it was said by Gaspar de San Agustin, the preeminently anti-Filipino
Augustinian, and he confirms it throughout the rest of his work by
speaking every moment of the state of neglect in which lay the farms
and fields once so flourishing and so well cultivated, the towns
thinned that had formerly been inhabited by many leading families!

How is it strange, then, that discouragement may have been infused
into the spirit of the inhabitants of the Philippines, when in the
midst of so many calamities they did not know whether they would see
sprout the seed they were planting, whether their field was going to
be their grave or their crop would go to feed their executioner? What
is there strange in it, when we see the pious but impotent friars of
that time trying to free their poor parishioners from the tyranny
of the encomenderos by advising them to stop work in the mines,
to abandon their commerce, to break up their looms, pointing out to
them heaven for their whole hope, preparing them for death as their
only consolation? (18)

Man works for an object. Remove the object and you reduce him to
inaction The most active man in the world will fold his arms from
the instant he understands that it is madness to bestir himself, that
this work will be the cause of his trouble, that for him it will be
the cause of vexations at home and of the pirate's greed abroad. It
seems that these thoughts have never entered the minds of those who
cry out against the indolence of the Filipinos.

Even were the Filipino not a man like the rest; even were we to suppose
that zeal in him for work was as essential as the movement of a wheel
caught in the gearing of others in motion; even were we to deny him
foresight and the judgment that the past and the present form, there