THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS
THE STORY OF JOSÉ RIZAL
POET, PATRIOT AND MARTYR
BY
CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL
AND
E. B. RODRIGUEZ
Illustrated with Photographs
THE CENTURY CO.
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1923
TO THE MEMORY OF
APOLINARIO MABINI
PHILOSOPHICAL DEMOCRAT
GALLANT SOLDIER OF THE COMMON GOOD
PREFATORY NOTE
The great storehouses of knowledge about this extraordinary being are
W. E. Retana’s “Vida y Escritos del Dr. José Rizal” and the “Lineage,
Life, and Labors of José Rizal,” by Professor Austin Craig of the
Philippines University. Neither is accessible to the general American
public. Retana’s ponderous volume has never been translated. Professor
Craig’s work was published in Manila but not in the United States and
is to be found in only a few of the public libraries. Prefixed to
Charles Derbyshire’s excellent translation of Rizal’s “Noli Me Tangere”
is a biographical sketch, all too brief, of the author of the novel,
but even this is denied to most American readers, for it, too, is
published only in Manila.
The notes that Rizal left about himself, few, fragmentary, and sternly
reticent, throwing a faint light upon his psychology and character but
next to nothing upon the stirring events of his life, are known only in
the Philippines. In an English magazine article published in 1902, Sir
Hugh Clifford, formerly governor of Ceylon, reviewed and estimated this
strange career, but no more than in outline. Three American magazines
in the space of twenty-five years have devoted each a page or so to the
same subject. Buried in that monumental work, Blair and Robertson’s
“Philippine Islands,” is liberal store of information about the
historic background of the events hereinafter to be set forth, though
few readers seem to avail themselves of even this assistance. John
Foreman’s well known book with the same title has an interesting
chapter about Rizal and his fate. An abbreviated translation of “Noli
Me Tangere,” published in New York in 1900, contained a short account
of his life and a version of his last poem. These, with fugitive
references, are virtually the sum of the Rizal material the most
resolute searcher has hitherto been able to find on American shelves.
Retana’s work is interesting and abounding in pertinent facts, but so
overloaded with documents and so prone to febrile exhilaration that it
could never be adapted to general circulation. Unluckily, too, it is
not always free from prejudice and not always accurate. Professor Craig
was the ideal investigator. With indefatigable patience he went over
the entire drama, beginning with the arrival of Lam-co in the
Philippines more than two hundred years before, and tracing the family
to Rizal’s own day. He visited most of the places where Rizal had
lived; he interviewed relatives, friends, acquaintances; he searched
records, he compared documents, he weighed testimonies; he wrote with
sympathy, he overstepped not the due bounds of reserve; and he produced
a book that so far as it goes is a model of honest inquiry.
The present work is founded chiefly upon his discoveries and Retana’s,
carefully compared, checked by reference to the writings of Derbyshire
and to Rizal’s own diary, notes, and scant narrative; checked also by
the corrections of Dr. De Tavera and others, and augmented by later
revelations. Where a discrepancy has appeared in these records the
authors have sought the best obtainable advice and tried to follow the
best of the accepted authorities. In a few instances (since there are
gaps in the story now unlikely to be filled) it has been necessary to
adopt the version of an incident or the explanation of an act that
seemed the most natural to a man in Rizal’s situation and the best
adjustable to his character and convictions. Every recurrent “Rizal
day” in the Philippines brings out thoughtful studies of the national
hero, additional reminiscences, or the results of original research
work, all by native writers. Of this abundant material the authors have
availed themselves, and thus have been able to enlarge or to correct
many episodes.
The authors are under obligations to the direction of the Philippine
Library at Manila, which most generously put at their disposal all of
its great collection of literature and objects relating to Rizal; to
Mr. Fernando Canon for his interesting personal reminiscences; to the
Hon. Jaime C. de Veyra, late resident commissioner from the Philippines
to the United States, long a collector of Rizaliana, for rich material
as well as for unstinted and invaluable assistance; to the Hon. Isauro
Gabaldon, present resident commissioner, for sympathetic encouragement;
to Senator Sandiko for useful data; to Miss Sevilla for her
investigations concerning Leonora Rivera; and to many good friends in
Manila and elsewhere that have contributed suggestions and corrected
errors. Mr. Benito Soliven’s masterly summary of Rizal’s work in
science and Dr. Eliseo Hervas’s estimate of Rizal’s place as a poet
have been most helpful. Of Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera’s admirable
treatise “El Carácter de Rizal” (Manila, 1918) free use has been made.
Mr. Pañina’s “Murió el Doctor Rizal Cristianamente?” has been carefully
studied. For the historical part of the narrative the authors have
consulted chiefly Fernández, Foreman, Barrows, and the great work of
Blair and Robertson.
The citations from “Noli Me Tangere” and “El Filibusterismo” in the
ensuing pages are from the translations by Charles Derbyshire, both
published by the Philippine Education Company, Manila, 1912.
