question thoroughly, without superciliousness or sensitiveness,
without prejudice, without pessimism. And as we can only serve our
country by telling the truth, however bit, tee it be, just as a
flat and skilful negation cannot refute a real and positive fact,
in spite of the brilliance of the arguments; as a mere affirmation is
not sufficient to create something impossible, let us calmly examine
the facts, using on our part all the impartiality of which a man
is capable who is convinced that there is no redemption except upon
solid bases of virtue.

The word indolence has been greatly misused in the sense of little
love for work and lack of energy, while ridicule has concealed the
misuse. This much-discussed question has met with the same fate as
certain panaceas and specifies of the quacks who by ascribing to them
impossible virtues have discredited them. In the Middle Ages, and even
in some Catholic countries now, the devil is blamed for everything that
superstitious folk cannot understand or the perversity of mankind is
loath to confess. In the Philippines one's own and another's faults,
the shortcomings of one, the misdeeds of another, are attributed to
indolence. And just as in the Middle Ages he who sought the explanation
of phenomena outside of infernal influences was persecuted, so in the
Philippines worse happens to him who seeks the origin of the trouble
outside of accepted beliefs.

The consequence of this misuse is that there are some who are
interested in stating it as a dogma and others in combating it as a
ridiculous superstition, if not a punishable delusion. Yet it is not
to be inferred from the misuse of a thing that it does not exist.

We think that there must be something behind all this outcry, for it