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 honor1 availed to save Father [4]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 [5]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, [6]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. [7]

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. [8]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 [9]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 [10]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, [11]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. [12]

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, [13]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 Malay9 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 [14]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 [15]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 [16]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 [17]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 [18]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 [19]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 [20]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. [21]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 [22]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 friars15 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 [23]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 [24]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 [25]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 [26]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 [27]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. [28]

The boy that so early and by this savage tuition came to be initiated into his people’s sorrows was then chiefly remarkable for a gentle, tractable disposition and a liking for books and study. He had been born at Calamba, June 19, 1861. In his earliest childhood he seemed undersized and undervitalized; but when he was six years old there came to his father’s house his uncle Manuel, a figure of health and a resolute practitioner of open-air sports, who took José in hand and with daily exercises and rigorous living built his body to normal strength and agility. Filipinos have a natural aptitude for athletics; he verified now the ancestral blood in his veins. He ran and jumped; he took long walks; he learned to fence, to ride, and to like the sun and the wind.

By all accounts he must have been a singularly attractive child, even in a country where handsome children are common. His color was the fine tint of his people, a light, clean, even brown; his face a delicate oval, but the chin firm and rather long; the forehead nobly shaped, the nose almost classical, the lips full but nothing sensual. His eyes had a hardly discernible slant; when he was animated they flashed out of black depths a kind of black fire; but when he was quiescent they seemed gravely introspective. Long [29]afterward his neighbors and relatives, trying to recall his boyhood, and perhaps overstraining memory, thought he seemed always much older than his years, a notion that may have arisen from his unusual habits. He liked to read or be read to; he liked at times to be alone; he liked to hear his elders argue; he liked to go to church to see the people there; and he liked to reason.

José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonzo Realonda was his full name, made up in the Spanish fashion from both sides of his house, paternal as far as the connecting “y,” and maternal the rest of the road. Philippine names seem to the Anglo-Saxon mind a riddle that adds unnecessarily to the burdens of life. This boy was to be known all his life as José Rizal; his father had been and was always thereafter known as Francisco Mercado, his mother as Doña Teodora Alonzo. Francisco, the father, and all Francisco’s younger brothers in a family of twelve called themselves Rizal as much as Mercado and the rest; none of his older brothers used Rizal; all of his children bore it as their family name. Yet family name it was never, according to western standards; for it was added in 1849 by virtue of a proclamation of the governor-general and by the whim of the man then head of the house. A strange difficulty had arisen in the Philippines. The original Tagalog (or other native) surnames being invincible against the Spanish tongue, Spanish names were used as substitutes, but not, one might think, with sufficient variety. Religious fervor overworked the popularity of some of these until there arose an inextricable confusion: seventeen [30]Antonio de la Cruzes in one town, all unrelated; twelve Francisco de los Santoses in a single street. This knot the wise old Governor-General Claveria1 cut with ready sword. He provided a list of Spanish names, apparently copied in alphabetical order from the Madrid directory, and required the head of each family to take one of these, add it at the rear or front of whatever other names he was then carrying, and hand it down to his children.2 The father of Francisco Mercado met the spirit of the decree but evaded its letter. He chose for his official name of names Rizal, which was not on the governor-general’s list, but passed muster. It is a corruption of the Spanish word ricial, and means a green field or pasture; being here a poetic recognition, maybe, of the blessed state of Mercado’s own rentals.

In the long and many syllabled cognomen, sounding like a verse of the Æneid, with which José was baptized, is to be noticed the name Realonda. This was from his mother’s family, where it also was an innovation of the ingenious Claveria. Her family had long been known as Alonzo.3

Those that like to go over the first records of great men in search of phenomena foreshadowing something unusual in after-life will never be disappointed here. José mastered his alphabet when he was three years old, and before he was five could read in a Spanish version of the Vulgate from which his mother had [31]taught him at her knee.4 In other ways his debt to her was unusual; she turned his mind in his earliest years toward good literature, in which she had a discerning taste, being for her times and environment of rare learning and college bred in Manila.5 With other accomplishments she knew and loved good poetry, could make it herself, and early taught José to make it. He grew up thus with the advantage of a bilingual background. About him the common speech was Tagalog; his mother made Spanish fairly familiar to his ear.

Once she read to him a moral tale, “The Moth and the Candle,” translating as she went along, and emphasizing the lesson. The moth had been told by its mother to keep away from the flame, and now see what happened. A cocoanut-oil lamp was burning on the table as she read; winged insects were flying about and losing their lives in the blaze. José became much more interested in them than in the salutary warnings of his mother. He said afterward that he was not so much sorry for the insects that lost their lives as fascinated by their fate.

The advice and warnings sounded feebly in my ears [he wrote]. What I thought of most was the death of the heedless moth. But in the depths of my heart I did not blame it. My mother’s care had not quite the result she intended.

Years have passed since then. The child has become a man. He has crossed the most famous rivers of other countries. He has studied beside their broad streams. Steamships have carried him across seas and oceans. He has [32]climbed mountains much higher than the Makiling of his native province, up to perpetual snow. He has received from experience bitter lessons, much more bitter than that sweet teaching which his mother gave him. Yet, in spite of all, the man still keeps the heart of a child. He still thinks that light is the most beautiful thing in creation, and that it is worth a man’s sacrificing his life for.6

He had the soul of an artist, you may perceive, and the artist’s irresistible yearning for expression. Before he was five years old, and without tutelage or suggestion, he began to draw with pencil and to model in clay and wax. It was form that most took his attention; to model images of birds, butterflies, dogs, and men, to draw faces and to outline designs.7 For such studies his surroundings could hardly have been better; as soon as his bent was shown father, mother, and uncles gave him every encouragement; this is a race that upon any manifestation of artistic promise looks with a kind of solemn joy. Uncle José Alberto, his mother’s half-brother, had been a school-teacher as well as a student abroad; Uncle Gregorio was a great reader; the atmosphere of the house was friendly to study. After the Philippine manner it was grave, decorous, reserved; for there is not on earth, one may believe, a people by nature more serious-minded. The family was happy to have the benignant friendship of Father Lopez, the parish priest, a fair antithesis of the typical friar of those days and a noble inheritor of the purest spirit of the first missions. Father Lopez [33]was beloved of all the children of the parish. They had sound reason for their affection; there was no kinder or more useful man. The friendship he maintained with José seemed more like a page out of Charles Dickens than the barren realities of ordinary child life in the Philippines, and the priest to have stepped from some new and Spanish version of “Christmas Stories.” The boy was to learn by painful experience how different from certain others of the cloth was the gentle old curate of Calamba.

The House at Calamba in which Rizal was born

Years afterward, when he was entering upon man’s estate, he was induced to write what he called the story of his boyhood. It proved to be a juiceless sketch of a few pages covering many years. He was not enough egotist to make a good autobiographer. He begins by saying he was born a few days before the full of the moon. Then he adds:

I had some slight notions of the morning sun and of my parents. That is as much as I can recall of my baby days.

The training I received from my earliest infancy is perhaps what formed my habits, just as a cask keeps the odor of its first contents. I recall clearly my first gloomy nights, passed on the azotea8 of our house. They seem as yesterday! They were nights filled with the poetry of sadness and seem near now because at present my days are so sad.

