Note 30 — ANDA’S MEMORIAL, 1768

“From the earliest days of the conquest of Filipinas, the monarchs displayed decided earnestness that the knowledge of the Castilian language should be diffused among their peoples; while the friars opposed to this a resistance as tenacious as it was hostile, not only to the interests of the civilization of these regions, but to the sovereignty of España.” (Here is cited a royal decree, dated August 4, 1765, as an example of many, strictly commanding that the natives be taught the Castilian language, and that no hindrance be placed in the way of the Spaniards freely traveling and trading in the provinces.) “A few years ago Señor Escosura, royal commissary—whose complaisance toward the friars, so well known, gives more force to the censures which he directs against them—said, in speaking of the education of the Filipinos: ‘That education, in the first place, if we except the city of Manila and its environs, is entirely reduced to instruction in the Christian doctrine, in Tagal or in the dialects of the respective provinces—and for the same reason, is in exclusive charge of the parish priests, either seculars or regulars (who are most in number and influence); and these pastors, to whom this country owes most important services, and whose usefulness and necessity I avow and proclaim, suffer, nevertheless, from some prejudice …. They assert that to teach the Indians Castilian would be to furnish them the means—which at present they lack, on account of the diversity of their dialects—to revolt against the Spanish authority; that from the moment when they can readily understand the laws and measures of the government they will discuss these and comment upon them, from the standpoint of their local interests, and therefore in opposition to those of the metropolis; that to give these natives an idea of their own rights is to inoculate them with the spirit of rebellion; and that, the foundation of race superiority, which now aggrandizes the Europeans, being thus destroyed, it would be impossible to govern these provinces without material force, as now.’ And, in order to promote the teaching of Castilian in the second half of the nineteenth century, Señor Escosura said that ‘it would be expedient to address urgent requests to the archbishops and bishops, impressing upon them the necessity of their obliging the parish priests to fulfil the commands that are given on this point in the laws of the Indias,’ because in three centuries of Spanish domination the laws and frequent decrees thereon had never been obeyed.” (Pardo de Tavera, note 28, pp. 87–90.) ↑