Note 11 — Chapter X · FILIPINO INDOLENCE

First, the continual wars and the insurrections that were provoked by Spanish cruelty. When there was no civil strife abroad in the Philippines, able-bodied men were drafted to fight for Spain in Borneo or Indo-China; or there were huge expeditions, usually failures, that took away thousands of the best young men and never returned them. He quotes the Spanish writer, Gaspar de San Agustin, showing how one formerly populous town had been greatly shorn of inhabitants because, being noted as sailors and oarsmen, the Government took them for foreign service.11 In this way, the island of Panay, which had fifty thousand families when the Spaniards came, had been reduced to fifteen thousand.