f her rule, for
whatever progress this system made was counterbalanced by the futile
endeavour to induce the Mahometans to change their religion. Under
the wise administration set in progress by General Leonard Wood there
is a hopeful future for Moroland.

CHAPTER XXX

The Spanish Friars, After 1898

The Aglipayan Schism. Education. Politics. Population.

With the American dominion came free cult. No public money is
disbursed for the support of any religious creed. No restraint is
placed upon the practice of any religion exercised with due regard
to morality. Proselytism in public schools is declared illegal. [267]
The prolonged discussion of the friars' position and claims encouraged
them to hope that out of the labyrinthine negotiations might emerge
their restoration to the Philippine parishes. For a while, therefore,
hundreds of them remained in Manila, others anxiously watched the
course of events from their refuges in the neighbouring British and
Portuguese colonies, and the unpopular Archbishop Bernardino Nozaleda
only formally resigned the archbishopric of Manila years after he
had left it. Having prudently retired from the Colony during the
Rebellion, he returned to it on the American occupation, and resumed
his archiepiscopal functions until the end of 1899. Preliminary
negotiations in Church matters were facilitated by the fact of the
Military Governor of the Islands at the time being a Roman Catholic,
an American army chaplain acting as chief intermediary between the lay
and ecclesiastical authorities. The common people were quite unable, at
the outset, to comprehend that under American law a friar could be in
their midst without a shred of civil power or jurisdiction. There were
Filipinos of all classes, some in sympathy with the American cause,
who were as loud in their denunciation of the proposed return of the
friars as the most intransigent insurgents. They thought of them most
in their lay capacity of _de facto_ Government agents all over the
Islands. It cannot be said that the parish priests originally sought
to discharge civil functions; they did so, at first, only by order
of their superiors, who were the _de facto_ rulers in the capital,
and afterwards by direct initiative of the lay authorities, because
the Spanish Government was too poor to employ civil officials. What
their functions were is explained in Chapter xii. The complaints of the
people against the friars constituted the lea