lazy before the word miracle was introduced into their language.

The facility with which individual liberty is curtailed, that continual
alarm of all from the knowledge that they are liable to secret report,
a governmental ukase, and to the accusation of rebel or suspect,
an accusation which, to be effective, does not need proof or the
production of the accuser. With that lack of confidence in the future,
that uncertainty of reaping the reward of labor, as in a city stricken
with the plague, everybody yields to fate, shuts himself in his house
or goes about amusing himself in the attempt to spend the few days
that remain to him in the least disagreeable way possible.

The apathy of the government itself toward everything in commerce
and agriculture contributes not a little to foster indolence. There
is no encouragement, at all for the manufacturer or for the farmer;
the government furnishes no aid either when poor crop comes, when
the locusts (23) sweep over the fields, or when a cyclone destroys
in its passage the wealth of the soil; nor does it take any trouble
to seek a market for the products of its colonies. Why should it do
so when these same products are burdened with taxes and imposts and
have not free entry into the ports, of the mother country, nor is
their consumption there encouraged? While we see all the walls of
London covered with advertisements of the products of its colonies,
while the English make heroic efforts to substitute Ceylon for Chinese
tea, beginning with the sacrifice of their taste and their stomach,
in Spain, with the exception of tobacco, nothing from the Philippines
is known: neither its sugar, coffee, hemp, fine cloths, nor its Ilocano
blankets. The name of Manila is known only from those cloths of China
or Indo-China which at one time reached Spain by way of Manila, heavy
silk shawls, fantastically but coarsely embroidered, which no one has