On moonlight nights, I took my supper on the azotea. My nurse, who was very fond of me, used to threaten to leave me to a terrible but imaginary being like the bogy of the Europeans if I did not eat.

[34]

He had nine sisters and one brother. Of his father he says that he was a model parent.9 “He gave us the education that was suitable to a family neither rich nor poor. Through careful economy, he had been able to build a stone house.”

At nightfall, my mother had us all say our prayers together. Then we would go to the azotea, or to a window from which we could see the moon. There my nurse would tell us stories. Sometimes sad and sometimes gay, they were always oriental in their imagination. Dead people, gold and plants on which diamonds grew were all mixed together.

When I was four years of age, I lost my little sister, Concha, and for the first time my tears fell because of love and sorrow. Till then I had shed them only for my own faults. These my loving, prudent mother well knew how to correct.

The environment would seem nevertheless to be more propitious for the breeding of an agitator than of either a moralist or an artist. “Almost every day in our town,” he says, “we saw the Guardia Civil lieutenant caning or injuring some unarmed and inoffensive villager. The only fault would be that while at a distance he had not taken off his hat and made his bow. The alcalde did the same thing whenever he visited us.”

We saw no restraint put upon brutality. Those whose duty it was to look out for the public peace committed acts of violence and other excesses. They were the real outlaws, [35]and against such lawbreakers our authorities were powerless.

His father looked carefully to the beginnings of José’s education. There was daily drilling in all the elementary studies; an old man came and lived in the house to teach the boy Latin.

When he was nine years old he was sent to the boys’ school at Biñan, where his uncle José Alberto lived, and where he acquired knowledge in the traditional manner and under a liberal application of the rod. Dr. Justiniano Cruz, his teacher, seems to have had no modern illusions about the sparing of this implement; to have it hang by the side of the Bible and be more frequently used was his notion of thorough instruction.

José wrote of his experiences there:

My brother left me after he had presented me to the schoolmaster, who, it seemed, had been his own teacher. He was a tall, thin man, with a long neck and a sharp nose. His body leaned slightly forward. His shirt was of sinamay,10 woven by the deft fingers of Batangas women. He knew Latin and Spanish grammar by heart. And his severity, I believe now, was too great. This is all I can remember of him. His class-room was in his own house and only some thirty meters away from my aunt’s house [where José was lodged].

When I entered the class-room for the first time, he said to me:

“You, do you speak Spanish?”

“A little, sir,” I answered. [36]

“Do you know Latin?”

“A little, sir,” I again answered.

Because of these answers, the teacher’s son, who was the worst boy in the class, began to make fun of me. He was some years my elder and had an advantage in height, yet we had a tussle. Somehow or other, I don’t know how, I got the better of him. I bent him down over the class benches. Then I let him loose, having hurt only his pride.

From this feat, the other boys thought he was a clever wrestler. One of them challenged him. His pride had an early fall. The challenger threw him and came near to break his head on the sidewalk.

I do not wish to take up the time with telling of the beatings I got, nor shall I attempt to say how it hurt when I received the first ruler-blow on my hand. I used to win in the competitions, for no one happened to be better than I. Of these successes I made the most. In spite of the reputation I had of being a good boy, rare were the days in which my teacher did not call me up to receive five or six blows on the hand.

There was near-by an aged painter. José used to haunt his studio and learned much there about the secrets of pictorial art. He continues:

My manner of life was simple. I heard mass at four if there was a service so early, or studied my lesson at that hour and went to mass afterward. Then I went into the yard and looked for mabolos.11 Then came breakfast, which generally consisted of a plate of rice and two dried sardines. [37]There was class-work till ten o’clock, and after luncheon a study period. In the afternoon there was school from two o’clock until five. Next, there would be play with my cousins for a while. Study and perhaps painting took up the remainder of the afternoon. By and by came supper, one or two plates of rice with a fish called ayungin. In the evening we had prayers and then, if there was moonlight, a cousin and I would play in the street with the others. Fortunately, I was never ill while away from home. From time to time, I went to my own village. How long the trip seemed going and how short coming back!

The tenderer plants of knowledge would hardly be expected to flower in this harsh air, but the boy acquitted himself well. In two years he had gathered into his little head all the wisdom Dr. Cruz could supply, even with the conscientious use of the birch, and his parents had decided to send him to Manila and the famous Ateneo Municipal of the Jesuits.12

In Manila, though not at the Ateneo, he had been preceded by his elder brother Paciano, long a student at the College of San José, where that Father Burgos, whose death at the hands of the terrified governing class in 1872 we have recounted, was an instructor. Paciano lived at Father Burgos’s house and was his intimate friend. What ideas and ideals dominated the Mercado household at Calamba we may surmise from incidents of Paciano’s own school life. He was pilloried at San José as a notorious patriot; because [38]he spoke with some freedom against the tyranny that blasted his country the authorities refused to allow him to pass his examinations.13 It appears that Father Burgos, although unjustly accused of complicity in the Cavite affair, was likewise a sturdy Filipino and convinced that the iniquities of the existing System could not long be maintained. In all probability he was sentenced for holding these views. No one will ever know this, because the trial was in secret, no testimony (if any was taken) was afterward to be found, and he that was called the witness for the Government was garroted by that same Government before the public could learn the nature of his inventions.14 A belief that Father Burgos was a general-principles victim is justified by the habitual proceedings of the Government. He was not the only man that perished in those days for what he thought and not for what he did.

The slayings of Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora took place a few months before José Rizal went to Manila. Almost before Paciano’s face his friend and teacher had been dragged to death. What communication about these things Paciano made to his brother, or how Paciano was moved by the tragedy, we can gather only from what happened afterward; but what it meant to José we know well, for as to that he has left eloquent testimony. Sixteen years afterward he compressed into twenty-two lines of bitter irony the scorn he had of Spain for that day’s work. The tragedy on Bagumbayan Field came at the time when his mother’s persecution was beginning; his departure [39]from home had been delayed by her arrest. He was already burning under the sense of an intolerable wrong; this sharp and gratuitous access of injustice must have pierced him with another wound to brood over.15 All the rest of his life he seemed a lonely and rather melancholy figure. It was here at the Ateneo that his aloofness began. A feeling grew upon him that he was alone in the midst of crowds. It was the counterpart of a sense equally developing in him that the misfortunes of his people were to be the business of his life.

He found much at the Ateneo that sharpened his observations of the source of the national disease. All things considered, the school professed unusual virtues; its wise conductors made something of a vaunt of equal treatment for all their pupils. Yet even so it was impossible to shut out or to mitigate the contempt and hatred the Spaniards had for the Filipinos. Before the faculty, Spanish boys and Filipino boys might have an equal chance to pass their examinations; outside of the class-rooms, the Spanish boys sedulously imitated the arrogance and brutalities of their elders. One of the first remarks made by José Rizal in his new academe was that the Spanish boys always bore themselves with aggressive insolence toward their schoolmates of darker skin; the “miserable Indio” attitude over again. The next was that while the Filipino boys seemed as a rule to accept a situation they were powerless to end, they were one and all insubmissive in their hearts. Next he made note that the Filipino boys were so little impressed with Spanish [40]superiority that in secret they laughed at their white tyrants, mocking them and well aware of their faults and weaknesses. Finally, he satisfied himself many times in many ways, that the Filipino mind was not in any respect inferior to the Spanish; for the pretense of Spanish superiority there was no other basis but the accident of the overawing military.