To understand Rizal and his strange story it is necessary to understand
the environment into which he was born and against which he protested.
As any description written now of Spanish rule as it really was in the
Philippines would seem to American readers of these days improbable or
even fantastical, the needed background is supplied, so far as
possible, in Rizal’s own words.
Aside from the human interest that would at any time attend a life so
tragic, certain chief reasons have seemed to the authors sufficient to
justify the appearance now of such a book:
1. The hope to make available to American readers the story of the
great man and national hero of the people the United States has
undertaken to lead to national independence.
2. At a time when race antagonisms seem to have been revived and
emphasized, the fundamental truths about the universal household are
naturally obscured. Lest we forget how foolish, in the end, are the
pretended racial superiorities, it may be well to take note of this
brown man that revealed a genius so great, a mind so strangely
resourceful, so wide a range in achievement, so unusual a character,
while performing a service so momentous. Of a race too lightly esteemed
by Caucasians, he left a record of which the foremost Caucasian people
might justly be proud.
3. When the tide is running backward through the world and some men
scoff at democracy and some men doubt it, there may be profit in
turning to the story of this long-drawn-out struggle against autocracy
to observe once more how inevitable, against all oppositions or frantic
arguings, is the democratic advance.
4. A temporary fashion of detraction having left not even Lancelot
brave nor Galahad clean, it may be worth while to revive the fact that,
after all, men have lived on this earth that had other than merely
selfish aims and felt other than merely sensual impulses, and find an
example in this Malay.
5. When the world is resounding with the echoes of a terrible war, and
hatreds seem to possess the souls of men, it may be well to consider
the career and influence of one that sought reforms by peaceful means,
repudiated force, and chose for his motto a sentiment broad enough to
cover all human failings and cure most human hurts:
To understand all is to forgive all.
C. E. R. New York, June 25, 1923.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I A People’s Wrongs 3
II School-Days and First Impressions 28
III First Contacts with the Enemy 51
IV Voices of Prophecy 78
V “Noli Me Tangere” 97
VI Leonora Rivera 118
VII Again in the Philippines 130
VIII The Grapes of Wrath 161
IX Philippine Independence 172
X Filipino Indolence 181
XI What Manner of Man 202
XII “El Filibusterismo” 215
XIII The Safe-Conduct 233
XIV The Exile of Dapitan 246
XV The Katipunan 267
XVI “I Came from Martyrdom unto this Peace” 289
XVII Results and Influences 314
Appendices 337
A Rizal Bibliography 371
Index 383
ILLUSTRATIONS
Dr. José Rizal Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
The house at Calamba in which Rizal was born 32
The Ateneo de Manila 64
Leaves from Rizal’s travel notes and sketches through Europe 81
Drawings by Rizal 112
The original cover of the great novel, “Noli Me Tangere” 129
Photograph of an oil painting of his sister by Rizal—Miss
Saturnina Rizal 144
Wood carving by Rizal 161
Sculpture by Rizal when a mere student, “The Power of Science
over Death” 176
Remnants from Rizal’s Library 208
The outline of the constitution of the “Liga Filipina” 240
Rizal’s cell at Fort Santiago 257
Specimens of Rizal’s modeling when an exile at Dapitan, both
self-explanatory 264
Photograph of the original of “My Last Farewell” 304
The Rizal Monument at the Luneta decorated for Rizal Day,
December 30 321
A float, Rizal Day, December 30, 1922 328
THE HERO
OF THE FILIPINOS
CHAPTER I
A PEOPLE’S WRONGS
A futile insurrection had been followed by terrible reprisals and a
hardening everywhere of the articulated tyranny, terrorism, and
espionage with which the Government ruled. Such from the beginning had
been its practice in the long and uninspiring record of the Spanish
occupation of the Philippines: sore oppression leading to inevitable
revolt and then savage vengeance that sowed the seed of more revolt.
Now, as always in that delirious procedure, innocent natives were swept
to punishment indiscriminately with the guilty; men that had taken part
in the uprising and men that had never heard of it. With the rest of
these victims of insensate rage, marched, on the morning of February
28, 1872, three beloved priests and servants of God, of whose
complicity in the plot was never a shred of ponderable evidence. One of
them, lifting up his voice in prayer for his assassins as he went
along, was eighty-five years old. Not his years nor his gray hairs nor
those good works that had brought him honor [1] availed to save Father
Mariano Gomez from the most ignominious of deaths. With Fathers Burgos
and Zamora, he was garroted on Bagumbayan Field, fronting the sea at
Manila; a place consecrated in the Filipino mind to memories terrible
and yet grand. Native poets and orators that have seen there every
blade of grass springing from the blood of heroes are hardly
over-imaginative. On that spot to the same cause the same dull power
sacrificed victim after victim, ending with the nation’s greatest and
best.
