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. 51]

I801-I840] REMARKS ON ISLANDS, 1819-22

8 I

which are passed in the foregoing pages, the writer
is not conscious that they are in any instance unjust
or exaggerated, or that praise has been withheld
wherever it might be due. The unprejudiced, honourable, and well-informed, will, he hopes, think so,
the opinion of others is indifferent to him: they will
perhaps too believe, that his object has neither been
to flatter nor to wound, but, if a sketch like this had
originally any object, a hope that when their true
state was better known these islands might be better
appreciated-perhaps better governed; that a cruelly-abused class of men (the natives) might one day
find their condition ameliorated; and lastly, that
when this fair and rich portion of the earth shall be
visited by men of science, a few general remarks on
their state at any given period, however ill drawn
up, might be of some use. Who indeed can but reflect with pain, that while the torch of science has
blazed in the western hemisphere, from Greenland
to the Antarctic, bearing with it light, and life, and
hope, and blessings, few are even aware how very
much it has yet to illumine in the East l
Finis