In cannon and not in mind, spirit, or genius lay all of Spain’s prestige.

Before this discovery all the theory upon which Europe dominated any part of the Orient crumbled and vanished. There was no such thing, it did not exist, it was only fabrication and device. The brown man was not inferior; he was not deliberately shaped by the Creator to be the white man’s patient drudge. Put down side by side with an equal course before them, footing the same starting-line, the brown boy in school won to the goal as quickly and surely as the white. And only as quickly and surely? It seemed to Rizal, after a time, taking careful note, that the brown boy was in every trial heat the nimbler and wiser.16 As, for example, here was all the instruction in this school given in Spanish, the white boy’s native tongue, but all alien to the brown boy. So, then, the brown boy must needs compass the language in which the instruction was conveyed as well as the instruction given therein. Yet, even so, handicapped by this and no less by universal contempt and disparagement, behold him winning at least as many prizes as the Spaniard, at least as proficient, diligent, capable.

Here was a revelation to shake the towers of accepted [41]doctrine. In the light of it how great (and how hideous!) was the wrong done to the people of the Philippines! The pretense upon which Spain ruled in this iron fashion, with so much cruelty and dishonesty, was (in effect) that in the cells of the brains and in the corpuscles of the blood of these people some undefined and mysterious essence was lacking, and for want of this they were incapable of ruling themselves or even of taking a place among the other children of earth. Being put to the test, no such lack appeared, but only aptitude, mental health, mental vigor, equal at least to those of the white man. The European ruled, then, because he had a larger share of the brute in him, because he had a sensual ambition to rule, because his taste found pleasure in humiliating and exploiting others, because he had a tougher conscience, and because luck had been on his side. Of any essential, irradicable, structural difference between race and race there was not an indication. What the Asiatic really lacked was opportunity, not intellect; and liberty, not character.

He came to these conclusions without haste, because his was a mind that worked deliberately and over stretched-out periods of observation. He has left a record of them: of the time when they caused him to believe that the Malayan mind must really be better than the Caucasian; of his final conviction that between mind and mind there is no racial distinction with which reasoning men will bother themselves; that all the children of mother earth under the same conditions will average about the same results. In the end he came to discard the whole theory of races; to his [42]mind it was nothing but the manufacture of prejudice, ignorance, or profit-mongering. Mankind he saw not separated by perpendicular lines into races but by horizontal lines into strata.17 Everywhere some groups of men, favored by conditions, by liberty first of all, by institutions, by opportunity, had climbed to higher strata; everywhere other groups of men less fortunate as to conditions, having less liberty, worse institutions, and narrower opportunity, remained still in the lower strata. But everywhere it was, first of all, conditions that determined whether men should climb or remain, and not blood nor the color of skin nor the texture of hair.

It appears that he would make full allowance for individuals of unusual gifts, for the Shakespeares and Hugos, Goethes and Voltaires. What he was considering was men in the mass, not individuals. If we may judge from his writings and the testimony of his friends he was singularly free from vanity; certainly from the little vanities of self-seekers. He could hardly have failed to perceive even then that he himself was of the order of the exceptional; at the same time he saw plainly enough that his own attainments were won by hard and systematic toil rather than the rare blessings of the gods dropped into his lap. Still looking upon men in the mass, he saw that to assign special qualities as special inheritances out of the reach of other complexions was wrong in science and foolish in practice. One race could not possibly inherit the right to rule another; one race could not possibly [43]be dearer than another to the Omnipotence that he believed had created all.

Equality, then, was not a dream of enthusiasts, like those of France; equality was the scientific fact. Liberty was not a rare chrism with which were touched the lips of a few peoples set apart by their complexions for this distinction; liberty was the indefeasible right of all.

Manila, Philippine Islands, year 1876—this was. He found nothing in the text-books put into his hands then that bred any of these ideas; above all, there was nothing of the kind in the tuition he was receiving. When he was a student at the Ateneo and later at the University of Santo Tomas, the trend of thought there and elsewhere ran all the other way. By his own mental processes he had worked out, when he was hardly more than a boy, the theory to which gray-beard science was to come a few years later. What he felt then the best schools teach now; a fact that if there were nothing else would establish his precocity. But we are to remember that he had formed early a habit of independent thinking and had been stimulated to form it. This accounts for much. Walls of convention that shut in upon and crushed the intellectual machinery of so many other youths (there and elsewhere) had no terrors for him; despite all weight of eminent authority he would at all times and on all subjects think for himself. To be thus erect intellectually in a university, even of these days and in these nations of ours abreast with the front line of human advance, is still not so easy that we fail to mark [44]it if ever we find it. In his day, in his nation, then intellectually dragged along at the moldering chariot-wheels of antique formality, behold a marvel and no less.

This habitual attitude of mind was a great asset in his make-up—the complete intellectual emancipation of the querist that will take nothing for granted, but without bias or passion will investigate, consider, weigh, seek, and decide. Being without feeling, it was curiously counterpoised against another asset that was all feeling, deep and real. His mind might climb into abstraction’s chilly heights; his heart would be hot for Filipinas. He was an example of that enlightened patriotism that has redeemed the word from its cheap and reactionary definitions. It was no mere instinct of attachment to the walls wherein he was born that moved him, the instinct that causes goats to come home and cows to low when they are sold. He saw a people of whom he was a member bowed under monstrous injustice, denied the birthright of opportunity, slandered by oppressors, and contemned by a world that took these slanderous inventions for a true coinage. In a soul that worshiped justice and loved equity, he revolted against these abominations, as it was certain he would have revolted against the same wrongs practised against another people.

Not in the same degree; for at home the brand had been thrust deep into him. He might not even have come, so far in advance of his time, upon the modern theory of races if he had not started with a sense of resentment against the suffering of his own. But when he had satisfied himself of the truth of his theory, [45]he naturally applied it to his own people and felt more than ever the yoke that galled and hobbled them. If the Filipino was not in fact made of different stuff from the marl that made up the white man; if he was held in subjection not because he was inferior in capacity but because he was shouldered out of his due share of the world’s light and hope, again how much more terrible was his plight! An aspiring soul, as fine and sure as any other, held as a brother to the ox, Rizal began to perceive even in those early days that the Filipinos were like a river that some great arbitrary force had closed in and dammed back. He could see the water rising and hear it struggling, and knew that some time it would break through the barriers and run its due course. To his thinking, the real powers of his people were latent, but of a kind the world would have to admit when these powers should be set free. And what should set them free?

Education and political liberty.

It has become a habit among some writers and speakers to look upon Rizal as a kind of superman, a creature of abnormal gifts, a brilliant exception to the common endowment of the Filipino. Some have described him as a bright, strange meteor flashing against a background of Malayan incapacity.18 As this narrative of a wonderful life unfolds it will probably show that the man thus pedestaled was only human and that the secret of his great works, enduring influence and pre-eminence in so many walks was nothing mysterious but plainly understandable. He had a twofold [46]inspiration. First, he developed a habit of ceaseless industry, carefully ordered, carefully followed. Second, and even better than this, from his youth he had been overmastered, fired and whirled along by a vision of his people redeemed. So then to their redemption he consecrated his life. He did it in his closet, quietly, without theatrics and without telling anybody. Macaulay’s theory that every great man has something of the charlatan in him falls short in this instance. For him the grand stand never existed. Whatever he did was dedicated first in his heart to Filipinas; whatever he thought, planned, dreamed, or hoped for had some reference to her and her service, and now when he studied it was to fit himself to serve her better.