But now, in 1872, forgotten medieval brutalities seemed to be brought
back to darken life in a region the sunniest and of right the most
cheerful. Prisoners were tortured with instruments the world believed
to exist only in museums; tortured with thumb-screws, great pincers,
and machines of devilish ingenuity that produced and reiterated the
agonies of drowning. [2] The whip was busy in the hands of men hired
for their expert knowledge of how it could be used to yield the largest
fruition of pain; many a wretched Filipino that had in his heart no
more of disloyalty than you or I was flogged naked in the presence of
officers in whose ears his shrieks seemed to sound like music. Hysteria
and fear in the minds of the dominant class were added to the racial
hatred always festering there. Under the empire of this triad of the
beast, men that had worn the gloss of the almost classic society of
Madrid became in the Philippines no better than hooting devils.
To the typical haughty Spaniard there the Filipino was an Indio, an
inferior creature designed to render service to the white man’s needs
and to receive the white man’s blows. Each successive generation of
rulers had learned at least once, and always with astonishment and
disgust, that the lowly Indio was capable of combinations and
resistances that sometimes shook the walls of Malacañan itself and
started painful visions of massacres and wild fleeings. From the
beginning to the end of the story, it was a discovery that first exiled
reason and then multiplied work to the executioner. Yet the knowledge
gained in this way by one generation never seemed to enlighten the
next: each revolt created in its turn the same astonishment, as if for
the first time in human experience wronged men had turned against their
wrongers. Each generation, therefore, had the same obtuse notion of
violent repression as the only answer to the natives’ complaint, a
concept that each left with additions of its own to its successor.
Hence the complex savageries of 1872, which might be regarded as in a
way accretionary; not a soul in the governing class seeming to suspect,
despite all this rich experience, that the essence of the slayings was
no better than one revenge making ready for another.
In those evil days millions of Filipinos rendered to the dominant
tyranny what it compelled them to render and kept alive in their proud
hearts the longing for justice, the love of their country, and a
respect for their race. One of these, Francisco Rizal Mercado, was then
living in Calamba, a little town on the west shore of the great lake of
Laguna de Bay. Manila was twenty-five miles to the northward; the tall
mountains of Luzon, Mount Makiling and others, gloomed or shone south
and west; the plains around were fertile and well cultivated; it was a
pleasant and profitable region. Francisco Mercado was of some substance
and a character so excellent that all the country-side knew and honored
him; a sturdy, resolute, reasoning man, wide-eyed, square-headed. He
had prospered by diligence and deserving; his large two-storied
dwelling was the best in Calamba. Overawing guns and the military
checked his spirit but never daunted it. In his house the Government’s
key-hole listeners and hired porch-climbers were defied, and no one
hesitated to discuss the evils that had befallen the land.
One of the most detested instruments of the Spanish supremacy was a
body of troops called the Civil Guard, [3] a kind of military police
charged with ferreting out disloyalty and the signs of revolt. In the
strained relations between Government and governed that followed the
cruelties of 1872, it may be imagined how zestfully the Civil Guards
pursued their peculiar calling. Domiciliary visits were their
specialty, sudden and without warrant; a species of terrorism not then
practised anywhere in Europe outside of Russia and Turkey. A squad of
these visitors was in the habit of watching Calamba and the neighboring
town of Biñan, and when it was Calamba that they were favoring with
their attention, the lieutenant commanding quartered himself and his
horse upon the Mercados, where he could find the best fare and the best
fodder in town.
The crops in 1871 had not been good in that region. Mr. Mercado’s store
of fodder diminished until he had barely enough to supply his own live
stock. When next the lieutenant came the situation was explained to
him, and with every politeness he was asked to bait his horse
elsewhere.
He chose to take the request as an affront. Reciprocal hatreds were
thick and rife around him; he conceived that in some way his honor as a
Spaniard had been impaired by a “miserable Indio,” and he swore
revenge. [4]
About the same time the unfortunate Mercado managed to offend another
Spaniard still more powerful. For all such visitors to Calamba he kept
a kind of gratuitous hotel; hospitality was and is a sacred and
inviolable rite among his people. The judge of the local district,
conferring upon the Mercados thus the honor of his uninvited presence,
fancied that his reception lacked something of cordiality and ceremony.
As to this, he may have been right; in the hearts of most intelligent
Filipinos of those days the feelings toward official Spaniards were not
likely to be exuberantly warm. The judge, like the lieutenant before
him, deemed his Spanish honor to have suffered and went away with a
similar appetite for vengeance, a lust to which the example of their
Government richly incited them.
