Note 1 — GOVERNMENT REORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF SANTO TOMAS

The lawyers undersigned have no exact and minute information of the vicissitudes which the college-university has experienced from 1611 to the present day. Comparing alone the royal decree of October 29, 1875, which reorganized the instruction of the said college with the writ of its primitive foundation, it appears that some rulings of the former are at variance with the latter: for example, article 3, which declares that the orders, plans, programs, and regulations, which emanate from the ministry and in that case from the governor-general, are obligatory for the organization and rule of education; article 6, and the following ones which allowed entrance to secular professors and defined their emoluments and fees; article 11, which reserved to the ministry the power of fixing the fees of matriculation, degrees, titles, and certificates; and article 13, which obliged the rector to render an annual account to the royal vice-patron of the emoluments and expenses of the university, the order supplying the deficit resulting. But we are not consulting as to the greater or less legal stability of the present condition of the institution or if we were treating of it, it would not be within our province to disavow that in other things of great importance, the government still respected the fundamentals of the foundation, and that the concessions which were made in 1875 in exchange for obtaining by entreaty the abolition of the decrees of November 6, 1870,1 appeared practically corroborated by the lasting agreement of the patrons and of those summoned to obtain the properties by virtue of the clause of reversion, although in strict rigor of law the document of the foundation ought to take precedence over any act and any submission of its natural guardians.