We come back to him, knocking at the gate of Ateneo, eleven years old, small for his age, and all a boy still; for we have shot far ahead of that day to deal with the development of the ideas of which he was slowly possessed. It was not with a head full of philosophy that he made his application to the famous school, but, as he tells us in his short notes on his life, a heart full of misgivings. The day was June 10, 1872, and he was to take his entrance examinations at the College of San Juan de Letran, Manila. Christian doctrine, arithmetic, and reading were the branches of human erudition required of youth that sought to enter those doors. It is to be supposed that José could have passed them with his eyes shut. He received the required mark and spent the next few days at home. When he returned to Manila to begin his studies at the [47]Ateneo, “even then,” he says, “I felt that unhappiness was in store for me.”19

For all his good passing-mark, he came near to miss the opening he sought. Father Fernando, the Jesuit priest then in charge of the Ateneo, looked upon him without favor. He had come late in the term, for one thing; and then he was so small and slight. Only at the intercession of Dr. Manuel Burgos, a nephew of the priest officially murdered on Bagumbayan Field, the rules were relaxed and the midget from Calamba allowed to come in. For the moment he forgot his forebodings. With joy he put on the school uniform, the white coat called an americana, the necktie, and the rest. When he found himself in the chapel of the Jesuit fathers to hear mass, surrounded with strange faces, a new boy in a new school, he prayed fervently. Then he says he went to the class-room and appraised his teachers and school-fellows, on whom he seems to have looked with preternaturally keen eyes.

Father José Bech was a tall man, thin and somewhat stooping, but quick in his movements. His face was ascetic, yet animated. The eyes were small and sunken, the nose sharp and Grecian. His thin lips curved downward. He was a little eccentric, at times being out of humor and intolerant and at other times amusing himself by playing like a child.

Some of my schoolmates were interesting enough to warrant mentioning them by name. A boy, or rather a young man from my own province, Florencio Gavino Oliva, was of exceptional talents but only average application. The [48]same was true of Moisés Santiago. He was a mathematician and penman. Also it was true of Gonzalo Manzano. The last named then held the position of Roman Emperor.

The title seems incongruous, but Rizal explains that to stimulate the boys in Jesuit colleges the custom was to divide them into two “empires,” one Roman, the other Carthaginian or Greek. These were continually at war—academic. The battles fought were in the class-room, over recitations. Points were scored by discovering errors in the work of the hated foe. Rizal was placed at the bottom of the cohorts of one of these “empires,” a private in the rear ranks. Within a month he was emperor; he had outstripped everybody else.

Paciano was there that first day and took him in charge. He would not allow the sensitive little artist to lodge in the Walled City or ancient part of Manila, “which seemed very gloomy to me,” says Rizal, a judgment others might echo. In another quarter of the town, twenty-five minutes away, he was lodged with an old maid, who seemed to have a superfluity of other lodgers and a scarcity of room to stow them in. “I must not speak of my sufferings,” says José, with pious resignation.20

The Ateneo was not an easy school in which to gain distinction or to win favor; Rizal speedily achieved both. By the end of the first week he was going up in his class. In a month he had captured his first prize and seems to have looked upon it with rapture. At the end of the first quarter he had won another [49]prize and the grade of “excellent.” He confesses that for the rest of that year he did not care to apply himself. He had taken on a boyish resentment to something a teacher had said, he explains. Possibly he was not yet inured to the prevailing method of driving instruction into the heads of the young with the aid of sarcasm and shouts. At the end of the year he says as if with a kind of sigh, “I had only second place in all my subjects.” He received the grade of “excellent” but no prizes, and the lack seems to have goaded him to remorse.

It must have been efficacious, for when he returned to school he flung himself with something like passion into the race for these laurels, and it was said of him that no student there had ever equaled his performance. The fathers began to look with wondering pride upon this premier medal winner. For all that, he was a boy still and no mere Johnny Dighard; he had fights and he read novels and he even found time for social amenities, so called. At these latter he seems not to have won distinction, though the records are meager; but at least it may be said for him that he managed to fall in love.21 One of the first works of fiction he read was Dumas’s “Count of Monte Christo” in Spanish. He says that it gave him “delight,” but it did more than that for him. The wrongs and sufferings [50]of Edmond Dantes bore in upon him the misfortunes of his own people and sharply reminded him of his mother and the two terrible years she had spent in Santa Cruz jail. In Calamba and all about him festered a social system infinitely worse than any Dumas had imagined.

About this time he began to lay out his days into a schedule of hours to which he aimed rigidly to adhere; so many hours for study, so many for reading; from four to five, exercise; five to six, something else. This was a plan he followed, or tried to follow, all the rest of his life, and accounts in part for that list of achievements that still staggers the investigators. It was strict economy of time and likewise an exercise in self-mastery, a virtue on which he set great store and in the practice of which few men outside of monastery walls have equaled him. He came to look upon his body as a kind of mechanism with which, as its master, he could do as he pleased; feed it, starve it, or run races with it. At the Ateneo he held it in subjection while he accumulated medals, fought when necessary, and composed treatises in chemistry, which, next to poetry and sculpture, had become his pleasure. [51]

For the times and the place the Ateneo was a good school, by general consent the best in the Islands, in some respects matching well with an inferior preparatory school in America. When the Jesuits were allowed to return to the country from which they had been banished, they brought with them new ideas of education into a region where for two hundred years such imports had been rare. For all that, education at the Ateneo was not to be had except at the price of a struggle. There was no suggestion there, at least, of Tennyson’s idea of a row of empty pates and kindly Instruction tumbling in the sciences. A student like Rizal, reputed in his second year to be the hardest working in the institution, seemed like a soldier fighting in doubtful trenches; education to be won, as it were, by hand-to-hand conflict. Years afterward Rizal wrote in his own vivid style a description of the manner in which wisdom was imparted in even the highest Philippine seat of learning, from which wonder grows to amazement that there were in those days any educated Filipinos. It reveals them again as of iron will and unmatchable persistence. No such dogged resolution in chase of knowledge is now required of any people; the pursuit of learning under difficulties, it may well be called. A Filipino reading it now may be excused if he is moved somewhat to hold [52]up his head among the nations. Every fact that one of his countrymen added to his store he must wrest from the hard hands of prejudice and desperate chance.

