The people of the Philippines, their religious progress and preparation for spiritual leadership in the Far East,

PART III: SPANISH RULE
CHAPTER VI
THE SPANISH REGIME-THE FIRST THREE
CENTURIES-I 52I-1868
The Philippine Islands did not rightfully belong to Spain.
They lay within the area granted to Portugal in the division
of the world as made by Pope Alexander VI. Portugal sent
missionaries to the Philippines and opened slave markets a
quarter of a century before Spain was ready to colonize.
(There was no incongruity in combining missionaries and
slavery prior to the nineteenth century.) Happily for the
Philippines, Spain took these Islands in spite of the decision
of the Vatican. Portugal's infamous slave traffic in Africa
indicates what she might have done in the Philippine Islands,
if she had stayed.
SPANISH MISSIONARY EFFORT
The fact that Spain had violated the papal decree made the
Spanish sovereign predisposed to emphasize missionary effort
in order to placate the Pope and to prove the superiority of
Spanish rule to that of Portugal. From the first the Spanish
home government went out of its way to assist religion. The
Spaniards submitted with scarcely a murmur to the papal decree of I59I, forbidding them to have any slaves excepting the
Negritos. And when pressed to give up the Philippines, the
Spanish monarch Philip II (after whom the Islands were
named) grandiloquently exclaimed: "For the conversion of
only a single soul I would gladly give all the treasures of the
Indies." He set the example which was followed by later
Spanish kings of paying the expenses of all friars who came
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