The Social Cancer | Page 9

men studying in Europe cast doubt upon the fitness of such a state of
affairs. As they approached their downfall, like all mankind, the friars
became more open, more insolent, more shameless, in their conduct.
The story of Maria Clara, as told in Noli Me Tangere, is by no means
an exaggerated instance, but rather one of the few clean enough to bear
the light, and her fate, as depicted in the epilogue, is said to be based
upon an actual occurrence with which the author must have been
familiar.
The vow of obedience--whether considered as to the Pope, their highest
religious authority, or to the King of Spain, their political liege--might
not always be so callously disregarded, but it could be evaded and
defied. From the Vatican came bull after bull, from the Escorial decree

after decree, only to be archived in Manila, sometimes after a hollow
pretense of compliance. A large part of the records of Spanish
domination is taken up with the wearisome quarrels that went on
between the Archbishop, representing the head of the Church, and the
friar orders, over the questions of the episcopal visitation and the
enforcement of the provisions of the Council of Trent relegating the
monks to their original status of missionaries, with the friars invariably
victorious in their contentions. Royal decrees ordering inquiries into the
titles to the estates of the men of poverty and those providing for the
education of the natives in Spanish were merely sneered at and left to
molder in harmless quiet. Not without good grounds for his contention,
the friar claimed that the Spanish dominion over the Philippines
depended upon him, and he therefore confidently set himself up as the
best judge of how that dominion should be maintained.
Thus there are presented in the Philippines of the closing quarter of the
century just past the phenomena so frequently met with in modern
societies, so disheartening to the people who must drag out their lives
under them, of an old system which has outworn its usefulness and is
being called into question, with forces actively at work disintegrating it,
yet with the unhappy folk bred and reared under it unprepared for a
new order of things. The old faith was breaking down, its forms and
beliefs, once so full of life and meaning, were being sharply examined,
doubt and suspicion were the order of the day. Moreover, it must ever
be borne in mind that in the Philippines this unrest, except in the parts
where the friars were the landlords, was not general among the people,
the masses of whom were still sunk in their "loved Egyptian night," but
affected only a very small proportion of the population--for the most
part young men who were groping their way toward something better,
yet without any very clearly conceived idea of what that better might be,
and among whom was to be found the usual sprinkling of "sunshine
patriots" and omnipresent opportunists ready for any kind of trouble
that will afford them a chance to rise.
Add to the apathy of the masses dragging out their vacant lives amid
the shadows of religious superstition and to the unrest of the few, the
fact that the orders were in absolute control of the political machinery
of the country, with the best part of the agrarian wealth amortized in
their hands; add also the ever-present jealousies, petty feuds, and racial

hatreds, for which Manila and the Philippines, with their medley of
creeds and races, offer such a fertile field, all fostered by the governing
class for the maintenance of the old Machiavelian principle of "divide
and rule," and the sum is about the most miserable condition under
which any portion of mankind ever tried to fulfill nature's inexorable
laws of growth.

And third came she who gives dark creeds their power,
Silabbat-paramasa, sorceress, Draped fair in many lands as lowly Faith,
But ever juggling souls with rites and prayers; The keeper of those keys
which lock up Hells And open Heavens. "Wilt thou dare," she said,
"Put by our sacred books, dethrone our gods, Unpeople all the temples,
shaking down That law which feeds the priests and props the realm?"
But Buddha answered, "What thou bidd'st me keep Is form which
passes, but the free Truth stands; Get thee unto thy darkness." SIR
EDWIN ARNOLD, The Light of Asia.
"Ah, simple people, how little do you know the blessing that you enjoy!
Neither hunger, nor nakedness, nor inclemency of the weather troubles
you. With the payment of seven reals per year, you remain free of
contributions. You do not have to close your houses with bolts. You do
not fear that the district troopers will come in to lay waste your fields,
and trample you under foot at your own firesides.