As to this, the Ateneo was not so bad as the rest, but bad enough. Within even its halls was as yet no emancipation from the notion that the student is the scum of the earth and the professor sent to scourge and chasten him. At Santo Tomas, whither Rizal was later transferred, this variant of purgatory was at its worst; tuition dwelt in the Lower Silurian. Rizal’s description is of the session of a class in physics. The discerning reader will conclude that it is the transcript of a personal experience:

The class-room was a spacious rectangular hall with large grated windows that admitted an abundance of light and air. Along the two sides extended three wide tiers of stone covered with wood, filled with students arranged in alphabetical order. At the end opposite the entrance, under a print of St. Thomas Aquinas, rose the professor’s chair on a level platform with a little stairway on each side. With the exception of a beautiful blackboard in a narra [wood] frame, scarcely ever used, since there was still written on it the viva that had appeared on the opening day, no furniture, either useful or useless, was to be seen. The walls, painted white and covered with glazed tiles, to prevent scratches, were entirely bare, having neither a drawing nor a picture, nor even an outline of any physical apparatus. The students had no need of any; no one missed the practical instruction in an extremely experimental science; for years and years it has been so taught, and the country has not been upset but continues just as ever. Now and then some little instrument descended from heaven and was exhibited [53]to the class from a distance, like the monstrance to the prostrate worshipers—look, but touch not! From time to time when some complacent professor appeared, one day in the year was set aside for visiting the mysterious laboratory and gazing from without at the puzzling apparatus arranged in glass cases. No one could complain, for on that day there were to be seen quantities of brass and glassware, tubes, disks, wheels, bells, and the like—the exhibition did not get beyond that, and the country was not upset.…

This was the professor who that morning called the roll and directed many of the students to recite the lesson from memory, word for word. The phonographs got into operation, some well, some ill, some stammering, and received their grades. He who recited without an error earned a good mark, and he who made more than three mistakes a bad mark.

A fat boy with a sleepy face and hair as stiff and hard as the bristles of a brush yawned until he seemed about to dislocate his jaws, and stretched himself with his arms extended as if he were in his bed. The professor saw this and wished to startle him.

“Eh, there, sleepy-head! What’s this? Lazy, too; so it’s sure you don’t know the lesson, ha?”

This question, instead of offending the class, amused them and many laughed; it was a daily occurrence. But the sleeper did not laugh; he arose and, with a bound, rubbed his eyes, and, as if a steam-engine were turning the phonograph, began to recite:

“The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces intended to produce by the reflection of light the images of the objects placed before said surfaces. From the substance that forms these surfaces they are divided into metallic mirrors and glass mirrors——” [54]

“Stop, stop, stop!” interrupted the professor. “Heavens, what a rattle! We were at the point where the mirrors are divided into metallic and glass, eh? Now if I should present to you a block of wood, a piece of kamagon for instance, well polished and varnished, or a slab of black marble well burnished, or a square of jet, which would reflect the images of objects placed before them, how would you classify those mirrors?”

Whether he did not know what to answer or did not understand the question, the student tried to get out of the difficulty by demonstrating that he knew the lesson; so he rushed on like a torrent:

“The first are composed of brass or an alloy of different metals, and the second of a sheet of glass, with its two sides well polished, one of which has an amalgam of tin adhering to it.”

“Tut, tut, tut! That’s not it! I say to you, ‘Dominus vobiscum,’ and you answer me with, ‘Requiescat in pace!’ ”

The worthy professor then repeated the question in the vernacular of the markets, interspersed with cosas and abás at every moment.

The poor youth did not know how to get out of the quandary; he doubted whether to include kamagon with the metals, or the marble with the glasses, and leave the jet as a neutral substance, until Juanito Pelaez maliciously prompted him:

“The mirror of kamagon among the wooden mirrors.”

The incautious youth repeated this aloud, and half the class was convulsed with laughter.

“A good sample of wood you are yourself!” exclaimed the professor, laughing in spite of himself. “Let’s see from what you would define a mirror—from a substance per se, in quantum est superficies, or from the substance upon which the surface rests, the raw material, modified by the [55]attribute ‘surface,’ since it is clear that, surface being an accidental property of bodies, it cannot exist without substance—what do you say?”

“I? Nothing!” the wretched boy was about to reply, for he did not understand what it was all about, confused as he was by so many surfaces and so many accidents that smote cruelly on his ears, but a sense of shame restrained him. Filled with anguish and breaking into a cold perspiration, he began to repeat between his teeth: “The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces——”

“Ergo, per te, the mirror is the surface,” angled the professor. “Well, then, clear up this difficulty. If the surface is the mirror, it must be of no consequence to the ‘essence’ of the mirror what may be found behind this surface, since what is behind it does not affect the ‘essence’ that is before it, id est, the surface, quae super faciem est, quia vocatur superficies, facies ea quae supra videtur. Do you admit that or do you not admit it?”

The poor youth’s hair stood up straighter than ever, as though acted upon by some magnetic force.

“Do you admit it or do you not admit it?”

“Anything! Whatever you wish, Padre,” was his thought, but he did not dare to express it from fear of ridicule. That was a dilemma indeed and he had never been in a worse one. He had a vague idea that the most innocent thing could not be admitted to the friars but that they, or rather their estates and curacies, would get out of it all the results and advantages imaginable. So his good angel prompted him to deny everything with all the energy of his soul and refractoriness of his hair, and he was about to shout a proud nego, for the reason that he who denies everything does not compromise himself in anything, as a certain lawyer had once told him; but the evil habits of disregarding the dictates of one’s own conscience, of having [56]little faith in legal folk, and of seeking aid from others where one is sufficient unto himself were his undoing. His companions, especially Juanito Pelaez, were making signs to him to admit it, so he let himself be carried away by his evil destiny and exclaimed, “Concedo, Padre,” in a voice as faltering as if he were saying, “In manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.”

“Concedo antecedentem,” echoed the professor, smiling maliciously. “Ergo, I can scratch the mercury off a looking-glass, put in its place a piece of bibinka, and we shall still have a mirror, eh? Now what shall we have?”…

Another pupil is questioned.

“What’s your name?” the professor asked him.

“Placido,” was the curt reply.

“Aha! Placido Penitente, although you look more like Placido the Prompter—or the Prompted. But, Penitent, I’m going to impose some penance on you for your promptings.”

Pleased with his play on words, he ordered the youth to recite the lesson; and the latter, in the state of mind to which he was reduced, made more than three mistakes. Shaking his head up and down, the professor slowly opened the register and slowly scanned it while he called off the names in a low voice.

“Palencia—Paloma—Panganiban—Pedraza—Pelado—Pelaez—Penitente, aha! Placido Penitente, fifteen unexcused absences——”

Placido started up. “Fifteen absences, Padre?”

“Fifteen unexcused absences,” continued the professor, “so that you only lack one to be dropped from the roll.”

“Fifteen absences, fifteen absences,” repeated Placido in amazement. “I have never been absent more than four times, and, with to-day, perhaps five.” [57]

“Jesso, jesso, monseer,”1 replied the professor, examining the youth over his gold eye-glasses. “You confess that you have missed five times, and God knows if you have missed oftener. Atqui, as I rarely call the roll, every time I catch any one I put five marks against him; ergo, how many are five times five? Have you forgotten the multiplication-table? Five times five?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Correct, correct! Thus you have still got away with ten, because I have caught you only three times. Huh, if I had caught you every time—Now how many are three times five?”

“Fifteen.”

“Fifteen, right you are!” concluded the professor, closing the register. “If you miss once more—out of doors with you, get out! Ha, now a mark for the failure in the daily lesson.”

He again opened the register, sought out the name, and entered the mark. “Come, only one mark,” he said, “since you hadn’t any before.”

