When a powerful and highly civilized community comes in contact with a barbaric and isolated wad, who have til forthwith advanced many steps on the road of progress, it would of form be thought that the superior and conquering race would enterprise to collect and place on record information concerning much(prenominal) people: their manners, customs, language, religion, and traditions. Unfortunately, in the case of the Spanish conquests of the XVI century, that nation appears neer to have considered it a duty to attain take to descendants any detailed description of the singularly evoke races they had vanquished. As it was with the Gaunches of the Canaries, the Aztecs of Mexico, and the Quichuas of Peru, so was it with the Chamorro of the Ladrones, and the Tagalog-Bisayan tribes of the Philippines. The same vandal spirit that prompted the conquistadores to destroy the Maya and Aztec writings excessively moved them to demolish the written records of the Philippine nativ es, and still if fewerer attempts were made to preserve relics or information concerning them.
The Spanish priests, as the lettered men of those times, were the persons we should look to for such a work, save in their religious ardor they thought only of the seduction and conversion of the natives, and so, with the sword in one hand and rood-tree in the other, they marched through that fair land ignoring and destroying the evidences of a distant semi-civilization which should have been to them a study of the deepest interest. Fortunately, however, there were a few in that period who were interested in such ma tters, and who wrote accounts of the common! wealth of culture of the islanders of that early date. Some of these MSS. have been preserve in the archives of Manila and have lately attracted the fear of Spanish scholars. Such is the article from which the greater part of these notes is taken. In the strength for 1891 of the Revista Ibero-Americana, published at Madrid, there appeared a serial of document contributed by the...If you want to get a blanket(a) essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com
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