The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803; explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commericial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the beginning of the nineteenth century; [Vol. 1, no. 36]

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THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS

[Vol. 36

impose any corporal punishment without the approval of the Audiencia, and then only imprisonment for one week. But they are judges of the first
instance for every kind of litigious or criminal cases.
In order that one may obtain the post of alcaldemayor, it is not necessary that he should have studied
law. Hence, the greater part of the heads of the
provinces are laymen in that respect. Generally
those posts are given to military men. Consequently,
this is the origin that for every process which is
prosecuted in a lawsuit or cause, the alcalde has to
have recourse to an assessor, in order to obtain the
opinion of that one on which to base his action. But
since the advocates reside in Manila, the records
have to make at times many trips from the province
to the capital. From this results the inconvenience
of delay, the liability of theft, or the destruction of
the mail. For, in the many rivers that must be
crossed, the papers become so wet that they are useless (as happened with several letters of a post which
was received in the chief city of a province when I
was there, the envelopes of which it was impossible
for us to read), and the malicious extraction in order
to obscure the course of justice. The defect of this
system can only be understood if one reflect that the
various provinces of the colony are not situated on a
continent, but in various islands, and that by reason
of the periodic winds and the hurricanes which prevail in this region, the capital very often finds itself
without news of some provinces for two or three
months, and of that of Marianas for whole years.
It appears that what we have said ought to be
sufficient to show the necessity of radical reforms in
this department, but, unfortunately, there are other