“But, Padre,” exclaimed Placido, restraining himself, “if your Reverence puts a mark against me for failing in the lesson, your Reverence owes it to me to erase the one for absence that you have put against me for to-day.”

His Reverence made no answer. First, he slowly entered the mark, then contemplated it with his head on one side—the mark must be artistic—closed the register, and asked with great sarcasm, “Abá, and why so, sir?”

“Because I can’t conceive, Padre, how one can be absent from the class and at the same time recite the lesson in it. Your Reverence is saying that to be is not to be.”

“Nakú, a metaphysician, but a rather premature one! So you can’t conceive of it, eh? Sed patet experientia and [58]contra experientiam negantem, fusilibus est arguendum, do you understand? And can’t you conceive with your philosophical head that one can be absent from the class and not know the lesson at the same time? Is it a fact that absence necessarily implies knowledge? What do you say to that, philosophaster?”

This last epithet was the drop of water that made the full cup overflow. Placido enjoyed among his friends the reputation of being a philosopher, so he lost his patience, threw down his book, arose, and faced the professor.

“Enough, Padre, enough! Your Reverence can put all the marks against me that you wish, but you haven’t the right to insult me. Your Reverence may stay with the class; I can’t stand any more.” Without further farewell, he stalked away.

The class was astounded; such an assumption of dignity had scarcely ever been seen, and who would have thought it of Placido Penitente? The surprised professor bit his lips and shook his head threateningly as he watched him depart. Then in a trembling voice he began his preachment on the same old theme, delivered, however, with more energy and more eloquence. It dealt with the growing arrogance, the innate ingratitude, the presumption, the lack of respect for superiors, the pride that the spirit of darkness infused in the young, the lack of manners, the absence of courtesy, and so on. From this he passed to coarse jest and sarcasm.…

So he went on with his harangue until the bell rang and the class was over. The 234 students, after reciting their prayers, went out as ignorant as when they went in, but breathing more freely, as if a great weight had been lifted from them. Each youth had lost another hour of his life and with it a portion of his dignity and self-respect, and in exchange there was an increase of discontent, of aversion to [59]study, of resentment in their heart. After all this ask for knowledge, dignity, gratitude!

Just as the 234 spent their class hours, so the thousands of students that preceded them have spent theirs, and, if matters do not mend, so will those yet to come spend theirs, and be brutalized, while wounded dignity and youthful enthusiasm will be converted into hatred and sloth.2

Rizal liked the Ateneo and the Ateneo liked him, students as well as fathers. His fellows seem to have had for him more of awe than affection as they contemplated his always growing list of victories. We may believe now that the distance that separated them from him was not so great as they thought, the wizardry of his prize-winning being, next to his hard work, the advantages of his definite aim. Most men that acquire this and follow it with any steadiness, whether it be for wealth, position, or reputation, seem to their contemporaries a kind of demon, but if they live, indent the chronicles of their times. The idea that seized upon Rizal and was always growing in his thoughts was that he ought to do something to help his people out of the prison-house of ignorance and tyranny in which they sat the bound captives of a preposterous social organization. This was enough to mark him apart from students that went to the Ateneo only because their parents told them to go. Good things for him were things that helped him to his purpose and bad things were things that got across his way.

Long after he had left those sequestered halls, he [60]put together notes on his recollections of his life at the Ateneo, that, curt as they are, light up his views of himself, his peculiar self-abnegation and his idea of his destiny. He says:

After the vacation, in that memorable year of my mother’s release, I again had my lodgings in the Walled City.… My mother had not wanted me to return to Manila, saying that I already had a sufficient education. Did she have a presentiment of what was going to happen to me? Can it be that a mother’s heart gives her double vision?

My future profession was still unsettled. My father wanted me to study metaphysics, so I enrolled in that course. But my interest was so slight that I did not even buy a copy of the text-book. A former schoolmate, who had finished his course three months before, was my only intimate friend. He lived in the same street that I lived in.

On Sundays and other holidays, this friend used to call for me and we would spend the day at my great-aunt’s house in Trozo. My aunt knew his father. When my youngest sister entered La Concordia College, I used to visit her, too, on the holidays. Another friend had a sister in the same school, so we could go together. I made a pencil sketch of his sister from a photograph she lent me. On December 8, the festival of La Concordia, some other students and I went to the college. It was a fine day, and the building was gay with decorations of banners, lanterns, and flowers.

Shortly after that I went home for the Christmas holidays. On the same steamer was a Calamba girl that had been a pupil in Santa Catalina College for nearly five years. Her father was with her. We were well acquainted, but her schooling had made her bashful. She kept her back to me while we talked. To help her pass the time, I asked about her school and studies, but I got hardly more than “yes” and [61]“no” answers. She seemed to have almost, if not entirely, forgotten her Tagalog. When I walked into our house in Calamba, my mother at first did not recognize me. The sad cause was that she had almost lost her sight. My sisters greeted me joyfully, and I could read their welcome in their smiling faces. But my father, who seemed to be the most pleased of all, said least.…

There I tied the horse by the roadside and for a time watched the water flowing through the irrigation ditch. Its swiftness reminded me how rapidly my days were going by. I am now twenty years old and have the satisfaction of remembering that in the crises of my life I have not followed my own pleasure. I have always tried to live by my principles and to do the heavy duties I have undertaken.3

The instructor at the Ateneo that Rizal chiefly liked was Father Guerrico, a kindly, gentle, devout old man, full of learning and given to good works. Long after swift and stirring events in the great world had dimmed the memory of other faces at the Ateneo, the visage of Father Guerrico, furrowed with thought, yet beaming with good will to all mankind, was clear before Rizal, and with that marvelous gift of his for sculpture he made, out of his lingering recollections, a bust of the father, achieving a likeness of extraordinary quality, so subtly charged it is with the feeling of truth that confers life upon portraiture. But there is, indeed, no room to doubt his high artistic calling; if to painting or to sculpture he had cared to devote himself, he would have been one of the world figures of his day. When one so gifted and having also the artist’s craving for expression and achievement makes [62]of these a sacrifice for the general welfare, it may be doubted if rack or prison mean much more.

Sculpture came as easily to him as laughter to a child. From his babyhood, or thereabouts, he had been modeling these figures in clay, a spontaneous and irrepressible outgiving of the spirit in him; figures strangely vital, and wittily touched, so that to-day the observer coming upon them for the first time beholds them with a sense of something weird, as if in some way he had come also upon the sculptor behind his work. Often with no tool but a pocket-knife he worked in wood to the same results. There are extant faces and busts he carved thus in wood that have an almost inexplicable potency to suggest character, thought, or life.

He had as great a command over his brush and pencil; his sketch-book has a certain charm, distinctive and rare; he had the French artist’s uncanny power to suggest with a single line an inevitable trait or an overmastering feature of a landscape. He could paint before he had taken a lesson. When he was a mere boy, still at Calamba, before he had entered the Ateneo, a banner was spoiled that was to have been used in one of the local festivals that were then so important; José painted in its place a banner that all men declared to be better than the original.4 At the Ateneo he carved an image of the Virgin Mother that won the unstinted praise of men not novices in art, and a statue of Christ that for twenty years was one of the admired exhibits of the school hall. [63]

By all accounts, this multiplex being could write as easily; he was poet and dramatist as well as sculptor and painter. At school he continued to practise the art his mother had taught him, showing himself a skilled practitioner in verse and a devout worshiper of poetry, Spanish and Tagalog. For, despite the common European belief to the contrary, Tagalog is not the dialect of a tribe of savages but a highly developed language having an ancient and honorable literature. There were poems in Tagalog as early as in English, and many a beautiful Tagalog poem has been sung and resung and passed into the heritage of the people where no European speech had ever been heard.

