[62] Especially in the appendix of VOL. XLI.—Eds. [↑]
[63] Appendix vii to report of Major-General G. W. Davis, commanding the division of the Philippines (Rept. War Dept., 1903, iii, pp. 379–398). [↑]
[64] La Política de España en Filipinas reproduces Retana’s eulogy of Weyler (Retana was made a deputy for Cuba in the Cortes during the Weyler régime in Cuba) and occasional articles on the Blanco campaign in the Lake Lanao region, among which note (vi, p. 18) Blanco’s letter of Oct. 19, 1895, describing the beginning of a railroad and other work around the lake. Ibid., vii, p. 170, has the protocol of April 1, 1907, whereby Germany and Great Britain accept a modification of the Sulu archipelago protocol of 1885, permitting the prohibition by Spain of traffic with Joló in arms or alcoholic liquors. The projects to colonize Mindanao put forward in connection with the Lanao campaign have been mentioned. [↑]
[65] The reports are in the annual Report of the Philippine Commission. Among the special publications, note Jenks’s The Bontoc Igorot (Manila, 1905), chap. ii, for some notes on Spanish relations with the Igorots. [↑]
[66] Its columns could also be used to further personal interests, as already shown in the case of Weyler. Retana has since 1898 executed a “right-about-face,” as has been best shown in his recent biographical study of Rizal. Herein, in various editorial notes in vol. v of the Archivo (1905), and in various letters to the Filipino press of Manila, he has many times virtually apologized for his political writings up to 1898, has declared that he was always a “Liberal” at heart, and has thus written an impugnation of his own writings in behalf of friar-rule. In a letter to I. de los Reyes (reproduced from El Grito del Pueblo of Manila in El Renacimiento, Manila, July 24, 1906), Retana carries this note to the point of practically abject retraction, saying he never has been really a Catholic, never confessed since his marriage, etc., and referring to Rizal (whom he bitterly reviled from 1892 to 1898) as a “saint,” etc. Regarding Retana and Blumentritt, see also a letter by J. A. LeRoy in the Springfield Republican for July 7, 1906.
In this connection see Retana’s opening paragraphs in his Vida y escritos del Dr. José Rizal, in Nuestro Tiempo for 1904–06.—EDS. [↑]
[67] This work furnished almost the sole basis for the discussion of the work of the friars by Stephen Bonsal in the North American Review of Oct., 1902; but Mr. Bonsal, whose article is thus entirely one-sided, did not state the source of his information. More than this, Mr. Bonsal has, in translating, made even stronger some of the extreme claims of Friar Zamora. The latter (pp. 483–498) cites praise for the friars from various governors-general: Gándara (1866), De la Torre (1871), Moriones (1877), Weyler (1891), and Primo de Rivera (1898). It is to be hoped he has not garbled them all as he did the statement of Primo de Rivera, omitting its most significant expressions of opinion and exactly reversing its import. Moreover, Mr. Bonsal, in translating these passages from Zamora, thought it best to leave out, for his American readers, the statement by Weyler. Much the same ground as covered by the claims of Zamora is traversed, with citations, by J. A. LeRoy in the Political Science Quarterly for December, 1903 (also in the same author’s Philippine Life, chaps. v and vii). See also, in re extreme claims for the friars that they brought about all the internal development, settlement of towns, development of agriculture, etc., Sancianco y Goson, El progreso de Filipinas, pp. 212–223, official data as to agriculture and lands by provinces in 1862, at the beginning of the modern era of trade and industry. [↑]
[68] The official correspondence in the negotiations of Governor Taft with the Vatican, above cited, may also be mentioned here as discussing the question of recognition of the native clergy in the Philippines, and, in general, the status which the friars came to have there. Many loose assertions made with regard to the friars’ titles to the Philippines will be corrected by a perusal of the legal report on their titles cited above. [↑]
[69] The political phase of the attack on the friars’ privileges which rapidly developed, especially in view of the events of 1868, are discussed from the friars’ side in the pamphlet Apuntes interesantes (1870), condemned by Pardo de Tavera (no. 91) and ascribed to Barrantes. Retana (Estadismo, ii, p. 135*) praises the work and ascribes it to Friar Casimiro Herrero. A general argument against the friars in those times is that of Manrique Alonso Lallave, Los frailes en Filipinas (Madrid, 1872), parts of which were reproduced in El progreso, Manila, August 8–11, 1901. His figures on friar revenues, etc., are grossly exaggerated. He was an excloistered Dominican, later turned Protestant in Spain, and went to the Philippines as a Protestant missionary in 1890, being poisoned in Manila, according to V. Diaz Perez (Los frailes de Filipinas, Madrid, 1904, p. 10). [↑]
[70] See the Biblioteca, nos. 2,000 and 2,001. Both put forward the claims of the Filipinos on grounds of ecclesiastical rule and practice (the Council of Trent particularly), but it is to be feared that the author’s judgment on matters of authority purely ecclesiastical is sometimes warped by political or personal feeling. The same author’s Mi último grito de alarma (Bigan [Luzon], 1903) is an answer to Constitución apostólica Quae mare sinico (Manila, 1903), which is a defense of the Pope’s Philippine bull of 1903 by Presbyter Manuel E. Roxas, a Filipino priest. Father Pons also had a part in Impugnación de la censura impuesta … al Presbítero Adriano García (Manila, 1900), a notable case which much aroused the Filipino clergy in Chapelle’s time. Here and in Defensa del clero filipino are references to the torturing of native priests by the friars at Bigan in 1896, to make them confess complicity in a supposed plot for revolt in Ilokos. [↑]