THE present war with Spain has an important religious and missionary bearing. The government of Spain has denied to her colonies religious as well as civil liberty, and has kept them in moral darkness, as well as in material depression. Missionary work in Cuba has been carried on under the utmost difficulties, and in the Philippines has been utterly discouraging. A few years ago the British and Foreign Bible Society sent there a colporter and a converted priest. The priest was killed, the Bibles confiscated, and the colporter was obliged to flee for his life. We trust that the time has now come for the emancipation of these islands, long oppressed and neglected. Professor Worcester, of the University of Michigan, in the Independent gives the following facts in regard to them:—
The Philippine Islands (see map) lie wholly within the tropics, reaching at the south to within four and a half degrees of the equator. Big and little, they number some six hundred, varying in size from Luzon, with its 40,000 square miles, to tiny islets hardly worthy of the name. The islands are in most instances of volcanic origin, and several fine volcanic peaks may still be seen in Luzon, Negros, and Mindanao. Destructive eruptions have occurred within recent times, while earthquakes are frequent and often of great violence.
The climate is intensely hot, and in many of the islands very unhealthy for Europeans. There are four months of rain, four of sun, with intense heat, and two months of variable weather at each change of the monsoons. Revolving storms of great magnitude and frightful violence occur at certain seasons, and frequently cause enormous damage to property, attended with heavy loss of life.
The tropical scenery in the forests of this archipelago is of unsurpassed splendor, the heat and moisture combining to produce vegetation of magnificence which beggars description. Gigantic trees, towering to a height of two or three hundred feet, are festooned with graceful rattans, beautiful ferns, and exquisite orchids, while underneath splendid tree-ferns rear their lovely heads thirty or forty feet into air. So dense is the vegetation in some of these forests that the fierce tropical sun hardly penetrates to the ground beneath them, and the dense undergrowth perpetually drips with moisture.
The population of the islands is estimated at from eight to ten millions. The natives are divided into11something like two hundred tribes, each with its peculiar dialect and customs. With the single exception of the Negritos, these tribes are of Malay extraction. The latter people are a race of dwarfish blacks, confined at present to a few of the loftiest mountain ranges. They are characterized not alone by their color, but by the possession of closely curling hair, which serves at once to distinguish them from the straight-haired Malay races. They are commonly believed to be the aborigines of the islands.—Missionary Review of the World.