ich the author must have
been familiar.

The vow of obedience--whether considered as to the Pope, their
highest religious authority, or to the King of Spain, their political
liege--might not always be so callously disregarded, but it could be
evaded and defied. From the Vatican came bull after bull, from the
Escorial decree after decree, only to be archived in Manila, sometimes
after a hollow pretense of compliance. A large part of the records of
Spanish domination is taken up with the wearisome quarrels that went
on between the Archbishop, representing the head of the Church, and
the friar orders, over the questions of the episcopal visitation and
the enforcement of the provisions of the Council of Trent relegating
the monks to their original status of missionaries, with the friars
invariably victorious in their contentions. Royal decrees ordering
inquiries into the titles to the estates of the men of poverty and
those providing for the education of the natives in Spanish were
merely sneered at and left to molder in harmless quiet. Not without
good grounds for his contention, the friar claimed that the Spanish
dominion over the Philippines depended upon him, and he therefore
confidently set himself up as the best judge of how that dominion
should be maintained.

Thus there are presented in the Philippines of the closing quarter of
the century just past the phenomena so frequently met with in modern
societies, so disheartening to the people who must drag out their lives
under them, of an old system which has outworn its usefulness and is
being called into question, with forces actively at work disintegrating
it, yet with the unhappy folk bred and reared under it unprepared for
a new order of things. The old faith was breaking down, its forms
and beliefs, once so full of life and meaning, were being sharply
examined, doubt and suspicion were the order of the day. Moreover,
it must ever be borne in mind that in the Philippines this unrest,
except in the parts where the friars were the landlords, was not
general among the people, the masses of whom were still sunk in their
"loved Egyptian night," but affected only a very small proportion of
the population--for the most part young men who were groping their
way toward something better, yet without any very clearly conceived
idea of what that better might be, and among whom was to be found the
usual sprinkling of "sunshine patriots" and omnipresent opportunists
ready for