royal Audiencia is a court without appeal in Filipinas. The
alcaldes-mayor cannot terminate by their own action civil questions
that have to do with a sum of greater value than 100 pesos fuertes, or
impose any corporal punishment without the approval of the Audiencia,
and then only imprisonment for one week. But they are judges of the
first instance for every kind of litigious or criminal cases.

In order that one may obtain the post of alcalde-mayor, it is not
necessary that he should have studied law. Hence, the greater part
of the heads of the provinces are laymen in that respect. Generally
those posts are given to military men. Consequently, this is the
origin that for every process which is prosecuted in a lawsuit or
cause, the alcalde has to have recourse to an assessor, in order to
obtain the opinion of that one on which to base his action. But since
the advocates reside in Manila, the records have to make at times
many trips from the province to the capital. From this results the
inconvenience of delay, the liability of theft, or the destruction
of the mail. For, in the many rivers that must be crossed, the papers
become so wet that they are useless (as happened with several letters
of a post which was received in the chief city of a province when
I was there, the envelopes of which it was impossible for us to
read), and the malicious extraction in order to obscure the course
of justice. The defect of this system can only be understood if one
reflect that the various provinces of the colony are not situated
on a continent, but in various islands, and that by reason of the
periodic winds and the hurricanes which prevail in this region, the
capital very often finds itself without news of some provinces for
two or three months, and of that of Marianas for whole years.

It appears that what we have said ought to be sufficient to show the
necessity of radical reforms in this department, but, unfortunately,
there are other more grave reasons for such reform. The alcaldes-mayor
are permitted to engage in business. [63] The author of Les Estrits
des Lois [64] said many years ago that the worst of governments is
the commercial government; and surely, for those who have studied the
science of government, all comment on this point is superfluous. The
alcalde who is permitted to engage in business naturally tries, if
possible, to monopolize it by all means in his power. This vice of
the system leads some greedy men to the