oney with great secrecy and as if it were his own, in
which case there would be no trouble. The government of India was a few
years ago entirely commercial, but since the commerce was prohibited,
none of its dependents engage in it. Those who have savings deposit
them in one of the banks or in one of the good commercial houses there
at four or five per cent, or indeed they buy public stock or speculate
with them. Alcaldeships in my opinion ought to be divided into three
classes and given to individuals, all of them advocates, who would
form a body of civil employes. When an alcaldeship of the first class
fell vacant, it would be given to the senior advocate in charge of
those of the second class, and so on. The regulation that alcaldes
were to remain in the country only six years was founded certainly
on the fear that they might acquire a dangerous influence over the
country. To the degree that the precaution is not unfounded, the term
is very short for so long a distance, for among other obstacles it
contains the one that when a chief is beginning to know the country he
has to leave it. Fifteen or twenty years would be a more fitting time.

In English India all the civil and military employes know the language
of the country. That extreme, however advantageous it be, and is, in
fact could be brought about here only with difficulty. It would have
been easy if one of the dialects of the islands had been established
from the beginning as the language of the government and of the courts;
for a Visayan learns Tagalog very quickly, and any other idiom of
the country, and the same thing is true of the other natives.

[If that had been done] all would at this moment show well or poorly
the dominant language, just as in Cataluna, Valencia, the Baleares
Islands, and the Basque provinces, Castilian is known. But this is
not a matter which can be remedied in a brief time. Consequently, if
an alcalde who is beginning to administer justice in Cagayan has to
go immediately to Cebu, he will surely arrive there without knowing
the language, although he had given himself to the study of it from
the very beginning. But if this is an evil, this evil is now being
endured, for the alcaldes arrive from Espana, and since they know that
they have to return in six years, they do not take the least trouble
to learn the language, and they leave the government in this regard
just as when they entered it.

In the capital and its suburbs, justice