The Indolence of the Filipino

And Gaspar de San Agustin says: “In those times (1690), Bacolor has
not the people that it had in the past, because of the uprising in
that province when Don Sabiniano Manrique de Lava was Governor of
these islands and because of the continual labor of cutting timber
for his Majesty’s shipyards, WHICH HINDERS THEM FROM CULTIVATING THE
VERY FERTILE PLAIN THEY HAVE.” (17)

If this is not sufficient to explain the depopulation of the islands
and the abandonment of industry, agriculture and commerce, then
add “the natives who wore executed, those who loft their wives and
children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those who were sold
into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them,” as Fernando de los
Rios Coronel says; add to all this what Philip II said in reprimanding
Bishos Salazar about “natives sold by some encomendoros to others,
those flogged to death, the women who are crushed to death by their
heavy burdens, those who sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse
their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many who are
executed and left to die of hunger and those who eat poisonous herbs
………… and the mothers who kill their children in bearing them,”
and you will understand how in less than thirty years the population
of the Philippines was reduced one-third. We are not saying this:
it was said by Gaspar de San Agustin, the preeminently anti-Filipino
Augustinian, and he confirms it throughout the rest of his work by
speaking every moment of the state of neglect in which lay the farms
and fields once so flourishing and so well cultivated, the towns
thinned that had formerly been inhabited by many leading families!

How is it strange, then, that discouragement may have been infused
into the spirit of the inhabitants of the Philippines, when in the
midst of so many calamities they did not know whether they would see
sprout the seed they were planting, whether their field was going to
be their grave or their crop would go to feed their executioner? What
is there strange in it, when we see the pious but impotent friars of
that time trying to free their poor parishioners from the tyranny
of the encomenderos by advising them to stop work in the mines,
to abandon their commerce, to break up their looms, pointing out to
them heaven for their whole hope, preparing them for death as their
only consolation? (18)

Man works for an object. Remove the object and you reduce him to
inaction The most active man in the world will fold his arms from
the instant he understands that it is madness to bestir himself, that
this work will be the cause of his trouble, that for him it will be
the cause of vexations at home and of the pirate’s greed abroad. It
seems that these thoughts have never entered the minds of those who
cry out against the indolence of the Filipinos.

Even were the Filipino not a man like the rest; even were we to suppose
that zeal in him for work was as essential as the movement of a wheel
caught in the gearing of others in motion; even were we to deny him
foresight and the judgment that the past and the present form, there
would still be left us another reason to explain the attack of the
evil. The abandonment of the fields by their cultivators, whom the
wars and piratical attacks dragged from their homes was sufficient
to reduce to nothing the hard labor of so many generations. In the
Philippines abandon for a year the land most beautifully tended and
you will see how you will have to begin all over again: the rain will
wipe out the furrows, the floods will drown the seeds, plants and
bushes will grow up everywhere, and on seeing so much useless labor
the hand will drop the hoe, the laborer will desert his plow. Isn’t
there left the fine life of the pirate?

Thus is understood that sad discouragement which we find in the friar
writers of the 17th century, speaking of once very fertile plains
submerged, of provinces and towns depopulated, of products that
have disappeared from trade, of leading families exterminated. These
pages resemble a sad and monotonous scene in the night after a lively
day. Of Cagayan Padre San Agustin speaks with mournful brevity: “A
great deal of cotton, of which they made good cloth that the Chinese
and Japanese every year bought and carried away.” In the historian’s
time, the industry and the trade had come to an end!

It seems that these are causes more thorn sufficient to breed indolence
even in the midst of beehive. Thus is explained why, after thirty-two
years of the system, the circumspect and prudent Morga said that the
natives “have forgotten much about farming, raising poultry, stock
and cotton, and weaving cloth, as they used to do in their paganism
and FOR A LONG TIME AFTER THE COUNTRY HAD BEEN CONQUERED!”

Still they struggled a long time against indolence, yes: but their
enemies were so numerous that at last they gave up!