For judge and lieutenant the opportunity came more quickly than they
could have hoped. At this neighboring town of Biñan lived José Alberto
Realonda (formerly Alonzo), a half-brother of Mrs. Mercado. He was
deservedly of mark in his province; his father had been an engineer
whose abilities were recognized by Spain in an order of knighthood that
the son inherited, an order equivalent to a baronetcy in England; José
Alberto himself had been at school in Calcutta, spoke English well, and
had traveled widely. It was at his home in Biñan that Sir John Bowring,
[5] the English linguist and traveler, had been entertained; and
Bowring had put into his book on the Philippines a graceful paragraph
about his host and entertainment, the good taste with which the
Realonda house was furnished, the excellent cooking set before its
guests.
Don José Alberto had married young, and, as the event showed, not
wisely. His wife was his cousin. They quarreled and separated, and the
wife seems to have set afoot wild and fantastic stories, injurious to
her husband. Divorces were difficult in the Philippines.
From material no better than these the lieutenant now manufactured
against Mrs. Mercado and her brother a charge of conspiracy to murder
Mrs. Realonda. It was a preposterous tale, but to such tales the
institutions that, in those parts, by a figure of speech, were called
courts of justice were in the habit of lending a ready ear if thereby
they served any end of the dominant power or gratified a powerful
Spaniard. In probably no other corner of the world with a pretense to
Christian civilization was the judicial system so farcical; the next
developments were typical of the conditions under which seven million
people dwelt at the mercy of perjurers, adventurers, and thieves. With
joy the incensed judge received the accusation and ordered Mrs. Mercado
to be arrested and imprisoned in the provincial jail.
This, although but left-handed and imperfect revenge, accorded with the
ideas and practices of the governing class. The grievances of the judge
and the lieutenant, if they had any, were against Mr. Mercado; they
evened the score by striking not at him but at his wife.
Incomprehensible or almost insane as this will seem to a healthier
sense of honor, it was a custom of which we shall find other and more
painful instances. Suppose the governing class, or a member of it, to
believe the much cherished supremacy of the white race to demand that
an example be made of an offending native. No nice discrimination was
deemed necessary. If the offender was not available, retribution could
still be inflicted upon the offender’s wife, or upon his children or
even upon his brother-in-law or his great aunt, if he had no children,
or if his wife was not within striking distance. In fairness to the
Spaniards we are to note that this singular reversion was not a product
of nationality but of geography; many a man defended vicarious
vengeance in the Philippines that would have scorned it in Spain, so
wonderful are the moral idiocies into which imperialism drives us.
Mrs. Mercado was ordered from her home to the prison at Santa Cruz, the
provincial capital, at the other side of the lake. Ordinarily, traffic
with Calamba was by steamer; but a road, rough and ill made, led along
the shore. The more to taste the pleasures of his revenge, the judge
ordered Mrs. Mercado to be conducted by this road and on foot; that is
to say, about twenty miles and in the sun.
It will later appear in this narrative that she was no ordinary woman;
she came from a household that believed in liberty; she seems to have
had a lofty spirit and a certain dignified self-mastery not rare among
Filipino women. All about that part of the province she was known for
her charities and good neighborliness. Her compatriots liked her. When,
therefore, trudging along the shore road under the custody of a guard,
she came at the evening of the first day to a village, she was received
by its inhabitants with outpourings of sympathy and an invitation to
lodge at the best house in the place instead of the village lockup as
the judge had thoughtfully intended. She accepted the invitation; but
with insatiable malice he had followed to see how his orders were
obeyed. When he found the prisoner well bestowed instead of undergoing
the miseries of the filthy prison, a madness of rage came upon him. He
broke down the door of the house where his victim was sheltered, and,
judge as he was, hesitated not to assault with his cane both the
unlucky guard that had shown her lenity and the owner of the house that
had received her. [6]
He was as merciful as the judicial system he adorned; as intelligent
and as well ordered. One of the least of its offenses was that this
same hedge-row magistrate, at whose order she had been arrested to
gratify his spite, was also to be the prosecuting attorney, when she
should be brought to trial, and the judge before whom her fate should
be decided. Mr. Mercado, meanwhile, had been putting forth every
peaceful means to rescue his wife from this disaster. He had secured an
attorney, who now presented a petition that her case should not be
allowed to come before a judge so manifestly prejudiced against her.
While Mrs. Mercado lay in jail, this appeal went before the supreme
court, which sustained it and ordered the prisoner’s release. Before
she could be set free the unjust judge brought a new charge against
her, that her petition alleging prejudice on his part constituted
contempt of court.
On this she continued to be a prisoner until another appeal could be
made to the supreme assize. When it had been reached and argued,
Dogberry wisdom seated upon this august bench upheld the court below
and found that such a petition was indeed contempt. How, that being the
case, a prisoner could ever escape from a court or judge manifestly
hostile to her, these eminent authorities did not suggest. But as Mrs.
Mercado had already been in jail much longer than the term of the
sentence passed upon her for contempt, they ordered her liberation.
It was now to be supposed that the end of this business had been
reached, vengeance had been satisfied, the crime of not feeding the
lieutenant’s horse had been atoned for, and the woman might return to
her family. Not in the Philippines, certainly. Before the prison doors
could open, a new charge was brought against her.
