As a sign of their allegiance and to meet the expenses of government every Indian family was assessed a tribute of eight reals, about one dollar, and for the purpose of assessment the people were set off in special groups something like feudal holdings (encomiendas).  The tribute from some of the encomiendas went to the king.  Others had been granted to the Spanish army officers or to the officials. [33] The “Report of the Encomiendas in the Islands in 1591” just twenty years after the conquest of Luzon reveals a wonderful progress in the work of civilization.  In the city of Manila there was a cathedral and the bishop’s palace, monasteries for the Austin, Dominican, and Franciscan Friars, and a house for the Jesuits.  The king maintained a hospital for Spaniards; there was also a hospital for Indians in the charge of two Franciscan lay brothers.  The garrison was composed of two hundred soldiers.  The Chinese quarter or Parian contained some two hundred shops and a population of about two thousand.  In the suburb of Tondo there was a convent of Franciscans and another of Dominicans who provided Christian teaching for some forty converted Sangleyes (Chinese merchants).  In Manila and the adjacent region nine thousand four hundred and ten tributes were collected, indicating a total of some thirty thousand six hundred and forty souls under the religious instruction of thirteen missionaries (ministros de doctrina), besides the friars in the monasteries.  In the old province of La Pampanga the estimated population was 74,700 with twenty-eight missionaries; in Pangasinan 2,400 souls with eight missionaries; in Ilocos 78,520 with twenty missionaries; in Cagayan and the Babuyan islands 96,000 souls but no missionaries; in La Laguna 48,400 souls with twenty-seven missionaries; in Vicol and Camarines with the island of Catanduanes 86,640 souls with fifteen missionaries, etc., making a total for the islands of 166,903 tributes or 667,612 souls under one hundred and forty missionaries, of which seventy-nine were Augustinians, nine Dominicans, forty-two Franciscans.  The King’s encomiendas numbered thirty-one and the private ones two hundred and thirty-six. [34]

Friar Martin Ignacio in his Itinerario, the earliest printed description of the islands (1585), says:  “According unto the common opinion at this day there is converted and baptised more than foure hundred thousand soules.” [35]

This system of encomiendas had been productive of much hardship and oppression in Spanish America, nor was it altogether divested of these evils in the Philippines.  The payment of tributes, too, was irksome to the natives and in the earlier days the Indians were frequently drafted for forced labor, but during this transition period, and later, the clergy were the constant advocates of humane treatment and stood between the natives and the military authorities.  This solicitude of the missionaries for their spiritual children and the wrongs from which they sought to protect them are clearly displayed in the Relacion de las Cosas de las Filipinas of Domingo de Salazar, the first bishop, who has been styled the “Las Casas of the Philippines.” [36]