The friar orders, deluded by their transient triumph and secure in
their pride of place, became more arrogant, more domineering than
ever. In the general administration the political rulers were at every
turn thwarted, their best efforts frustrated, and if they ventured too
far their own security threatened; for in the three-cornered wrangle
which lasted throughout the whole of the Spanish domination, the friar
orders had, in addition to the strength derived from their organization
and their wealth, the Damoclean weapon of control over the natives to
hang above the heads of both governor and archbishop. The curates in
the towns, always the real rulers, became veritable despots, so that
no voice dared to raise itself against them, even in the midst of
conditions which the humblest indio was beginning to feel dumbly to
be perverted and unnatural, and that, too, after three centuries of
training under the system that he had ever been taught to accept as
"the will of God."
The friars seemed long since to have forgotten those noble aims that
had meant so much to the founders and early workers of their orders,
if indeed the great majority of those of the later day had ever
realized the meaning of their office, for the Spanish writers of
the time delight in characterizing them as the meanest of the Spanish
peasantry, when not something worse, who had been "lassoed," taught a
few ritualistic prayers, and shipped to the Philippines to be placed
in isolated towns as lords and masters of the native population, with
all the power and prestige over a docile people that the sacredness of
their holy office gave them.
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