Note 5 — THE PHILIPPINES, 1860–1898—SOME COMMENT AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

The influx of Spaniards from this time forward had in it, from the first to the last, more of “politics” than of individual initiative. More of them came out to take governmental positions than to engage in trade, or, less frequently, in agriculture, though many who lost their places by changes in administration stayed in the islands and occupied themselves in private enterprises. It was the “reformers” of the revolutionary period in Spain who first undertook to make a “clean sweep” of the offices in the Philippines, putting in their friends. Administrative reforms, and to a considerable extent a change of officials, was needed; but a more or less complicated bureaucracy was introduced along with some laudable reforms, and there was then inaugurated the pernicious custom of changing the lower Spanish officials in the Philippines, as well as the higher, with every change of administration in Spain—the “dance and counter-dance of employees,” as one writer has named it.5