Excepting some large estates acquired in earlier times through donation, landed property originated mainly through the right of occupation by the possessor and his rendering the land productive which even now is a common right recognized in the laws of the Indias in favor of the indigenous inhabitants. In the exercise of this right, the native takes possession of such unused land as is necessary for his house and tilled fields, and loses it only when it remains uncultivated for two years. Setting aside these native (and likewise very poor) landed proprietors, landed property is legally acquired in the following manner: through purchase from the state of a certain area of unimproved crown lands [Spanish, realengas]; through actual purchase from the natives who possess property; through contracts (called pactos de retro) concluded with the natives; and through the pledging or hypothecation of bonds, which even these natives are accustomed to agree to, especially in commercial dealings.
The first of these means ought to be a source of wealth; but it is not, for various reasons. At present very few persons are familiar with the legislation regarding the unused crown land, which consists of numberless single decrees forming a casuistical, disconnected, complicated, and confused mass …. By a royal order of 1857, the first offer for untilled crown lands was fixed at fifty dollars a quiñon; and the concession could not be secured without a previous public auction. From that time private persons held aloof from such demands; to the former evils are added the high price, and the danger of being outbidden in the auction, and thus of losing one’s trouble and expense for the examination of the lands. In 1859 the decree was modified, and the former price of four reals a quiñon as first offer was established; but this decree is not yet published.
In order that capital may flow into agriculture—without which that industry cannot possibly be developed to the production of grain and colonial products for exportation—it is absolutely necessary to overcome all obstacles which discourage men of wealth. Among these hindrances stands in the first rank the local administration, in regard to the granting of untilled crown lands; in the second, the obstructions which are placed in the way of both [Spanish] natives and foreigners who wish to acquire rights of settlement and citizenship in the community. Besides the difficulty of acquiring large possessions, still others exist. The planter can easily find laborers, to whom he must make considerable advances in food, cattle, and money; but the Indians pay little attention to fulfilling their contracts, and the legal means at the command of the planter for compelling them to fulfill their past engagements are as burdensome and ruinous as even the abandonment of his rights. Unless the alcalde is active and shows good-will, the planters usually prefer not to press their claims; they endure the loss, and many are thus induced to abandon their enterprises. This cancer on agriculture will disappear as soon as every Indian possesses a certificate of citizenship [Bürgerbrief; Spanish, cédula de vecindad]. If one weathers the first year, storms, locusts, and business crises are to be expected later, all of which depress the price of his product. In such cases it is for the planter the greatest evil that no credit exists. There are no mortgages, at least there is no compulsory registration of mortgages; accordingly, no one dares to lend his money on such estates, or he does it only at crushing rates of usurious interest. An improvement in this respect is urgently demanded by the agricultural interests, both great and small, by the mercantile class, and by large and small estates; it would place a limit to the pacto de retro, as well as to the usurious contracts which are called in Luzon tacalanan, in Bisaya alili—the furnishing of loans on the proceeds of the next harvest—to which must be ascribed the misery and the backward conditions that prevail in many places ….
The pacto de retro is one of the most usual modes in which landed property passes from the possession of the natives to others. A considerable part of Pampanga, Bataan, Manila, Laguna, Batangas, and other provinces has, within a few years, changed owners in this way. Thus also do the inexpressibly cunning and thrifty mestizos usually acquire their landed possessions, the cultivation of which they then improve; but that does not prevent this custom from being detrimental to the public welfare. The native who possesses a piece of land through placing it under cultivation and actually occupying it, but almost never (or very seldom) by purchase from another owner, when he finds himself in pressing need of money offers his land as a pledge for the desired loan from a capitalist; but where he has no document to establish and prove his just claim, no foundation exists for a loan on mortgage under moderate conditions, since the applicant is free from all burdens and obligations. The capitalist therefore looks for his own security in immediate possession. The hypotheca is converted into an antichresis security (prenda pretoria), and as it is with great difficulty (or at least it very seldom occurs), that the Indian who receives the money consents to pay it back at the appointed time, and it is not to the lender’s interest to force him to pay it, the result is, that for a sum corresponding to the secured loan—that is, for a half or a third of the value of the security—the piece of land finally changes proprietors. Not seldom it happens that the former proprietor remains on the land as a farmer (that is, as a laborer, in reality as a slave to his debts). Often the Indian is seduced into contracts of this sort by his passion for cockfighting and gambling.
