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

78 THE PEOPLE OF THE PHILIPPINES
to the Philippines from Spain, furnishing them with clothing,
breviaries and missals-which cost in all about six hundred
pesos per friar-and paying them salaries amounting to about
one hundred pesos per annum.1 Spain was on her honor in
the Philippines just because she was legally a trespasser.
Fortunately, too, for the Filipinos, the Spaniards found very
little gold and silver, such as they had discovered in such
abundance in Mexico and South America. The pearl fisheries
were safely in the hands of the Moros in Sulu; and the Moros
Spain could not conquer. The Philippines therefore attracted
a greater proportion of zealous missionaries, and a smaller
proportion of avaricious soldiers of fortune, than drifted into
America. The temptation to get rich quickly and leave for
Spain was absent. Laymen who came such a tremendous distance ordinarily came to stay, and remaining meant in many
instances intermarrying with the Filipinos. Wives and children had, as a matter of course, to be made good Catholics.
For many a priest and devout Spanish layman, these romantic, distant, primitive Islands took on something of the glamor
of a new crusade-they lay so inconceivably far away at the
other end of the world. Men might go as far as America for
gold, but if they crept on across the boundless Pacific it was
because it was the thing heroes did for the cross of Christ.
They went with a glow of virtue-and hoped (as who does
not?) that their virtue might bring them to some hidden pot
of gold.
The spiritual head of the first settling expedition, which
Legaspi brought from Mexico to Cebu in 1565, was the Augustinian friar, Andreas de Urdaneta. The other orders were
quick to follow, the Franciscans in I577, the Jesuits in I58I,
the Dominicans in 1587, and the Recollects in I606. By 1586
the friars were established in forty places (about the number
now occupied by all Protestant missions in the Islands) and
claimed as Christians 250,000, or nearly half the population
of the Philippines at that time.2
Philippine Census 1903, Vol. I, p. 341.
'Jernigan, "Iooo Questions and Answers in Philippine History," Manila,
p. rS.