Note 24 — THE FRIAR MEMORIAL OF 1898

Fundamental causes of the insurrection, and who are to blame for it. The government is able only too well to recognize the causes that have produced the insurrection, and we shall not be the ones who try to give it lessons in that regard. The government is aware that until several years ago, every separatist idea, every rebel tendency in the country, which was enjoying the most enviable peace and felt respect to authority with the same unreflecting, although patent and holy, force, with which domestic authority in all parts is obeyed and respected, was exotic and an anachronism. Then was submission to España and subordination to all authority an element truly social, rendered incarnate by the religious in the mass of the Filipino population, which neither dreamed, yea, your Excellency, neither dreamed of ideas of political redemption, nor imagined that, in order to keep themselves loyal to the mother-country, one single bayonet was necessary in the country. The public force of the cuadrilleros and of the guardia civil24 (the latter of very recent creation) was necessarily created to check and restrain thieves and tulisanes;25 while every one thought that the wretched army then in the archipelago had no other object than to combat Mindanaos and Joloans, and to be ready for any conflict with the neighboring powers. España was able to be sure of its dominion here, and to live so carelessly, with respect to political movements as in the most retired village of the Peninsula. All authority was obeyed, was respected, by conscience, by education, by tradition, by social habit, passively and by custom, if one wishes, but with so great strength and firmness, with so indisputable and universal submission, that more indeed than individual virtue it was the virtue of the mass of the whole population, it was the spontaneous homage to God, which, represented in the powers of the fatherland, all felt and practiced, not conceiving even the possibility of rebellions and insurrections. Thus had they been taught by the religious, who always unite the names of God and His Church with the names of their king and of España. Consequently, by bonds of conscience, did all the archipelago love and obey him, and no one thought then of political liberties, nor in lifting yokes that existed for no one.