Note 77 — THE PHILIPPINES, 1860–1898—SOME COMMENT AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Reforms of a partial nature, any statesman could predict, would breed the demand for more. So, during the eighties, when most headway was made in administrative and legal reforms under Liberal administrations, we find the Filipinos formulating demands for the first time; and it is significant that they all centered about the friars. Under the liberal Governor-General Terrero, and with sympathetic Spaniards in the posts of secretary of the civil administration and civil governor of Manila, officers of some of the Tagálog towns ventured to display a sense of independence of the traditional friar-dictatorship in local affairs, even (in the case of Malolos and the Binondo district of Manila) to carry contests with the friars over the personal tax-lists before higher authority; the friars’ tenants around Kalamba, where José Rizal’s parents lived, challenged the administrator of that Dominican estate, and aired their protests publicly in 1887;77 and in 1888 a public demonstration against the friars, and especially Archbishop Payo, took place in Manila, and a petition for the removal of the friars was addressed to the Queen Regent. In 1887 these civil authorities of Liberal affiliation had issued official orders regarding cemeteries and church funerals, contravening, on grounds of public health, long-standing practices of the friar-curates; and the friars, even the archbishop, had been almost openly intransigent about the matter, indicating the belief that they would soon upset this régime of affairs by the exercise of their power at Madrid. The demand on the part of some Spanish periodicals of Manila that the proposed government trade school should not be surrendered to the Augustinians was another indication of the current of the times.78