equal status, for which the masses were unprepared. The abolition of
tribute in 1884 obliterated caste distinction; the university graduate
and the herder were on a legal equality if they each carried a _cedula
personal_, whilst certain Spanish legislators exercised a rare effort
to persuade themselves and their partisans that the Colony was ripe for
the impossible combination of liberal administration and monastic rule.

It will be shown in these pages that the government of these Islands
was practically as theocratic as it was civil. Upon the principle of
religious pre-eminence all its statutes were founded, and the reader
will now understand whence the innumerable Church and State contentions
originated. Historical facts lead one to inquire: How far was Spain
ever a _moral_ potential factor in the world's progress? Spanish
colonization seems to have been only a colonizing mission preparatory
to the attainment, by her colonists, of more congenial conditions
under other _regimes_; for the repeated struggles for liberty,
generation after generation, in all her colonies, tend to show that
Spain's sovereignty was maintained through the inspiration of fear
rather than love and sympathy, and that she entirely failed to render
her colonial subjects happier than they were before.

One cannot help feeling pity for the Spanish nation, which has let
the Pearl of the Orient slip out of its fingers through culpable
and stubborn mismanagement, after repeated warnings and similar
experiences in other quarters of the globe. Yet although Spain's
lethargic, petrified conservatism has had to yield to the progressive
spirit of the times, the loss to her is more sentimental than real,
and Spaniards of the next century will probably care as little about
it as Britons do about the secession of their transatlantic colonies.

Happiness is merely comparative: with a lovely climate--a continual
summer--and all the absolute requirements of life at hand, there is not
one-tenth of the misery in the Philippines that there is in Europe, and
none of that forlorn wretchedness facing the public gaze. Beggary--that
constant attribute of the highest civilization--hardly exists,
and suicide is extremely rare. There are no ferocious animals,
insects, or reptiles that one cannot reasonably guard against; it
is essentially one of those countries where "man's greatest enemy is
man." There is ample room for double the population, and yet a million
acres of v