n the opening of Parliament in 1837, their exclusion, as well as
the government of the Ultramarine Provinces by special laws, was voted.

The friars, hitherto regarded by the majority of Filipinos as their
protectors and friendly intermediaries between the people and the civil
rulers, had set their faces against the above radical innovations,
foreseeing in them a death-blow to their own preponderance. Indeed,
the "friar question" only came into existence after the year 1812.

In 1868 Queen Isabella II. was deposed, and the succeeding Provisional
Government (1868-70), founded on Republican principles, caused an
Assembly of Reformists to be established in Manila. The members of
this _Junta General de Reformas_ were five Filipinos, namely, Ramon
Calderon, Bonifacio Saez de Vismanos, Lorenzo Calvo, Gabriel Gonzalez
Esquibel, and Joaquin Pardo de Tavera; eleven civilian Spaniards,
namely, Joaquin J. Inchausti, Tomas Balbas y Castro, Felino Gil,
Antonio Ayala, with seven others and five Spanish friars, namely,
Father Fonseca, Father Domingo Trecera, Rector of the University,
(Dominicans), one Austin, one Recoleto and one Franciscan friar. This
_junta_ had the power to vote reforms for the Colony, subject to the
ratification of the Home Government. But monastic influence prevailed;
the reforms voted were never carried into effect, and long before
the Bourbon restoration took place (1874) the Philippine Assembly had
ceased to exist. But it was impossible for the mother country, which
had spontaneously given the Filipinos a taste of political equality,
again to yoke them to the old tutelage without demur. Alternate
political progress and retrogression in the Peninsula cast their reflex
on this Colony, but the first sparks of liberty had been gratuitously
struck which neither reaction in the Peninsula nor persecution in the
Colony itself could totally extinguish. No Filipino, at that period,
dreamed of absolute independence, but the few who had been taught by
their masters to hope for equal laws, agitated for their promulgation
and became a thorn in the side of the Monastic Orders. Only as their
eyes were spontaneously opened to liberty by the Spaniards themselves
did they feel the want of it.

The Cavite Rising of 1872 (_vide_ p. 106), which the Philippine
Government unwisely treated as an important political movement and
mercilessly avenged itself by executions and banishment of many of the
best Manila families, was neither f