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The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 — Volume 01 of 55 - 1493-1529 - Explorations by Early Navigators, Descriptions of the Islands and Their Peoples, Their History and Records of the Catholic Missions, as Related in Contemporaneous Books and Manuscripts, Sho by Unknown
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by the landed estates of the orders. Church fees may have been at
times excessive, but the occasions for such fees were infrequent. The
tenants of the church estates found the friars easy landlords. Zúñiga
describes a great estate of the Augustinians near Manila of which
the annual rental was not over $1,500, while the annual produce was
estimated to be not less than $70,000, for it supported about four
thousand people. [143] The position of women was fully as good among
the Christian Indians of the Philippines as among the Christian people
of Europe. But conspicuous among the achievements of the conquest
and conversion of the islands in the field of humanitarian progress,
when we consider the conditions in other European tropical colonies,
have been the prohibition of slavery and the unremitting efforts to
eradicate its disguised forms. These alone are a sufficient proof
that the dominating motives in the Spanish and clerical policies were
humane and not commercial. Not less striking proof of the comfortable
prosperity of the natives on the whole under the old Spanish rule has
been the steady growth of the population. At the time of the conquest
the population in all probability did not exceed a half-million. In
the first half of the eighteenth century according to the historian
of the Franciscans, San Antonio, the Christian population was about
830,000. At the opening of the nineteenth century Zúñiga estimated the
total at a million and a half as over 300,000 tributes were paid. The
official estimate in 1819 was just short of 2,600,000; by 1845 Buzeta
calculates the number at a little short of four millions. In the next
half century it nearly doubled. [144]

In view of all these facts one must readily accord assent to Zúñiga's
simple tribute to the work of Spain. "The Spanish rule has imposed
very few burdens upon these Indians, and has delivered them from many
misfortunes which they suffered from the constant warfare waged by one
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