islands by Romanizing their vernacular alphabets. Every missionary in the East will instantly appreciate this service. The native letters were mere scrawls, and each scrawl was different from all the others. In place of these, scholarly friars worked out equivalents in Roman letters, with certain marks under or over the letters to indicate peculiar sounds. This makes the learning of any one of the vernaculars a comparatively easy matter.

An even greater service has been rendered by the introduction and maintenance of schools. Here the friar has been at his best. In the year that our Pilgrim Fathers landed in New England the Dominican Order of friars set up the College of Santo Tomas (St. Thomas) in Manila. It has been continued until this day. It has registered more pupils than Harvard, and literal thousands of graduates and undergraduates are to be found in all parts of the islands. In 1644 it was raised to the rank of a university, and given the right to call itself "Royal and Pontifical," by special Papal Bull. The intermediate or preparatory school of San Juan de Lateran was opened in 1640 to provide a means of suitably fitting lads for entrance upon regular collegiate work. High schools and colleges of less pretensions were opened in various provinces, all of them taught by friars and assistants whom they had trained. Schools for girls were opened as early as 1759, and some very creditable work has been done for the girls and women of the Islands through these institutions. They have given a taste of modern culture to thousands of Filipino women, making them in many cases, to all appearances at least, the peers of women of their rank and station in life in Europe or America. In the provinces, too, the friar was the educator. If he willed it so, there was a school in the city where he officiated. If he were a man of energy and good character, the school

left a deep and favorable impress upon the young life of that place. If he were an indolent profligate man-as, alas! was too often the case-his school was rather worse than a failure. Until the year 1863 there was not in all the Islands so much as one school that was not carried on by friars. Since that time they have been compelled to suffer rivals in what was once a field exclusively held by themselves.

The courses of study in these institutions was superficial, old, and inelastic; and over them all lay the interdict of Rome as to anything like original thinking. For the independent thinker Rome has never had place. All she has ever afforded him was a dungeon, a rack, or the flames. With a meager and archaic course of study, and within the narrow limits of accepted doctrine, tradition, and the decisions of councils, the friar has done a real work for education. It has been necessarily a poor work, for he had poor tools. He was lame in science. He feared the light of the modern world, and clung with almost pitiful tenacity to theories and conclusions which had been discarded by scholars for at least a hundred years. But such as that service has been, the credit belongs to the friar orders who maintained the only educational work on university lines in all Malaysia for three centuries.

It will be my duty to say things less favorable to the work of the friars than are contained in some of the statements of this chapter, and I can not go forward to do that unpleasant but necessary duty without calling attention to the fact that, when all has been said that can be, truthfully, as to the blemishes upon the escutcheon of the friars in the Philippines, it remains true that here, in these Islands, the native population has been raised to a condition of practical civilization. The Filipinos, when con

CHAPTER VI.

WHY THE FRIARS ARE HATED,

NO PROOF should be required that the friars are hated by the majority of Filipinos. It is true that educated and wealthy Filipinos were able, either by wit or influence, to protect themselves against the wiles of the friars, and are, in some cases, friendly to them. But as a matter of totals the case is closed.

It may be wise, however, to set forth briefly some of the mass of evidence which it would be easy to furnish in order that denials of this hostility made in the United States can be met and answered.

Both the insurrections known as the "Cavite Uprising of 1872," and the larger insurrection of 1896, were purely anti-friar risings. The first clause in the list of demands and declaration of purposes put forth by the insurrectos reads as follows:

"Expulsion of the friars, and restitution to the townships of the lands which the friars have appropriated, dividing the incumbencies held by them, as well as the episcopal sees, equally between peninsular and insular secular priests."

The first rising proposed the massacre of every friar in and near Manila, and their burial "in Bagumbayan Field," the place where hundreds of Filipinos had been shot at friar instigation. Rizal was shot there, as were

also the three Filipino priests at the close of the Cavite uprising of 1872. In the first report of the Civil Commission, discussing this question of hostility to the friars, Governor Taft and the Commission say:

"Regarding the return of the friars, the deep-seated hatred of the people must be reckoned with.”

And further on in the same section the report says: "It is enough to say that the political question will be eliminated if the friars are sent back."

One of many instances that might be cited in proof of this hatred occurred at Naic, in the province of Cavite, August 29, 1901. The Manila Times, reporting the oc

currence, says:

"Evidence of the hatred and contempt which exists among the natives towards the friars was clearly demonstrated at Naic, Cavite province, on the 29th ult. The people rose en masse to show their disapproval of the presence in their town of the friars, who came there from Manila to collect rentals on buildings and farms owned by the religious corporations in that vicinity. Thousands of men, women, and children formed in procession, parading the streets, carrying banners with the inscription, 'Long live Naic under the flag of the United States. of America!' and shouting, 'Hurrah for the Americans and the Filipinos!' 'Out with the friars!' and other remarks deprecatory to the friar agents who were alluded to as vampires."

I have eleven such newspaper notices of protests against the return of friars to their estates and schools among my clippings from local papers. Less than a month ago four hundred citizens of Dagupan, province of Pangasinan, petitioned Governor Taft against the return of Dominican friars to that city to reopen a school which