The Social Cancer | Page 8

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
secured the richest of the arable lands in the more thickly settled
portions of the Philippines, notably the part of Luzon occupied by the
Tagalogs. Not always, however, it must in justice be recorded, were
such doubtful means resorted to, for there were instances where the
missionary was the pioneer, gathering about himself a band of devoted
natives and plunging into the unsettled parts to build up a town with its
fields around it, which would later become a friar estate. With the
accumulated incomes from these estates and the fees for religious
observances that poured into their treasuries, the orders in their nature
of perpetual corporations became the masters of the situation, the lords
of the country. But this condition was not altogether objectionable; it
was in the excess of their greed that they went astray, for the native
peoples had been living under this system through generations and not
until they began to feel that they were not receiving fair treatment did
they question the authority of a power which not only secured them a
peaceful existence in this life but also assured them eternal felicity in
the next.
With only the shining exceptions that are produced in any system, no
matter how false its premises or how decadent it may become, to
uphold faith in the intrinsic soundness of human nature, the vow of
chastity was never much more than a myth. Through the tremendous

influence exerted over a fanatically religious people, who implicitly
followed the teachings of the reverend fathers, once their confidence
had been secured, the curate was seldom to be gainsaid in his desires.
By means of the secret influence in the confessional and the more open
political power wielded by him, the fairest was his to command, and
the favored one and her people looked upon the choice more as an
honor than otherwise, for besides the social standing that it gave her
there was the proud prospect of becoming the mother of children who
could claim kinship with the dominant race. The curate's "companion"
or the sacristan's wife was a power in the community, her family was
raised to a place of importance and influence among their own people,
while she and her ecclesiastical offspring were well cared for. On the
death or removal of the curate, it was almost invariably found that she
had been provided with a husband or protector and a not inconsiderable
amount of property--an arrangement rather appealing to a people
among whom the means of living have ever been so insecure.
That this practise was not particularly offensive to the people among
whom they dwelt may explain the situation, but to claim that it excuses
the friars approaches dangerously close to casuistry. Still, as long as
this arrangement was decently and moderately carried out, there seems
to have been no great objection, nor from a worldly point of view, with
all the conditions considered, could there be much. But the old story of
excess, of unbridled power turned toward bad ends, again recurs, at the
same time that the ideas brought in by the Spaniards who came each
year in increasing numbers and the principles observed by the young