing subversive of good order and due restraint; the convulsed state of Spain, the imbecile indecision of the present government, and the recent revolution of Mexico (another example to the many already before them), will not a little tend to accelerate the crisis to which, it is to be feared, they are fast approaching; a crisis to which every political body must be subject, who would govern an ignorant people by laws made for an enlightened one, and who forget in their speculations, that though the civil institutions of a people may be changed in a few hours, their moral character cannot; and on it and its influence throughout the circle of social intercourse depends the portion of real freedom which a people can enjoy.