She was alleged by the judge-prosecutor-tribunal to have committed
theft. [7]
Here is an incident luminous upon the society of that day and region;
we had better pursue it. All this time, Mrs. Mercado’s half-brother,
José Alberto, the engineer, whose unfortunate marriage had wrought so
much of trouble, had been a prisoner in the same jail, similarly beset
with accusing inventions. He had a moderate fortune; therefore the
story went around that he had much money concealed about him. The scent
of the peso was ever strong in the nostrils of the jail officials and
court attendants. When the gold could not be found in José Alberto’s
cell, the searchers for it reasonably concluded that the half-sister
must have taken it, possibly by means of an astral presence or through
some form of witchcraft.
For this rank imagining there was even less of basis than there had
been for the conspiracy charge; yet it was months in falling apart.
When it had dissolved in its own absurdity another quite as unfounded
took its place. Justice à la espagnole—in the Philippines. Two years
passed in these futilities. It was apparently the purpose of the
authorities to keep their helpless victim in prison the rest of her
life.
From such a fate she was now rescued by another incident not less than
her imprisonment typical of misgovernment under which the country
groaned. The governor-general of all the Philippines, representative in
his single person of the might and majesty of Spain, came to Calamba on
a tour. Among the entertainments offered in his honor was dancing by
children. One of the little girls by her grace and beauty particularly
won the governor-general’s applause. He asked her what he could do for
her. She said he could release her mother from prison. She was Mrs.
Mercado’s daughter, and by this detour and purified recrudescence of
Salome and Herod was Mrs. Mercado snatched at last from her persecutors
and got again to her home. [8]
It was a populous household that welcomed her return; she had already
borne eleven children to her husband, rearing them with an
old-fashioned and sedulous care not yet out of vogue in the
Philippines. Immigration had much affected the original Island strains;
on both sides the family was of mixed descent. One of Mr. Mercado’s
ancestors was Lam-co, a Chinaman of means and character that came to
the Islands in the latter part of the seventeenth century. He settled
at Biñan, was converted to Christianity, and was baptized in 1697,
taking the name of Domingo. At Biñan he married the daughter of another
Chinaman, whose wife was a mestiza, or half-caste Filipino. From this
time on Chinese blood was mixed with Malay [9] until in 1847 Francisco
Mercado, descendant of Lam-co, married Teodora Alonzo, a Filipino lady
of a distinguished family, partly Chinese in ancestry, and came to live
at Calamba. It was her lot, twenty-five years later, to be the victim
of the strange story of persecution and villainy here related.
The seventh of her children, José, was then eleven years old and a
student in a preparatory school in Manila. Upon his mind the reports
that came to him of the successive steps in her degradation stamped
themselves as if in iron. Even when he had become a mature man, famous,
accomplished, absorbed in studies and achievements at the other side of
the busy world, the thought of that great wrong haunted and goaded him.
Yet it had been no novelty, even in his short experience; it had been
no more than a focus, upon the one household he knew best, of wrongs
with which other households were familiar and of which he had often
heard. All his conscious days he had been aware, and ever better aware,
of the cold, black, implacable despotism that had yoked and now drove
and lashed his people. He knew well the hateful excesses of the Civil
Guard, the license and arrogance of the governing class, the extortion
and thefts, the infinite scorn in which the subject race was held, the
intolerable parody of justice, the bitter jest of the code and the
court-room, the flogging of men, the violating of women, the protected
murderers, the rapists that went untouched and unabashed. When he was
only five years old he used to sit on the shore of that beautiful green
lake, the Laguna de Bay, and look across it and wonder if the people
that lived on the other side were as wretched as the people of Calamba,
whether they were beaten, kicked and trodden upon, whether they dwelt
in the same terror of the Civil Guards and the flogging-rods. [10] He
said years afterward that even then he had a distinct conviction that
these things were not necessary and that there must be some region on
the earth where its children could be happy and enjoy the sunshine, the
flowers, and the beautiful things that seemed made for their delight.
Many of the troubles that fell upon his neighbors, or were laid upon
them by the existing System, were troubles about land; and before ever
the malicious lieutenant had begun his revenges upon the family, young
José was familiar with stories of the wrongs the so-called courts
inflicted upon tenants and the men that tilled the farms. It was
miserable business for any child to master, if he was to make his way
through life as anything but a gloomy misanthrope. Yet such things for
his people made the world into which he had come. Doubtless much may be
said to excuse the System the Spaniards maintained in the Philippines:
they had inherited it, they had not the skill nor the inspiration to
better it, and the like extenuations; when all is said, it remains but
hideously stupid and cruel. In the beginning it was medievalism,
neither better nor worse than was to be found in the sixteenth century
in the most of Europe. Planted upon the other side of the globe as if
upon another planet, it missed all the vivifying and enlightening
influences that drew Europe out of the slough. The Philippines stuck as
they were; Europe lumbered ahead. In all the world one could not find
another such phenomenon, the sixteenth century cold-storaged for the
instruction of the nineteenth. Whosoever might wish to observe in
action the political and social ideas of Philip the Second needed but
to journey to the Philippines.
