he English language,
and to make it possible for university and public libraries and
the leaders in thought and policy to have at hand the complete and
authentic records of the culture and life of the millions in the
Far East whom we must understand in order to do them justice, is an
enterprise large in its possibilities for the public good.

In accordance with the idea that underlies this collection this
Introduction will not discuss the Philippine question of today nor
Philippine life during the last half century, nor will it give a
short history of the Islands since the conquest. For all these the
reader may be referred to recent publications like those of Foreman,
Sawyer, or Worcester, or earlier ones like those of Bowring and
Mallat, or to the works republished in the series. The aim of the
Introduction is rather to give the discovery and conquest of the
Philippines their setting in the history of geographical discovery,
to review the unparalleled achievements of the early conquerors and
missionaries, to depict the government and commerce of the islands
before the revolutionary changes of the last century, and to give such
a survey, even though fragmentary, of Philippine life and culture under
the old regime as will bring into relief their peculiar features and,
if possible, to show that although the annals of the Philippines may
be dry reading, the history of the Philippine people is a subject of
deep and singular interest.

The Philippine Islands in situation and inhabitants belong to the
Asiatic world, but, for the first three centuries of their recorded
history, they were in a sense a dependency of America, and now the
whirligig of time has restored them in their political relations to
the Western Hemisphere. As a dependency of New Spain they constituted
the extreme western verge of the Spanish dominions and were commonly
known as the Western Islands [2] _(Las Islas del Poniente)._ Their
discovery and conquest rounded out an empire which in geographical
extent far surpassed anything the world had then seen. When the sun
rose in Madrid, it was still early afternoon of the preceding day in
Manila, and Philip II was the first monarch who could boast that the
sun never set upon his dominions. [3]

In one generation, 1486-1522, the two little powers of the Iberian
Peninsula had extended their sway over the seas until they embraced the
globe. The way had been prepared for this unparalleled achievement by
the cour