At the age when children usually begin to learn their alphabet this boy was making verses. A little later he could see subjects not only for poems but for plays. Before he was eight years old he had written a drama that was performed at a local festival and brought him two pesos. At the Ateneo, poetry and dramatic composition were his relaxation, his pastime, his joy and rapture, when he turned from the ponderous routine of the curriculum.

In December, 1875, he being then fifteen, he wrote “The Embarkation, a Hymn in Honor of Magellan’s Fleet,” a poem in seven stanzas of eight lines. The measure may be called anapestic dimeter, of which old Skelton was a master and in which Herrick occasionally performed, but rare thereafter in English poetry until Hood and Swinburne revived it. A few months later he appeared with a poem of nine stanzas arranged much after the manner of the Sicilian octave. [64]This was on “Education” and contained exquisite imagery, while it showed an unmistakable grasp of melodic resource.5

THE ATENEO DE MANILA

The school attended by Rizal in Manila where he won several prizes in literature

In ranging among all books, old and new, that seemed to promise any profit, he came upon one in these days at the Ateneo that helped mightily to direct his career, while it freshened his young hopes to a new bent concerning his people and what was to become of them. It was a Spanish translation of “Travels in the Philippines,”6 by Dr. F. Jagor, the German naturalist. Something more than the flora and fauna of these fascinating Islands concerned Dr. Jagor; like so many other just and reflective visitors in those parts, he had been led to think much about the remarkable characteristics of the inhabitants and the singular misfortune that had befallen them. Unless all signs were deceptive, this was a race endowed for a career and a place in the world’s procession; of these it had been cheated by an outland despotism whose sole foundation stood upon force. In all probability this anomaly could not endure. Spain, still groping in the past, was no possible cicerone for a race that felt springing within it the strong man-child of nationality and progress. One thing, if none other, was at hand to insure the doom of such absurdity. Dr. Jagor had traveled in the United States and considered its profound influence upon other nations. Its life and growth were daily proofs before him of the eternal persistence of the democratic idea, and from that showing the world [65]could never turn away. He saw that the example of the United States had spurred all South America to revolt and eventually to win freedom; hence he concluded that the spread of this influence around the Pacific was inevitable.7

In proportion as the navigation of the west coast of America extends the influence of the American element over the South Sea [wrote this prophet], the captivating, magic power that the great republic exercises over the Spanish colonies will not fail to make itself also felt in the Philippines. The Americans are evidently destined to bring to a full development the germs originated by the Spaniards. Conquerors of modern times, they pursue their road to victory with the assistance of the pioneer’s ax and plow, representing an age of peace and commercial prosperity in contrast to that bygone and chivalrous age whose champions were upheld by the cross and protected by the sword.…

With regard to permanence, the Spanish system cannot for a moment be compared with that of America. While each of the Spanish colonies, in order to favor a privileged class by immediate gains, exhausted still more the already enfeebled populace of the metropolis by the withdrawal of the best of its ability, America, on the contrary, has attracted to itself from all countries the most energetic element, which, once on its soil and freed from all fetters, restlessly progressing, has extended its power and influence still farther and farther. The Philippines will escape the action of the two great neighboring powers [the United States and Great Britain] all the less for the fact that neither they [the Philippines] nor their metropolis find their condition of a stable and well-balanced nature.

[66]

These deliberated forecasts deeply impressed Rizal. They were written about 1874. Looking back now, the applause Jagor deserves for his keen vision is easy, but in 1874 or 1876 who hailed him as a prophet? If he found a disciple outside of the grim walls of the Ateneo the fact escaped record; but to Rizal the sequence seemed normal to his own reflections. He had an instinctive faith in the latent capacity of his people; now he noted that this cool-minded scientist came from judicial analysis of these same people to share the same belief. The next step was facile; he perceived the logical procession of Jagor’s reasonings about the rising American influence. It must be so, then, that America would prove to be light and leadership to the Far East, and from this time he turned to the United States as an example and a well-spring of hope.8

That same year came the celebration of the first one hundred years of American independence, and the reports of it fell pat with his new meditations. As a rule, the newspapers of Manila, inspired by the Spanish habitude, had referred with phrases of contempt to the American republic. The centennial festival seemed to modify or to beat through their prejudices, for space was given to long and respectful reviews of the progress and achievements of the United States, and with these an outline of the desperate struggle by which it had won its independence. Upon a mind like Rizal’s, enlisted for freedom, susceptible to all things heroic and idealistic, the effect must have been galvanic. It [67]was a lesson of more than one angle. Here was a people that had been under such an incubus of political medievalism as was strangling his countrymen. A handful challenging the greatest power in the world, they had achieved their emancipation, and he could not fail to note that the disparity between the Philippines and Spain was hardly greater than that between America and Great Britain in 1776.

In the next place, the heart of the system the Americans had thrown over was the idea that the royal authority imposed upon them was of God and resistance to it was an impiety God would surely punish. One nation, according to this record, had not only resisted such authority but cast it off and trampled upon it, and, behold, its reward was not the curse but the apparent blessing of God in richest measure. He studied the history of this nation, considered its work in the world, and deemed the conclusions of Jagor to be sound and just.

But Jagor had supplied also a certain warning. “It seems to be desirable for the natives [Filipinos] that the above-mentioned views should not speedily become accomplished facts, because their education and training hitherto have not been of a nature to prepare them successfully to compete with either of the other two energetic, creative, and progressive nations.” Nothing could be plainer; this was the great work to which he should apply himself. His people must be trained and educated for the freedom they were one day to have. They must be educated first and then aroused. Therefore, whatever learning, discipline, equipment [68]of facts and knowledge, power and resources he could gain were capital, energy, equipment laid by for their service.

Toward two sorts of men the world has never warmed while they lived; toward a man of melancholy and a man with a fixed and serious purpose other than material. Rizal was both of these in one. A school is a microcosm of the world outside it. He was admired at the Ateneo but went his way there essentially alone. He seems to have felt that this must be so and accepted loneliness in the spirit of his philosophy and as part of the task laid upon him. The natural complement of his loneliness was an unusual capacity for friendship; the natural complement of his melancholy was a keen sense of humor and a flashing wit; for so do men seem to be made up and (except in novels and plays) never of one piece.

Being real and breathing and not a lay figure of romance, Rizal was like the rest of us, subject to gusts of this and that and a gamut of moods; and yet, like other men of strong will, managed to steer fairly straight for one landfall. When the fit was on him he was wont to draw for his family vastly funny sketches, to write quips, to make jokes, and even to fashion comic verses. His gift of portraiture, a singular power to reproduce with convincing strokes any face he had ever noted, ran over at the least provocation into rollicking burlesque. In later times he would have been a priceless cartoonist; to illuminate any thought that crossed his mind a humorous or grotesque or inspiring picture fell easily from his pencil. It was from his brooding introspection that he reacted [69]to his excruciatingly funny caricatures, and if he had not some such vent might have gone mad or (terrible thought!) even have become a prig.

