Consanguine marriages are very common, and perhaps this accounts for the low intellect and mental debility perceptible in many families.
Poor parents offer their girls to Europeans for a loan of money, and they are admitted under the pseudonym of sempstress or housekeeper. Natives among themselves do not kiss--they smell each other, or rather, they place the nose and lip on the cheek and draw a long breath.
Marriages between Spaniards and pure native women, although less frequent than formerly, still take place. Since 1899 many Americans, too, have taken pure native wives. It is difficult to apprehend an alliance so incongruous, there being no affinity of ideas, the only condition in common being, that they are both human beings professing Christianity. The husband is either drawn towards the level of the native by this heterogeneous relationship, or, in despair of remedying the error of a passing passion, he practically ignores his wife in his own social connections. Each forms then a distinct circle of friends of his, or her, own selection, whilst the woman is but slightly raised above her own class by the white man's influence and contact. There are some exceptions, but I have most frequently observed in the houses of Europeans married to native women in the provinces, that the wives make the kitchen their chief abode, and are only seen by the visitor when some domestic duty requires them to move about the house. Familiarity breeds contempt, and these _mésalliances_ diminish the dignity of the superior race by reducing the birth-origin of both parents to a common level in their children.
The Spanish half-breeds and Creoles constitute a very influential body. A great number of them are established in trade in Manila and the provinces. Due to their European descent, more or less distant, they are of quicker perception, greater tact, and gifted with wider intellectual faculties than the pure Oriental class. Also, the Chinese half-breeds,--a caste of Chinese fathers and Philippine mothers,--who form about one-sixth of the Manila population, are shrewder than the natives of pure extraction, their striking characteristic being distrust and suspicion of another's intentions. It is a curious fact that the Chinese half-caste speaks with as much contempt of the Chinaman as the thorough-bred Filipino does, and would fain hide his paternal descent. There are numbers of Spanish half-breeds fairly well educated, and just a few of them very talented. Many of them have succeeded in making pretty considerable fortunes in their negotiations, as middlemen, between the provincial natives and the European commercial houses. Their true social position is often an equivocal one, and the complex question has constantly to be confronted whether to regard a Spanish demi-sang from a native or European standpoint. Among themselves they are continually struggling to attain the respect and consideration accorded to the superior class, whilst their connexions and purely native relations link them to the other side. In this perplexing mental condition, we find them on the one hand striving in vain to disown their affinity to the inferior races, and on the other hand, jealous of their true-born European acquaintances. A morosity of disposition is the natural outcome. Their character generally is evasive and vacillating. They are captious, fond of litigation, and constantly seeking subterfuges. They appear always dissatisfied with their lot in life, and inclined to foster grievances against whoever may be in office over them. Pretentious in the extreme, they are fond of pomp and paltry show, and it is difficult to trace any popular movement, for good or for evil, without discovering a half-breed initiator, or leader, of one caste or another. They are locally denominated _Mestizos_.