Note 14 — Chapter X · FILIPINO INDOLENCE

Fourth, taxes and the cruelty of the Government. De los Rios Coronel cites “the natives that were executed, those that left their wives and children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those that were sold into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them,” among the elements disappearing from the population. There were also, it appears from San Agustin, to be added “those flogged to death, women crushed to death by their heavy burdens, those that sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many that are executed or left to die of hunger, those that eat poisonous herbs, and the mothers that kill their children in bearing them.”14 It is not an exhilarating picture; to believe it we must remind ourselves that it is limned by Spaniards: it can have no impulse to a hostile exaggeration.