hammedans. We do not know the Oriental mind well enough. If we wish to make inroads into the mighty citadel of Islam, our strategy is to lead Oriental Mohammedans themselves to do it. For centuries the Moros have been the most formidable people of their numbers in the Far East. They are the choicest people we could have found to begin to unravel Mohammedanism at the heel. They will go among their backward kinsmen of the Malay Islands. They will say:

"Once we were backward, stagnant, afraid, hungry, like yourselves. Now look at the transformation. We are educated, progressive, prosperous, peaceful, happy. The Philippines are the proof of what Christianity can do for Mohammedans."

The ancient pirates of the Far East will become the key to the Moslem problem. It is in their blood to do it and they will.

No such opportunity as that has confronted Christianity during the last fourteen hundred years of Christian-Moslem conflict!

PART III: SPANISH RULE

CHAPTER VI

THE SPANISH REGIME-THE FIRST THREE
CENTURIES-1521-1868

The Philippine Islands did not rightfully belong to Spain. They lay within the area granted to Portugal in the division of the world as made by Pope Alexander VI. Portugal sent missionaries to the Philippines and opened slave markets a quarter of a century before Spain was ready to colonize. (There was no incongruity in combining missionaries and slavery prior to the nineteenth century.) Happily for the Philippines, Spain took these Islands in spite of the decision of the Vatican. Portugal's infamous slave traffic in Africa indicates what she might have done in the Philippine Islands, if she had stayed.

SPANISH MISSIONARY EFFORT

The fact that Spain had violated the papal decree made the Spanish sovereign predisposed to emphasize missionary effort in order to placate the Pope and to prove the superiority of Spanish rule to that of Portugal. From the first the Spanish home government went out of its way to assist religion. The Spaniards submitted with scarcely a murmur to the papal decree of 1591, forbidding them to have any slaves excepting the Negritos. And when pressed to give up the Philippines, the Spanish monarch Philip II (after whom the Islands were named) grandiloquently exclaimed: "For the conversion of only a single soul I would gladly give all the treasures of the Indies." He set the example which was followed by later Spanish kings of paying the expenses of all friars who came

to the Philippines from Spain, furnishing them with clothing, breviaries and missals-which cost in all about six hundred pesos per friar-and paying them salaries amounting to about one hundred pesos per annum.1 Spain was on her honor in the Philippines just because she was legally a trespasser.

Fortunately, too, for the Filipinos, the Spaniards found very little gold and silver, such as they had discovered in such abundance in Mexico and South America. The pearl fisheries were safely in the hands of the Moros in Sulu; and the Moros Spain could not conquer. The Philippines therefore attracted a greater proportion of zealous missionaries, and a smaller proportion of avaricious soldiers of fortune, than drifted into America. The temptation to get rich quickly and leave for Spain was absent. Laymen who came such a tremendous distance ordinarily came to stay, and remaining meant in many instances intermarrying with the Filipinos. Wives and children had, as a matter of course, to be made good Catholics.

For many a priest and devout Spanish layman, these romantic, distant, primitive Islands took on something of the glamor of a new crusade they lay so inconceivably far away at the other end of the world. Men might go as far as America for gold, but if they crept on across the boundless Pacific it was because it was the thing heroes did for the cross of Christ. They went with a glow of virtue-and hoped (as who does not?) that their virtue might bring them to some hidden pot of gold.

The spiritual head of the first settling expedition, which Legaspi brought from Mexico to Cebu in 1565, was the Augustinian friar, Andreas de Urdaneta. The other orders were quick to follow, the Franciscans in 1577, the Jesuits in 1581, the Dominicans in 1587, and the Recollects in 1606. By 1586 the friars were established in forty places (about the number now occupied by all Protestant missions in the Islands) and claimed as Christians 250,000, or nearly half the population of the Philippines at that time.2

Philippine Census 1903, Vol. I, p. 341.

"Jernigan, "1000 Questions and Answers in Philippine History," Manila, p. 15.

Enormous as was their energy, the friars could not have made the rapid progress they did without the assistance of the strong arm of the government. By a system known as the encomienda a Spaniard was given a grant of land as big, usually, as a couple of villages or a small island. The Spaniard had from a hundred to a thousand or more Filipinos under his control, from whom he levied taxes. He was, indeed, an oldfashioned feudal lord. The tribute went to the church, the government, and the Spanish encomendero himself. By 1591 there were 267 of these encomiendas. Not even this substitute for slavery, however, could make the Islands profitable. They had proven so disappointing to exploiters and so expensive to the government that the friars had to make special appeals to the crown on at least two occasions to prevent their being abandoned entirely. But the ecclesiastics were finding the Philippines the most wonderful field from a religious point of view that they ever had seen, and though they had at first condemned the Spanish occupation, they were now adamant against withdrawal.

Willingly or unwillingly, the Filipinos had to become Christians; and what is more, any other Orientals who visited the Philippines had to be baptized. This was up to the very time of American occupation, with few exceptions. Before a

Chinese, for example, was permitted to enter the Philippines on business he had to become a nominal Christian; a large bunch of crosses on strings was hung in the hold, and before he was permitted to leave the vessel, he was compelled to hang one of these around his neck.3

The people did not know the deep significance of the thing that was being done to them. "The wholesale baptisms performed by the secular priests who accompanied the expedition were regarded by the people rather as a spectacular entertainment staged for their benefit than as a rite designed to mark a spiritual rebirth." In some instances baptism was regarded as evil magic. Datu Tonkaling in Mindanao (still living)

4

'Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions Report 1900, p. 210, quoting Captain Dodd of Chengtu.

Robertson, Catholic Historical Review, 1917, p. 376.