Almost nothing had changed there. In Europe ideas had dawned of a free
press, free speech, general education, the ballot-box, parliamentary
government, the rights of the individual, the immaculate nature of
justice, the determining of legal causes by unimpeachable processes,
the gradual eclipse of the monarchical conception of society, the
passing of the barony. Not one of these had come near the Philippines.
Government there was the autocracy of a privileged class, tempered
slightly by occasional revolutions, unlimited and unrestrained by any
other consideration, and carried on chiefly for personal
aggrandizement.
Instead of freedom of publication, the censor sat upon an impregnable
throne and scrutinized not merely every word to be printed in every
journal but every book that was imported, even in a traveler’s
hand-baggage. Instead of free speech, the natives might not even
petition of their grievances. Instead of general education, the masses
were of a purpose kept in ignorance. Instead of justice, they must lead
their lives without other protection than they could win by a feigned
humility beneath the arbitrary power of their rulers.
It was in such surroundings that this boy came into his consciousness.
He had a mind receptive and powerful. By no possibility could these
impressions fail to be reflected in his thinkings and then in his life.
Other youths the same environment drove into sullen apathy, racial
fatalism, or a life fed with always disappointed hopes of revenge. This
boy they drew along a path of strange adventures and almost
unprecedented achievement to a place among the great men of all times.
The roots of this story begin three centuries before the Mercado family
at Calamba was caught up in its heartbreaking intrigues. After what was
called the “discovery” of the Philippines by Magellan, March 16, 1521,
Spain laid claim to the entire Archipelago, more than two thousand
sizable Islands. [11] Portugal disputed this, neither having the
slightest just basis for its claim, until 1529, when the pope settled
the quarrel out of hand and gave the Philippines to Spain. In 1570 the
taking by a Spanish expedition of the capital city of Manila was
assumed to have put the physical seal upon this deed of gift, and Spain
proceeded to annex and to govern such of the Islands as she could by
persuasion or beating induce to accept her sovereignty. From the first
the tenancy was incongruous and precarious; Europe of the Middle Ages
laid upon a civilization more ancient, wholly alien, and traditionally
well rooted. What followed is a tangle of inconsistencies. On the
administrative side, Spain with musket-balls shot order and obedience
into the natives; from first to last the rulers had but the one broad
policy, which was to overawe the people they ruled and to subjugate
them with fear. On the cultural side the account was at first wholly
different. That they might give to these same natives the blessings of
Christianity and the gospel of peace, the heroic Spanish missionary
priests endured trials compared with which most martyrdoms seemed easy.
Thus in a naïve way, rather startling now to contemplate, perdition and
paradise were to be glimpsed side by side, brute force marched with an
apostolic love, and bullets were distributed with the Bible.
But, before the labors and good deeds of the missionary priests,
scoffing falls silent. The soldier slew and destroyed; the priest
planted schools, spread knowledge, bettered conditions. He did not even
wait for the soldier to break a way or to indicate security, but
plunged ahead of the armies into the wilderness where he knew he was
likely to leave his bones.
Whether when all is said the general balance-sheet of the Spanish
occupation shows more net advantages or disadvantages for the Filipino
can be argued plausibly either way. In such a welter of conflicting
testimonies the fair-minded will be slow to judge. We shall have to
deal again with the question when we come to see how in his mature
years José Rizal reacted to it and how his analyses disposed of the
commonest of the Spanish claims. Considering it here in its due
historic place, we may first remind ourselves that with all her faults
Spain had at least one great virtue. She pretended no altruism. On a
sordid impulse she took the Islands; she kept them merely as goods.
As to this debated point the findings of Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera seem
clear. [12]
“Those that are wont to depreciate civilization and material
development to the point of being inexact,” he says, “cite the voyage
of Magellan as an enterprise motived only by religious ideals and by
sincerest and purest charity. They misrepresent or forget two
incontestible facts. First, the voyage of Magellan was proposed to and
accepted by the King of Spain, was approved by his ministers and was
carried out by Magellan and his companions for the mercantile purpose
of discovering, by sailing westward, a route to the Moluccas and thus
wresting from the hands of Portugal the rich commerce that pertained to
those, the Spice Islands. This and nothing else was the origin,
inspiration and object of that famous expedition. Second, such a
purpose could be realized precisely because the Spaniards had achieved
a material development that inspired the enterprise and made it
possible.”
