buildings, the cathedral, and the monasteries of the three orders were
of the same material. The Jesuits, besides providing special courses of
study for members of their order, conducted a college for the education
of Spanish youth. The establishment of this college had been ordered by
Philip II in 1585 but it was 1601 before it was actually opened. [42]
Earlier than this in 1593 there had been established a convent school
for girls, [43] the college of Saint Potenciana. In provisions for
the sick and helpless, Manila at the opening of the seventeenth
century was far in advance of any city in the English colonies for
more than a century and a half to come. [44] There was first the
royal hospital for Spaniards with its medical attendants and nurses;
the Franciscan hospital for the Indians administered by three priests
and by four lay brothers who were physicians and apothecaries and
whose skill had wrought surprising cures in medicine and surgery;
the House of Mercy, which took in sick slaves, gave lodgings to
poor women, portioned orphan girls, and relieved other distresses;
and lastly, the hospital for Sangleyes or Chinese shopkeepers in the
Chinese quarter. [45] Within the walls the houses, mainly of stone and
inhabited by Spaniards, numbered about six hundred. The substantial
buildings, the gaily-dressed people, the abundance of provisions and
other necessaries of human life made Manila, as Morga says, "one of
the towns most praised by the strangers who flock to it of any in the
world." [46] There were three other cities in the islands, Segovia
and Cazeres in Luzon, and the city of the "most holy name of Jesus"
in Cebú, the oldest Spanish settlement in the archipelago. In the
first and third the Spanish inhabitants numbered about two hundred
and in Cazeres about one hundred. In _Santisimo nombre de Jesús_
there was a Jesuit college.

Although the Indians possessed an alphabet before the arrival of the