ch in this
connection they dragged from depth to depth until it quite aptly fitted
Dr. Johnson's famous definition, "the last refuge of a scoundrel."

In their conduct the religious corporations, both as societies and as
individuals, must be estimated according to their own standards--the
application of any other criterion would be palpably unfair. They
undertook to hold the native in subjection, to regulate the essential
activities of his life according to their ideas, so upon them
must fall the responsibility for the conditions finally attained:
to destroy the freedom of the subject and then attempt to blame him
for his conduct is a paradox into which the learned men often fell,
perhaps inadvertently through their deductive logic. They endeavored
to shape the lives of their Malay wards not only in this existence
but also in the next. Their vows were poverty, chastity, and obedience.

The vow of poverty was early relegated to the limbo of neglect. Only a
few years after the founding of Manila royal decrees began to issue on
the subject of complaints received by the King over the usurpation of
lands on the part of the priests. Using the same methods so familiar in
the heyday of the institution of monasticism in Europe--pious gifts,
deathbed bequests, pilgrims' offerings--the friar orders gradually
secured the richest of the arable lands in the more thickly settled
portions of the Philippines, notably the part of Luzon occupied by
the Tagalogs. Not always, however, it must in justice be recorded,
were such doubtful means resorted to, for there were instances where
the missionary was the pioneer, gathering about himself a band of
devoted natives and plunging into the unsettled parts to build up
a town with its fields around it, which would later become a friar
estate. With the accumulated incomes from these estates and the fees
for religious observances that poured into their treasuries, the
orders in their nature of perpetual corporations became the masters of
the situation, the lords of the country. But this condition was not
altogether objectionable; it was in the excess of their greed that
they went astray, for the native peoples had been living under this
system through generations and not until they began to feel that they
were not receiving fair treatment did they question the authority of
a power which not only secured them a peaceful existence in this life
but also assured them eternal felicity in the next.

W