Note 2 — Chapter XII · The Americans in the Philippines.

Manila was in the time of the Spaniards a most temperate city; a drunken man was a very rare sight, and would usually be a foreign sailor. Since the American occupation, some hundreds of drinking saloons have been opened, and daily scenes of drunkenness and debauchery have filled the quiet natives with alarm and horror. When John L. Motley wrote his scathing denunciation of the army which the great Duke of Alva led from Spain into the Low Countries, “to enforce the high religious purposes of Philip II.,” not foresee that his words would be applicable to an American Army sent to subjugate men struggling to be free “for their welfare, not our gain,” nor that this army, besides bringing in its train a flood of cosmopolitan harlotry,2 would be allowed by its commander to inaugurate amongst a strictly temperate people a mad saturnalia of drunkenness that has scarcely a parallel.