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

each one. That of the captain-general he opened
with the key which the latter's own assistant gave him.
The greater part of the money was delivered to that
assistant, his accomplice; the rest was lost at play.
This deed served the defender of San Ger6nimo,
Don Agustin Ruiz de Santayana, to petition his
acquittal, alleging in his favor the incapacity and
irreflection which that individual had shown with
the said thief. Both the criminal and his accomplice
confessed, and no obstacle was presented to substantiate this verbal process. However, it lasted for more
than one year. They troubled the master Garcia so
much with notifications and accounts of the maintenance of the prisoner that at last he refused to have
anything more to do with the matter, and abandoned
the charge. The alcalde-in-ordinary sentenced San
Geronimo to six months' imprisonment. When the
Audiencia examined that clause, March 31, 1841, it
ordered the prisoner to be liberated. In Inglaterra,
that violator of his own daughter, and the domestic
thief would have been given the death sentence on
the gallows.
This impunity for crimes is, to my understanding,
very fatal, not only because of the encouragement
which it gives on that account to criminality, but also
because of the fear which gobernadorcillos and alcaldes have in arresting the guilty, for they know
that they will be soon liberated and will soon take
vengeance on them by robbing them, cutting down
their trees, and burning their places of business. An
employe of estimable qualities in the department of
taxes told me that once grown tired in a certain province of seeing that no one dared to arrest a thief who
had terrified the entire village, he himself took the