which are generally the lowest, and the natives, unable to keep their bargains without considerable injury or endangering the subsistence of their numerous families, implore the favor of the magistrate, petitioning him to lay their calamitous situation before the superior government, in order to have the payment of their tribute in kind remitted, and offering to pay it in money.  This is the precise moment when, as his own profits depend on the misery of the province under his command, he endeavors to misuse the accidental power with which he is invested.  Hence it happens that, instead of acting as a beneficent mediator, and supporting the just solicitations of the natives, he at first disregards their petition, and then all at once transforming himself into a zealous collector, issues his notifications, sends his satellites into the very fields to seize on the produce, and in a most inexorable manner insists on collecting till necessity compels him to suspend the measure.  The principal object being attained, that is, having now become master of the gleanings and scanty crops of his bereft subjects, on a sudden his disposition changes, he is moved to pity, and in the most pathetic language describes to the government the ravages done to the plantations by the hurricanes, and the utter impossibility of collecting in the tributes that year in kind.  On such a remonstrance he easily obtains permission to change the standing order, and proceeding on to collect in some of the remaining tributes in money, merely to save appearance, with perfect impunity he puts the finishing stroke to the wicked act he had commenced, by applying to himself all the produce his collectors had gathered in, and places to the credit of the treasury the total amount of the tributes, corresponding to his jurisdiction, in money.

Supposing, for example, that this has happened in the province of Antique, where the payment of the capitation-tax generally takes place in the unhusked rice, rated at two reals per cavan, and, through the effects of a bad season, this article should rise as high as ten or twelve reals.  It is clear that the magistrate, by accounting for the tributes with the revenue office in money, and collecting them in kind at the rate fixed by law, would by the sales gain a profit of 400 or 500 per cent; at the same time the native, by the mere circumstance of then paying in kind, would have paid the tribute corresponding to five or six years in a single one, without, on that account, having freed himself from the same charge in the following seasons.

[No check on extortion.] When the extortionate acts as these are practised, to what lengths may it not be expected the other excesses and abuses of authority are carried?  To the above it ought moreover to be added, that the provincial magistrates have no lieutenants, and are unprovided with any other auxiliaries in the administration of justice, except an accompanying witness and a native director; that the scrutinies of their accounts, to which they formerly were subject, are now abolished, and, in short, that they have no check upon them, or indeed any other persons to bear testimony to their irregularities, except the friendless and miserable victims of their despotism and avarice.