The Social Cancer | Page 3

to make the method
clear: not an isolated instance but a typical case chosen from among the
mass of records left by the chief actors themselves.
Fray Domingo Perez, evidently a man of courage and conviction, for he
later lost his life in the work of which he wrote, was the Dominican
vicar on the Zambales coast when that Order temporarily took over the
district from the Recollects. In a report written for his superior in 1680
he outlines the method clearly: "In order that those whom we have
assembled in the three villages may persevere in their settlements, the
most efficacious fear and the one most suited to their nature is that the
Spaniards of the fort and presidio of Paynaven[2] of whom they have a
very great fear, may come very often to the said villages and overrun
the land, and penetrate even into their old recesses where they formerly
lived; and if perchance they should find anything planted in the said
recesses that they would destroy it and cut it down without leaving
them anything. And so that they may see the father protects them, when
the said Spaniards come to the village, the father opposes them and
takes the part of the Indians. But it is always necessary in this matter
for the soldiers to conquer, and the father is always very careful always
to inform the Spaniards by whom and where anything is planted which
it may be necessary to destroy, and that the edicts which his Lordship,
the governor, sent them be carried out .... But at all events said
Spaniards are to make no trouble for the Indians whom they find in the
villages, but rather must treat them well." [3]
This in 1680: the Dominican transcriber of the record in 1906 has
added a very illuminating note, revealing the immutability of the
system and showing that the rulers possessed in a superlative degree
the Bourbonesque trait of learning nothing and forgetting nothing:
"Even when I was a missionary to the heathens from 1882 to 1892, I
had occasion to observe the said policy, to inform the chief of the
fortress of the measures that he ought to take, and to make a false show
on the other side so that it might have no influence on the fortress."
Thus it stands out in bold relief as a system built up and maintained by
fraud and force, bound in the course of nature to last only as long as the

deception could be carried on and the repressive force kept up to
sufficient strength. Its maintenance required that the different sections
be isolated from each other so that there could be no growth toward a
common understanding and coöperation, and its permanence depended
upon keeping the people ignorant and contented with their lot, held
under strict control by religious and political fear.
Yet it was a vast improvement over their old mode of life and their
condition was bettered as they grew up to such a system. Only with the
passing of the years and the increase of wealth and influence, the ease
and luxury invited by these, and the consequent corruption so induced,
with the insatiable longing ever for more wealth and greater influence,
did the poison of greed and grasping power enter the system to work its
insidious way into every part, slowly transforming the beneficent
institution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into an incubus
weighing upon all the activities of the people in the nineteenth, an
unyielding bar to the development of the country, a hideous
anachronism in these modern times.
It must be remembered also that Spain, in the years following her
brilliant conquests of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, lost strength
and vigor through the corruption at home induced by the unearned
wealth that flowed into the mother country from the colonies, and by
the draining away of her best blood. Nor did her sons ever develop that
economic spirit which is the permanent foundation of all empire, but
they let the wealth of the Indies flow through their country, principally
to London and Amsterdam, there to form in more practical hands the
basis of the British and Dutch colonial empires.
The priest and the soldier were supreme, so her best sons took up either
the cross or the sword to maintain her dominion in the distant colonies,
a movement which, long continued, spelled for her a form of national
suicide. The soldier expended his strength and generally laid down his
life on alien soil, leaving no fit successor of his own stock to carry on
the work according to his standards. The priest under the celibate
system, in its better days left no offspring at all and in the days of its
corruption none bred and reared