tand us at that short distance from Manila,
for no one knew any Castilian; neither did they even pay any attention
to us. One would not believe that the Spaniards were the masters of
the country. That, I was told by the Spaniards, was the result and
the effect of the policy of the friars.

If the religious in the Philippines have resisted the temporal power
in these matters, they have not been more docile, in another matter,
to the ecclesiastical power; for they have been able, even to this
day, to elude the visitation of the archbishops, and those prelates
have never been able to succeed in that.

The great obstacle in this matter is, that there are very few
[secular] priests in the Philippines, and the majority of those who
are there are Indians. The people, say the Spaniards, have almost
no respect or veneration for the latter. Most frequently they are
dressed like their compatriots, the other Indians, in the fashion
of the country. The friars, on the contrary, are necessarily more
respected, and even though it were only by reason of their mode of
dress, they would inspire more awe in the people than do the Indian
priests. Those religious hold the people in a sort of dependence in
which the priests of their own race, and clad as they, could not hold
them. But so the religious, because they know that they are necessary
in the present condition of affairs, have always raised an opposition
when the archbishops have tried to visit them, so that the latter
have never been able to surmount the difficulty. The religious are,
so to speak, entrenched or fortified in castles (_encastillados_, to
use the peculiar expression of the Spaniards), so that all the zeal
of the archbishops has been unable to reduce them to the footing of
the other curas. As a rule, there are no difficulties at all in the
other bishoprics; for, as the livings there are almost always filled
by religious, the curas easily allow themselves to be visited by a
person of their own class. It is true that, since the governors have
not as yet taken sides with them, the archbishops have always been
the weaker party.

Monsieur Arandia, of whom I have already spoken, a man fit to govern
a state, would have doubtless put an end to it had he lived. Don
Manuel Antonio Roxo was appointed archbishop of Manila under his
government. Don Andres Roxo, nephew of that archbishop, told me
several times that Monsieur Arandia was only awaiting his uncle's
arrival to conclude