PHILIPPINE INDEPENDENCE
Sixteen years after Jagor printed his almost unheeded prophecy, other
men less gifted might have seen that his views on Philippine evolution
were soundly based. The conditions existing in the Islands could not
last much longer. Six or seven discontented millions could not continue
to be overawed with soldiery and great guns and managed upon a plan
they hated. No matter how assiduously they might be kept from all
weapons more deadly than jack-knives and toothpicks, the existing state
could not endure. The mere physical fact of the United States, forging
ahead upon a totally different principle, would be an influence that
soon or late would overturn these sagging bulwarks of antiquity. What
was to be the future of the Islands? For a long time the students of
Barcelona tried to settle this question, sometimes with debate and
sometimes with vociferation. Thence with similar futility it spread to
Madrid and elsewhere, and finally Rizal took it up in a series of
articles entitled “The Philippines a Century Hence.” [119]
What he thought about Philippine independence he here set down as
plainly as the law and the Spanish Government would allow. That any one
should try to muddle his views on this subject is strange enough when
he left thus a testament reasonably explicit in its text and still more
in its deductions. Although much latitude was allowed to public
discussion in the Spain of that day, plotting to overthrow Spanish rule
in the Philippines was still sedition, and under that term the police
sometimes included much that was extraneous—in Spain, as elsewhere.
Rizal had no fear for himself on this occasion nor any other, but one
can easily understand that he wished to save “La Solidaridad” from the
ash-can. Hence with admirable skill he steers as close as he can to the
forbidden line and yet escapes it.
Against one bugaboo of the timid, and even to this day a favorite
device of the crafty, he brought to bear a destructive logic. It was
urged that if the Philippines were free they would instantly be snapped
up by some powerful and greedy neighbor. The functions of a shield
against these ravenous wild beasts, a function later supposed to be
performed unselfishly by the United States, was then imagined to fall
to the lot of mighty Spain. But for her frowning guns and men-of-war,
behold the Philippines a breakfast any morning for Japan or for Great
Britain! In those days there were a few Filipinos that were impressed
with these fantasies, or said to be; in later times the superior white
man often seemed strangely infected with them. To one inclined to take
them seriously Rizal’s words might have been commended then, or may be
now.
It appears that he had been applying to his country the lessons of the
American Revolution.
If the Philippines [he says] succeed in winning their independence
at the close of a heroic and bitterly contested war, their people
can rest assured that neither England, Germany, France, nor Holland
will dare to pick up the territory that Spain could not retain.
Within a few years, Africa will absorb all the attention of the
great European nations, and none of them would neglect the immense
territories and opportunities that will open in the Dark Continent
for the sake of a handful of rugged islands at the other end of the
world.
As to England, she has already enough of colonies in the Orient, and
she is too wise to imperil her equilibrium by adding more. She does not
wish to run the risk of losing her great empire in India for the sake
of the comparatively poorer Philippine Archipelago. If England had even
thought of taking the Philippines, she would never have retired from
Manila after she had captured it in 1763; she would have retained that
great vantage-point and so would have spread her power from Island to
Island until all should be hers. For her the game was not worth the
candle, and is not. Singapore, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, mean much more to
British trade and the empire than the Philippines could ever mean, and
she has no idea of risking these great possessions for the sake of a
domain so dubious and restless as these Islands. For all reasons of
common sense and commercial advantage, England would look with favor
upon a state of independence that would open the Philippine ports to
British trade.
There is, besides, in England a feeling always growing that the country
has gone too far in imperialism and expansion, that the colonies have
already begun to weaken the mother-country and there must be no
additions to them.
He proceeds next to discuss the probable policies of Germany, China,
Holland, Japan, and the United States toward Philippine independence.
None of them, in his view, would feel any temptation to interfere with
it or to seize the Islands for itself. But, in any event, he says:
The Philippines would defend with the utmost ardor and courage the
liberty bought with so much blood and sacrifice. A new man will
spring from the Philippine bosom; with new energy he will dedicate
himself to progress; he will labor with all his resources to
strengthen his country at home and abroad. Gold will be dug from
the Philippine soil; copper, lead, coal, and other minerals will be
developed. The country will revive the maritime and mercantile
activities to which the Islanders are especially adapted by nature,
instincts, and aptitude. Filipinas will recover those good
qualities that she had centuries ago and has since been losing.
[120] Easily, then, we can see her once more a lover of peace, a
home of justice, and as of old merry, smiling, hospitable,
audacious.
He recounts then some of the existing evils in his country and inquires
what, if one can imagine another century of such servitude, the
Philippines will be reduced to in that time? But without circumlocution
he warns the Government that the servitude cannot possibly continue.
Unless the prudence of the Government provides remedies that are real,
the grievances now accumulating will have but one result.
This is not the time to forecast the probable outcome of such a
struggle if, most deplorably, it should come. It would depend upon
faith, zeal, the qualities of weapons, and a million conditions
that men cannot foresee. But one thing is certain. Suppose all the
advantages to be upon the side of the Government. Suppose the
Government to win an ostensible victory. It would be a victory as
disastrous as a defeat, and this simple fact the Government should
be wise enough to see.
