had been strictly confined to religious works until about the middle
of the past century, when there was a sudden awakening and within
a few years five journals were being published. In 1848 appeared the
first regular newspaper of importance, El Diario de Manila, and about a
decade later the principal organ of the Spanish-Filipino population, El
Comercio, which, with varying vicissitudes, has continued down to the
present. While rigorously censored, both politically and religiously,
and accessible to only an infinitesimal portion of the people, they
still performed the service of letting a few rays of light into the
Cimmerian intellectual gloom of the time and place.

With the coming of steam navigation communication between the
different parts of the islands was facilitated and trade encouraged,
with all that such a change meant in the way of breaking up the old
isolation and tending to a common understanding. Spanish power, too,
was for the moment more firmly established, and Moro piracy in Luzon
and the Bisayan Islands, which had been so great a drawback to the
development of the country, was forever ended.

The return of the Jesuits produced two general results tending to
dissatisfaction with the existing order. To them was assigned the
missionary field of Mindanao, which meant the displacement of the
Recollect Fathers in the missions there, and for these other berths
had to be found. Again the native clergy were the losers in that they
had to give up their best parishes in Luzon, especially around Manila
and Cavite, so the breach was further widened and the soil sown with
discontent. But more far-reaching than this immediate result was the
educational movement inaugurated by the Jesuits. The native, already
feeling the vague impulses from without and stirred by the growing
restlessness of the times, here saw a new world open before him. A