RECOLLECTIONS OF FULL YEARS
they should be able to rise against the men who administered the sacraments which they so deeply loved and revered. Or, is it more of a commentary on the conditions which caused the uprisings?
Without exception the Spanish Friars had been driven from their parishes, and the most burning of all the burning political questions which the Commission met and had to settle, was whether or not they should be permitted to return. It was impossible to make the people understand that the government of the United States and the government of Spain were two different matters, and that if the Friars were returned to their parishes they would exercise no secular functions of any kind. The people had the proverbial dread of the "burnt child" and no amount or kind of reasoning could move them from the position they had taken, nor could any of them, from the highest to the lowest, talk calmly or rationally about the subject. The one point upon which the Filipinos were united was that the Friars should never be reinstated.
Universal agitation, uneasiness, fear, hatred, a memory of wrongs too recently resented and resented at too great a cost; these were the factors which made necessary the stand which the Commission finally adopted. The question with the Friars became one, largely, of getting value for their property, their title to which was never seriously disputed, and it was decided that on condition of their leaving the Islands, the insular government would undertake the purchase of their vast estates. The intention was then to make some arrangement whereby the lands might be sold back to the people in the homestead tracts, and on terms which the poorest man might be able, in time, to meet.
It was to negotiate this transaction, involving the expenditure of $7,000,000 that my husband was sent to Rome the following year as an emissary of the United States government to the Vatican. This was in the time of Pope
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