Note 40 — THE PHILIPPINES, 1860–1898—SOME COMMENT AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

No one who has read even a little about the Philippines and Filipinos need be told that it is necessary to trace the political development of this people along two lines—unfortunately, it proved for Spain, lines that are divergent in considerable degree. Hence the subdivision of this heading, regarding, first, development under Spanish Administration and then the Filipino Propaganda, first of Reform and finally of Revolution. We are concerned in the first instance, that is, with reforms and progress realized in consequence of measures “from above.” It has already been said that very considerable progress had been made by the Spanish government from about 1860 onward, and was being made when the Tagálogs appealed to arms in 1896.40 It is also true that the stimulus to the Filipino reform propaganda came in considerable degree from the movements toward betterment of the government itself, and from the agitations for reform in Spanish home politics.41 But the development of the Filipino people, social, political, and economic, proceeded at last more rapidly, or less haltingly at least, than the progress in reform from above; the reform measures were only partial, often unpractical or ill-adapted to Philippine conditions; abuses of administration continued under so-called Liberal periods as well as in times of full clerical domination; in the action and reaction of Spanish politics, in which so often are party divisions merely nominal and superficial, the course of progress was so irregular and uncertain as to lend justification to the feeling of the Filipinos that they were being treated with insincerity; and all the while, in the midst of bitter partisan and religious controversy, conducted on both sides by writers most rabid and intemperate, the two peoples were constantly growing apart from each other, and were losing the mutual good-feeling of past years which, though always superficial in large part (as in any such domination of one race by another), had nevertheless had a foundation of genuine esteem.