If those that seek to guide the destinies of the Philippines could
be so obstinate as to insist upon holding the country in darkness
instead of relieving it with adequate reforms, the people would
brave the chances of revolt and prefer revolt’s hazards, whatever
they might be, to the certainty of the misery and wrong in which
they would be dwelling. What would they lose in such a fight? To
normal men the choice between long-drawn-out oppression and a
glorious death is no choice at all. Such men will always leap at
the chance of such a death and by their fervor and desperate
courage go far in any such conflict to make up for a disparity in
numbers.
He points out the fact that so far in Philippine history the revolts
have been sporadic and largely local. Earnestly he warns the Government
that this cannot continue. Very different would be the uprising of the
whole people against a state of unendurable misery, and toward such an
uprising the policy of the Government is driving. It is to be
remembered, he says, that factors in the problem exist now that never
existed before. First, the native spirit has awakened and common
misfortune is drawing together all the children of the Islands. Second,
the growth of intelligence at home and abroad is fatal to the existing
order. All those Filipinos that the cruelty and stupidity of the
Government have driven abroad have learned there the rhythm of the
march of mankind and are transmitting it home. It is a class that
rapidly increases. If it is the brain of the country now, it will in a
few years be the country’s nervous system, and of impact upon those
nerves let the Government beware.
One of two things, he concludes, is certain. Spain will grant sweeping
reforms in the islands, establishing there the liberties and advantages
that all civilized people view as birthrights. Or the islands will
declare their independence, after staining themselves and Spain with
blood. To check the advance of the Filipinos to this crisis Spain has
in effect but three weapons. First, the brutalizing effect upon the
masses of a caste system; the high caste, as always, alined with the
Government. Second, the supremacy of a theocratic class in the
Philippine structure, acting to overawe the natives, as in the Dutch
colonies the aristocratic class frightens them. Or, third, the
impoverishment of the country, the encouragement of tribal discord, and
the gradual destruction of the inhabitants.
Already these expedients have been tried enough to prove them worthless
for Spain’s ultimate use.
One little fact that he points out might well be remembered by all
imperialists. Where the aborigines of a seized country, as in
Australia, succumb and disappear before the alien civilization, that
makes one situation for the invader. Where the inhabitants, as in the
Philippines, adapt themselves to the invader’s civilization, show they
can maintain themselves under it, increase in numbers and in
restlessness, bettering the instruction they receive, the situation for
the alien sovereignty is different and not wholesome.
Still his hope clung to peaceful agitation as the means of improvement.
Retana says that Rizal was one that abhorred violent revolution in his
mind and desired it in his heart.
This might easily be. At the time Rizal was studying abroad, many
cities such as London, Paris, Hong-Kong, Macao, as well as Madrid,
contained small colonies of Filipinos, being chiefly the exiles of 1872
and Cavite. Among them it was customary to circulate pamphlets
breathing out destruction to Spanish rule in the Philippines, and so
on. These the authors were usually wise enough not to sign, the chief
purpose of their labors being, apparently, not so much to launch
expeditions for the overthrow of the citadel of oppression as to cheer
the hearts of exile with verbal fireworks. One of these came out in
March, 1889, in Hong-Kong, but widely circulated wherever there were
Filipinos. It is a race that, like the others, has good men and bad,
men that go erect and those that crawl. One of the latter species, a
creature of Weyler of the Red Hands, was then living in Hong-Kong and
felt called upon to answer the inflammatory appeals of his countrymen.
Perhaps he was not much of a Filipino; perhaps he was, in the bulk,
Spaniard. At least he said in his document that Spain’s rule in the
Philippines was the grandest specimen of colonial wisdom ever known and
replete with good things for the people. As to the friars, he said that
no possible objection existed to them, for they were kind, gentle, fond
of the people, and wholly given to good works. So he warned his
countrymen to pay no attention to ribald persons that wrote otherwise,
for they but walked the straight road to destruction.
Copies of this unique production made their way to Europe and in the
end to Paris, where Rizal was then living. In October of that year,
1889, appeared in Paris a rejoinder to sycophancy that set on edge the
teeth of every Filipino in Europe. It was unsigned, but to the colonies
the authorship seemed unmistakable. Only one Filipino could write like
that; only one Filipino could wither with such disdainful sarcasm the
apologist for the wrongers of his country.
The manifesto closes with this paragraph:
When a people is torn asunder, when its dignity, its honor, and all
its liberties are trodden underfoot; when now no legal recourse
remains against the tyranny of its oppressors; when its complaints,
its supplications, and its groans are not listened to; when it is
not even allowed to cry; when its last hope is torn from its heart
... then ... then ... then! ... there remains no other remedy but
to snatch with delirious hand, from the accursed altars, the bloody
and suicidal dagger of revolution!
Cæsar, we, who are about to die, salute thee! [121]
The judgment of the Filipinos in Europe could hardly have been wrong.
There is every reason to hold with them that the writer of this fierce
cry of warning was Rizal.