ocial life during the
eighteenth century and in the first years of the nineteenth before
the entrance of the various and distracting currents of modern life
and thought. In some cases significant details will be taken from the
works of competent witnesses whose observations were made somewhat
earlier or later. This procedure is unobjectionable in describing
a social condition on the whole so stationary as was that of the
Philippines before the last half century.

From the beginning the Spanish establishments in the Philippines were
a mission and not in the proper sense of the term a colony. They were
founded and administered in the interests of religion rather than of
commerce or industry. They were an advanced outpost of Christianity
whence the missionary forces could be deployed through the great
empires of China and Japan, and hardly had the natives of the islands
begun to yield to the labors of the friars when some of the latter
pressed on adventurously into China and found martyrs' deaths in
Japan. In examining the political administration of the Philippines,
then, we must be prepared to find it a sort of outer garment under
which the living body is ecclesiastical. Against this subjection to
the influence and interests of the Church energetic governors rebelled,
and the history of the Spanish domination is checkered with struggles
between the civil and religious powers which reproduce on a small
scale the mediaeval contests of Popes and Emperors.

Colonial governments are of necessity adaptations of familiar domestic
institutions to new functions. The government of Spain in the sixteenth
century was not that of a modern centralized monarchy but rather of
a group of kingdoms only partially welded together by the possession
of the same sovereign, the same language, and the same religion. The
King of Spain was also the ruler of other kingdoms outside of the
peninsula. Consequently when the New World was given a political
organization it was subdivided for convenience into kingdoms and
captaincies general in each of which the administrative machinery was
an adaptation of the administrative machinery of Spain. In accordance
with this procedure the Philippine islands were constituted a kingdom
and placed under the charge of a governor and captain general,
whose powers were truly royal and limited only by the check imposed
by the Supreme Court (the _Audiencia_) and by the ordeal of the
_residencia_ at the expiration of