istance on the part of the inhabitants, and the greatest
circumspection and constancy were necessary for the governor, Don
Jose Basco, to carry this arduous enterprise into effect. Accustomed
to the cultivation of this plant without any restriction whatever,
and habituated to its use from their infancy, it appeared to the people
the extreme of rashness to seek simultaneously to extirpate it from the
face of the greatest part of the Island of Luzon, in order to confine
its culture within the narrow limits of a particular district. They
were equally revolted at the idea of giving to a common article a
high and arbitrary value, when, besides, it had become one of the
first necessity. Every circumstance, however, being dispassionately
considered, and the principle once admitted that it was expedient for
the colony to maintain itself by means the least burdensome to the
inhabitants, it certainly must be acknowledged that, although odious
on account of its novelty and defective in the mode of its execution,
a resource more productive and at the same time less injurious, could
not have been devised. Hence was it that the partisans of the opposite
system were strangely misled, by founding their calculation on false
data, when they alleged that a substitute, equivalent to the increased
revenue supposed to arise out of the monopoly of tobacco, might have
been resorted to by ordering a proportionate rise in the branch of
tributes. In fact, no one who had the least experience in matters of
this kind, can be ignorant of the open repugnance the natives have
always evinced to the payment of the ordinary head-tax (cedula),
and the broils to which its collection has given rise. Besides,
if well examined, no theory is more defective and more oppressive
on account of the disparity with which it operates, than this same
wrongly-boasted impost; for, however desirous it may be to simplify
the method of collecting the general revenue of a state, if the best
plan is to be adopted, that is, if public burdens are to be rendered
the least obnoxious, it is necessary preferably to embrace the system
of indirect contribution, in which class, to a certain degree, the
monopoly of all those articles may be considered as included which are
not rigorously of the first necessity, and only compel the individual
to contribute when his own will induce him to become a consumer.

[Doubling of insular revenue thru tobacco.] Let this be as it may,
certain it is,