The laws of the country require the Indians to live in villages, uniting their farms into hamlets, so that they can be watched over and their tributes collected. In ordinary circumstances, the Indian builds for himself a hut in his field, where he lives while he is working his land, and goes on Saturday evenings to the village in order to hear mass on Sunday. His field has no great value for him, since he can always put another piece of land into cultivation, so great is the surplus of land in all the villages remote from the capital. The facility with which he can abandon one tract to take possession of another is very detrimental to the development of agriculture. A small landed proprietor, who has planted a bit of waste land with rice or potatoes without asking any one’s permission, raises an outcry if his garden is entered by a cow or a horse that grazed there years ago; and, since the law stands in his favor, he is allowed to receive from the owner of the cattle payment for often imaginary damages, while the loss from such causes should be borne by him who cultivates a field without enclosing it.
This same small proprietor avails himself for his own benefit, of all the privileges and rights of an entire village of Indians, if a wealthy man desires to lay out a plantation in his neighborhood. The capitalist who has decided on such a plan often finds that on land which was before entirely unfilled and waste, when he has after long difficulties acquired control of his property, and has reckoned a certain amount [of expense], some Indians have planted a grain field; and through testimonies covered with signatures, which are presented in the court, they assert that they inherited these very lands from their fathers, and have never ceased to work them.
A remedy for these abuses would consist in the limitation of districts, and the jurisdiction of the municipality, so that, for the purpose of increasing the landed property for the inhabitants of a village, so much land should remain free as they could at the time reasonably claim—more or less than the so-called municipal field (legua comunal), of which, besides, no law makes mention. All the remaining land located within the jurisdiction should be declared the property of the crown, and the title to all possessions then located outside of municipal control should be valid; but in future all possessions that shall not conform to the said rules shall be declared invalid. Within the municipal limits or the legal property of the village (which may not extend beyond the sound of the bell) the native farmer should be allowed to dwell, [even] outside of the village, in the midst of the lands cultivated by him; and only in case he alienates or abandons these should he be compelled to live in the village. The natives should bring new plots under cultivation within the municipality, and be able to acquire these by paying to the communal treasury a small ground-rent, or a moderate sum once for all. Such grants should proceed, with all publicity, from the entire body of the notables, with the cooperation of the parish priest, and be recorded in a safely-kept book in every village, and should never contain a greater area than the applicant can till with his own carabaos [Büffeln]. If such grant of state land does not exceed a quinõn, it should be issued, according to the aforesaid forms, by the alcalde[5] of the province; if of greater extent, in the capital of the colony; but all ought to be recorded in the land-register of the province and village concerned. Those measures that were taken for the benefit of the natives and the promotion of cattle-raising, but which have an opposite effect, ought to be abolished. Agriculture, like every other occupation, needs no protection save clearness and security in its essential conditions of life.
Economic Society of Friends of the Country
[The following account of this association and the more notable of its achievements is obtained from Fernandez and Moreno’s Manual del viajero en Filipinas (Manila, 1875), pp. 173–178. This subject is presented here as being so largely connected with the progress of agriculture in Filipinas.]
Founded in the year 1781, in virtue of a royal order dated August 27 in the preceding year (issued in consequence of advices from the excellent governor Don José Basco y Vargas), in 1787 it suspended its meetings on account of the gradual and progressive decline of the society. In 1819 it resumed its functions, but suffered a period of discouragement and paralysis as a result of the Asiatic cholera morbus, which appeared then for the first time in these islands; and until October, 1822, the few meetings which the society held had no other object than questions of internal order, having little interest or importance for its history.[6] A memoir published by the society with date of January 1, 1860,[7] makes the following statement: “From that date (October 22, 1822), it can be said, begins the series of the society’s labors and services—achievements all the greater and more valuable, inasmuch as they proceeded from slight and ephemeral causes, and from a corporation which could not depend on material resources even remotely proportioned to the magnitude of its object; and which plunged into labors [which meant] nothing less than the advancement and civilization of a virgin country, containing more than 8,000 square leguas of surface, with 3,000,000 of inhabitants still half-barbarous, and without stable or established mercantile relations with any part of the world (on account of the recent crisis in the privileged commerce, which bad just been abolished), with a capital of 30,000 pesos, at 5,000 leguas distance from European civilization, and with a government occupied besides with the political situation and calamities of those days, confiding only in its patriotic enthusiasm and in its desires for the aggrandizement and prosperity of the country.” In the above memoir are concisely recorded three hundred forty-seven notable achievements, all beneficial to the country, accomplished by that distinguished society in the space of thirty-seven years. We would gladly reproduce entire in our modest book the relation of services so important; as we cannot do this, we indicate those which, in our judgment, are the more notable.