The more honor, then, to the Spaniards, who, having in view only the
purposes of a bargain, still added much to the equipment of the
Islanders. They erected better buildings than the Filipinos had ever
known, made better roads, introduced, with whatsoever cruelties, a
better coördination, something like uniform laws, something like a
welded and coherent polity; they discouraged piracy when it could no
longer serve to subdue the natives; they gave money for schools,
whether these were efficient or otherwise; they made some connection,
however frail, between the culture of the Islands and that formerly
existing in the rest of the world. Yet, aside from the labors of the
missionaries, the other boons that followed their red trail are
doubtful. Accepting these at the Spanish valuation, the fact still
seems to protrude that Spain found an industrious population and
managed to leave it indifferent and indolent, [13] found one style of
civilization and left another.
Prejudice and racial hatreds have obscured about this one other fact
that never should be overlooked. The Filipinos would not have stood
still if the Spaniards had left them alone. True estimate, therefore,
is to be made, not on a comparison between what they were when the
Spaniards came and what they were when the Spaniards left them, but on
what they probably would have made of themselves. They were no backward
race; they had shown a remarkable aptitude to absorb the best of the
progress around them, taking on arts, inventions, manufactures, and
developing them. They made and used gunpowder before it was known in
Europe; they made and used cannon of a considerable size, built better
sea-going ships than the Spaniards, had developed more skilful
artificers in silver and gold, and had evidently a disposition to
improve methods and manners. [14] In those three hundred years,
supposing them to have been left to their own devices, they would never
have ceased to look forward. Yet when the line comes to be drawn below
the items of their progress under Spanish control and we glance across
even to the most dilatory countries of Europe, we are compelled to
admit that relatively the advance is small.
But because the natives writhed under the crude and savage oppression
that walked with this, we are not to suppose the Spaniards they hated
were all bad men. Goodness and badness hardly enter into the matter.
There came to the Philippines in these 325 years many a
governor-general with a worthy inspiration to overturn the tables of
the money-changers and bring in righteousness and justice. It appears
that what was going on in the Philippines was not always ignored at
home, and many a private citizen of good character started out to
support a reforming governor-general. The significant fact is that all
these efforts had one end. Nothing was ever changed. The best of the
governor-generals fell impotent against the same menacing wall of
System. Securely it had been based upon favoring conditions; it had
grown under generations of greedy maladministration; it extended to
every part of the Archipelago where Spain had authority; and it was
buttressed by the power that in all times has proved the most difficult
foe to the freedom and progress of the masses. For such is the power of
accumulated profits to breed more power to make more profits and still
more power. Here was indeed the appetite that grows by what it feeds
on. The invisible government had swallowed the visible.
Nevertheless, for a long time, nothing is to be subtracted from the
work of the fathers of the church. A noble zeal animated them; often
they added to it a fine tact, much practical wisdom, unlimited capacity
for self-denial, and even self-immolation. Years went by; the
missionary era came to an end; there was no longer the splendor of the
apostolic adventure into the jungle. A different spirit began to
possess a part of the clergy; not all of it, but a part. Marvelously
rich the country was that Spain had annexed in this fashion; hardly
anywhere else had nature bestowed a more fertile soil with a more
pleasing climate. For two hundred years the Government at Madrid, with
an excess of stupidity, restrained the natural development of this Eden
by narrowly limiting its trade. Only to Mexico and only by means of one
galleon a year could the struggling colony export its products; a
process of strangulation into which some bugaboo of competition had
harried the merchants of Barcelona and so the poor foolish Government.
After 1815, as liberalism and the beneficent results of the French
Revolution began to make their belated appearance in Spain, these
restrictions were cautiously relaxed, and at once the value of
Philippine lands began to increase.
Four orders of European friars [15] had settled themselves in the
Philippines, obtaining in the early days from the insular Government
grants of estates that because of the lack of adequate surveying and
for other reasons were of shadowy boundaries. As trade increased it
multiplied the demand for Philippine products. Under this pressure,
forests once covering great areas of rich land were cleared away by
pioneers that settled upon the soil they had made tillable. In hundreds
of cases the friars laid claim to such lands and demanded of the
settlers possession or rents. If the settler resisted, the Civil Guard
or other military force ejected him. If he sought relief in the courts
he had only his heavy expenses for his pains.
Thus the monastic orders had become the System. Accumulated wealth had
wrought upon them the effects it ever achieves everywhere. Originally
they had come to the Philippines with a pure notion of doing good; now
they were caught in the soiled entanglements of gain. Through all the
sequel a gap widened between the four orders and the rest of the
church. Other clergy, notably the native priests, continued to serve,
according to their lights, the professed objects of religion; the four
orders were four great corporations, indurated with profits, playing
the callous landlord, extorting rents, harassing tenants, extending
their operations, and with every new peso of their hoards strengthening
their influence upon Malacañan, the seat of the administration. So
works the law that inevitably attends upon accretion. Gradually they
dispossessed the military, official, and merchant castes that at first
had been all in all. Such potency as in other countries belongs to
banks or great industrial companies lay now in their hands. Whatsoever
they wished, that, by one means or another, they won. It is not humanly
possible that under such conditions men should not deteriorate; the men
that sway so gross a rule, the men upon whom it is swayed.
