THE MARRIAGE OF THE GOVERNOR OF ILOCOS NORTE there was a host of. spiritual terrors militat ing against the coming into general and frequent use of the practice of civil mar riage "without the benefit of clergy." It is difficult for a person in this enlightened country and age to understand the grip upon the conscience of the native people which was possessed by the Roman Catho lic Clergy in the Philippines. The writer does not intend to reflect upon the Church in question, nor upon the noble army of its priests throughout the world who have done, and are still doing, so much for progress. But the situation in the Philip pines is unique. The Islands had originally been acquired under the impetus of a move ment primarily missionary in character. The Spanish flag had been set up over them professedly for the glory of God and the spread of the Christian faith among the heathen. Church influence dominated the government from the beginning. Toward th'e last of the Spanish regime, when any Governor General of the Islands did not please the ecclesiastical authorities, his recall was procured by them through the in fluence of the Vatican, or of the priest at Madrid who happened to be Chaplain and Father Confessor to the King, and therefore practically custodian to the King's con science. Through these or similar channels the Church completely dominated the State in the Philippines, not only the central government, but likewise the government of every province, pueblo, hamlet, and rural district. This naturally lead to abuses which finally culminated in revolution a year or so before the Spanis1 -American War. It was not so much the alleged immorality of the Spanish priests as it was their lust of power, and their abuse of it, which caused the revolution against Spain that was merely slumbering when the Spanish-American War broke out and fanned it anew into flame. In our efforts to train the Filipinos in the art of self-government, one of the first things we did after the backbone of the
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insurrection had been broken, was to set up a central civil government at Manila. This was followed by the establishment of civil government in forty odd provinces of the Archipelago. The scheme of these pro vincial civil governments provided for elec tion of the provincial governor by the people through representatives chosen by them. It was of course anticipated that most of these governors would be natives. In order to keep him in touch with and under supervision of the law of the land, the provincial governor was made ex officio sheriff of the United States District Court for the province. The writer was judge of that court in and for the province of I locos Norte at the time of the occurrence herein after described, and thus it was that he became acquainted with his late lamented friend, Don Elias Villanueva, governor of the province of I locos Norte, whose marriage constitutes the subject of this paper. When the present civil government of the Philippines was inaugurated in 1901, with our present Secretary of War as the first American Governor, the Archipelago was « divided, for the purposes of the adminis tration of justice, into fifteen judicial dis tricts, the northernmost of them being called the First Judicial District, and the rest num bered in the order in which they lay geo graphically, from north to south. The province of Ilocos Norte, together with three other provinces constituted the First Judicial District, just as ordinarily a judicial district of a state of the American union is composed of several counties. Under such circum stances the court, after concluding a session in one province, transfers itself to another and so on around the circuit, in the tradi tional itinerant fashion. This involved the absence from home of the judge and the stenographer for a very considerable portion of the year. We had elected the province of Ilocos Norte as the province of our residence pursuant to the fundamental judiciary act, which required such election. Nominally we had a home, but actually we were away
