The reader may fancy that he perceives in this chapter a direct
contradiction of what I said in a preceding chapter about the Filipino
aristocrat's desiring the best of everything for his country. But
the Filipino is like the sinner who says with all sincerity that he
desires to be saved, but who, when confronted with the necessity of
giving up certain of his pleasures as the price of salvation, feels
that salvation comes rather high, and begins to figure on how he can
accomplish the desired result without personal inconvenience. The
present land-holding aristocracy is jealous to the last degree of its
prerogatives, and it has fought every attempt to equalize taxation
and to make the rich bear their fair share in the national expense
account. The land tax and the _rentas internes_, or internal revenue
tax, are two governmental measures which the rich classes fought to
the extreme of bitterness, and which they would revoke to-morrow if
it lay in their power to do so.
An aristocracy represents a survival of the fittest--not necessarily
the ideally fit, but the fittest to meet the conditions under which it
must prove a survivor. The conditions which Spain created here to mould
Filipino character were mediaeval, monarchical, and reactionary. The
aristocracy is a land-holding one, untrained in the responsibilities
of land-holders who grow up a legitimate part of the body politic of
their country.
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