It was so here. The friars of the orders became intolerable local
tyrants. In the rural regions, the word of the curate, if he was of the
dominant caste, outweighed the command of the provincial governor. As a
rule the governor-general himself dared not in any way oppose the
clerical domination; a few words lightly whispered at Madrid would be
enough to make sure his recall and ruin. One of these governors that
tried to assert his own authority had to fight a clerical mob in his
own palace, and fell dead, sword in hand, across the body of his son.
[16] The lesson did not need repetition; thenceforth the successors of
the Governor-General Bustamante of 1719 made haste to placate a power
so great and so malignant. Even the redoubtable Emiliano Weyler himself
was careful and obsequious to maintain good relations with the four
orders. Nay, he went to the length of supervising the ejection of
settlers from the lands the friars claimed, and in at least one
instance, as we shall see, accelerated the work with a battery of
artillery.
It is now reasonably certain that most of these claims were without
merit, but unlimited power had produced among the orders the effect it
has had in all ages and climes upon the men that have possessed it.
Over a certain genus of temperament the evil spell seems too great to
be abridged by religion or by anything else. Nothing in the so-called
civilizing adventures of Europe upon the fringes of the earth has been
more clearly proved than that the white man, removed from the
restraining influence of home and his neighbors and clothed with
irresponsible power over people whom he deems inferior, is capable of
reversion to an astonishing tyranny. The records of the Congo, of Dr.
Peters in South Africa, of the Germans in the South Seas, are easy
illustrations on a large scale of what happened here in little.
It has been the huge blunder of Europeans dealing with the Malay to
mistake his patience for weakness and his silence for acquiescence.
Aliens imposing themselves by force upon a remote people of another
color have seldom been at pains to pick up the keys to the psychology
of the governed. Great is the misery that would have been avoided for
the dark-skinned children of earth by the use of this simple process,
and nowhere was it simpler than in the Philippines.
All these influences and causes were at work to make trouble. Partly by
their own excesses, partly by becoming the symbols and visualized
representatives of the whole foreign domination, with all its
intolerable wrongs and oppressions, the friars were now the objects of
a deathless hatred. Hardly were the landlords of old more abhorred by
the Irish peasantry.
It was a people capable by nature of much hating as of much loving upon
whom fell this bitter inheritance. One can only suppose that the
average Spaniard in the Philippines stood sentinel against himself lest
he should understand the people he thought were under his boot-heel. In
point of fact, they were not stupid and inferior, as he always
described them, but of an excellent mentality, quick apprehension,
reasoning powers at least equal to his own, of a certain inheritance of
culture, different, cruder, but in its way not less. Particularly they
were a people in whom resentment against injustice might smolder long
but only in the end to blaze into perilous fires. Three centuries of
Spanish domination had not extirpated the Malayan instinct for liberty,
but, judging from the climax of all this, only intensified it. Spanish
officers watching with intent eyes for the least sign of revolt took
from these people every discoverable weapon, even to bolos (knives) of
blades longer than so many inches. The better organization, discipline,
equipment, and military skill that alone constituted Spanish supremacy
was for ever being paraded in the eyes of the Indios. At every turn
they were reminded in some way of their position, helpless, barehanded,
and kept from one another by enmities the Spaniards knew well how to
foster. In the face of all this sedulous care, behold in the story of
their possession of the Philippines a serial of insurrection! Between
1573 and 1872, thirty-one revolts had been serious enough to leave
enduring records in history. [17]
Going over these records now, no one can fail to see that the uprisings
were progressive; however lamely inaugurated, poorly armed,
fallaciously led, each was of an aspect more serious than its
predecessor. Any Spaniard with the least skill in reading human history
could have foretold the result. As education spread, as mankind
elsewhere struggled more and more into comparative liberty, as the
sense of injustice grew in the Filipino heart, the day would come when
these people, too, would be driven to unite for the one great
all-embracing, all-inspiring object of national freedom and national
existence, and they would win it.
To this the friars and the governing class of the Philippines were now
contributing by providing the immediate sting that seems always to be
needed when an old and deep-lying resentment is to be goaded into
outward and physical activities. The friars and the governing class
were palpable; their acts of oppression were daily before the people’s
observation; but what they stood for as the emblems of a general
condition was much more important than anything they did. Stories of
men with causes just and righteous that had been ruined at the friars’
dictation in the farcical courts; stories of men and women persecuted
as Mrs. Mercado had been persecuted; stories of men beaten to death,
men strangled and men shot, men deported and women wronged, were
brooded over in thousands of barrios. [18] They but completed the tale
of three hundred years of government with the iron fist.