realized the meaning of their office, for the Spanish writers of
the time delight in characterizing them as the meanest of the Spanish
peasantry, when not something worse, who had been "lassoed," taught a
few ritualistic prayers, and shipped to the Philippines to be placed
in isolated towns as lords and masters of the native population, with
all the power and prestige over a docile people that the sacredness of
their holy office gave them. These writers treat the matter lightly,
seeing in it rather a huge joke on the "miserable Indians," and
give the friars great credit for "patriotism," a term which in this
connection they dragged from depth to depth until it quite aptly fitted
Dr. Johnson's famous definition, "the last refuge of a scoundrel."

In their conduct the religious corporations, both as societies and
as individuals, must be estimated according to their own standards--
the application of any other criterion would be palpably unfair. They
undertook to hold the native in subjection, to regulate the essential
activities of his life according to their ideas, so upon them
must fall the responsibility for the conditions finally attained:
to destroy the freedom of the subject and then attempt to blame him
for his conduct is a paradox into which the learned men often fell,
perhaps inadvertently through their deductive logic. They endeavored
to shape the lives of their Malay wards not only in this existence
but also in the next. Their vows were poverty, chastity, and obedience.

The vow of poverty was early relegated to the limbo of neglect. Only a
few years after the founding of Manila royal decrees began to issue on
the subject of complaints received by the King over the usurpation of
lands on the part of the priests. Using the same methods so familiar in
the heyday of the institution of monasticism in Europe--pious gifts,
deathbed bequests, pilgrims' offerings--the friar orders gradually