Among
these influences four cumulative ones may be noted: the spread of
journalism, the introduction of steamships into the Philippines,
the return of the Jesuits, and the opening of the Suez Canal.
The printing-press entered the islands with the conquest, but its use
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.
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