But from these adventures he came back to the sobering facts of his mission as the business and only reality of life. To contribute something to the helping and enlightening of these people was his métier and the only thing really important. A many-sided man, as you shall see. With all the laborious exactions of his time schedule, he could still continue his worship of art and beauty; he kept on with his modeling, kept on with his painting and poetry. His holidays he sometimes spent with his mother at Calamba; and his habit was to go home to her with a pocketful of verses of his recent making. That excellent woman and judicious critic set herself to clarify and direct the fire thus burning.9 She must have succeeded after good models, for Rizal freshened the laurels of his Ateneo triumphs by winning prizes beyond its intellectual tiltyards. The Manila Lyceum of Art and Literature founded a competition among Filipino poets, “naturales y mestizos.”10 Rizal won it with a poem entitled “To the Philippine Youth.”11 From a point of view that was never urged he had no right to win it: the Lyceum was supposed to be for adults, and he was only eighteen years old. But the subject had called forth the best that was in him; it offered a chance to preach his favorite theme, to appeal to his young countrymen, and to stir in them something of the passion [70]that moved him, while he suggested the Filipinas that might be.12

His achievement went beyond prize-winning. By a route that even he had never imagined, it became a thing of history. In this poem he called the Philippine Islands his “fatherland.” The Philippine youth were the Bella esperanza de la Patria Mia!13 Simple and natural as the reference was, it started the easy typhoon to blowing. No such phrase from such a source with such an application was tolerable. In his poem on “Education,” Rizal had spoken of that sweet wisdom as illuminating the “fatherland,” but this was naïvely taken to have a wholly different meaning. To these people, in the litany of lip-service, at least, the only fatherland they knew was the Spain they had never seen but of which the image in their hearts was all somber and cruel. With passionate adoration Rizal now spoke of another fatherland, of the Filipinas of his birthplace; he dared to address it even as a Spaniard might address Spain, “Vuela, Genio Grandioso!” “Come, thou great genius!” Yet he knew it as a country that breathed the effluvium of an unnatural existence—chained to a corpse. In irony he was dealing; a terrible, sobering irony. Already he felt in his heart that the existing state could not last; no proud, capable, normally minded people with a historic background of their own would long endure it. Echoes of the great wave that rolled around the rest of the world grew every day in the ears of these Islanders. Discontent surged in their hearts, and Rizal in his [71]poem was the first voice and wise articulation of their protest.14

In this, and as a piece of art, it was powerful and significant. He addressed the young men of the Philippines as if they were like other young men of the world, free, and able to put forth their powers, to make their way; not inferior, not the fags and drudges of the hateful Spanish tradition. Here was innovation—here was danger! In no such vein were they accustomed to be addressed, and the neuremic espionage that sustained the existing order seems to have been quick to notice the novelty. He had been careful to declare with due emphasis his loyalty; but in every autocracy the uneasy governing class learns first of all to discount such professions. The poem added to the disfavor in which the official world held him; his aloofness and studious habits seem to have multiplied suspicion. A youth with such sentiments and such ways must be thinking mischief; devilish plottings were irresistibly suggested. So, then, the blacker the mark against his name! The press of Manila, all censored, all edited in behalf of the rulers, seems to have learned early of this proscription. In the stealthy way of the journalistic prostitute it was already giving Rizal warning.15

There were other things in his habits not calculated to give pleasurable sensations to sedulous supporters of things as they were. From the beginning of his career at the Ateneo he had taken the position that the Filipino boys were not to serve as door-mats and [72]punching-bags for their Spanish fellow-students. He had the courage to insist upon this principle at whatever cost, which was often the breaking of his own head. In all years and all conditions it is character that determines; naturally he became the leader of the Filipinos in all these encounters and led them without flinching. The recluse came from his cell at the sound of battle; the student threw aside schedule and book. He had grown at the Ateneo; he was no longer a midget; and, having kept up his exercises with the rest of his regimen, he could hit hard and take punishment. One side or the other was driven off the field; he contrived to make the retreat a rout if victory sat upon his banners. “Sir, you have wrestled well, and overthrown more than your enemies.” One of these conflicts had, as you are presently to learn, results that he had never counted upon; among them another shadow on a life already troubled enough.

On March 23, 1876, he received the degree of bachelor of arts with the highest honors from the Ateneo, and in April, 1877,16 matriculated at the ancient university of Santo Tomas.17 Some of his studies he continued to pursue at the Ateneo, which he always preferred. The choice of a career still weighed upon him; in what way of life, business or profession, could he fit best and furnish the most help? He looked upon the fertile soil of the Islands, he looked upon the medieval methods of cultivation in use there, and he half resolved to be a scientific farmer and show the wonders [73]of which the soil was capable. He looked upon the general ignorance of the laws of health among his people and in the end determined to be a physician, choosing diseases of the eye to be his specialty. Oculists were almost unknown in the islands, even poor ones; and diseases of the eye were wide-spread there as in all tropical countries. Every year many Filipinos went blind whose sight science might easily have saved. For lack of competent treatment his own mother was likely to share this dread calamity.

To the profession he had chosen he surrendered nothing of his addiction to the arts; he modeled, painted, drew, and sang as before. Without yielding to the extravagant eulogy that has attended his fame in recent years, it appears certain that he was in art one of those rare creatures that are endowed at once with two great faculties. He could create and he could analyze; he could feel and he could reason; and on either side his activities could be carried on with the same native ease.

About the time he was entering Santo Tomas the Lyceum staged another poetic tourney, this time to celebrate the glory of Cervantes. Rizal was a competitor with an allegory called “The Council of the Gods,” in which he developed a critical exposition of Cervantes and his art, lucid, just, and competent; as remarkable a production as the imaginative part of his work. The awarding of the prizes in this competition resulted in a painful incident that took its place in the chain of fateful things now drawing him away. Mystery surrounds the facts and always will, but it appears that the competitors entered the lists [74]with assumed names, and that Rizal won the first prize; but when he was discovered to be a Filipino the laurel was taken from him and bestowed upon a Spaniard.18 It was a slash in the old wound; not even in that domain of art, supposed to have shut doors upon the prejudices of nation and birth, was the Filipino to be allowed to forget his inferiority. His fellows at the Ateneo felt that he had been wronged, and knowledge of the general resentment took nothing from the ill will with which he was viewed by the governing class. In all lands it is the fate of the foreign colony to be swayed by puerile emotions; among these in the Spanish colony of Manila suspicion led all the rest.

Meantime his fate was crying out to him in strange voices that led him, before he was aware, into the road from the Philippines. At the Ateneo the students were fond of enacting plays of their own devising. Rizal was poet and dramatist; here was the plain call to his favorite pursuit. He wrote for his fellows a metrical drama called “Beside the Pasig,” and on December 8, 1880, it was publicly performed by one of the student societies. Courage he had never lacked, the courage of a mind too reasonable to be deluded by fear. He showed now what he had in his heart. One of the characters in his drama was the devil himself. Into the mouth of Sathanas he put (with a dazzling audacity) a sentence denouncing Spain and her policy toward the Philippines.

There are single colorations of character that sometimes reveal and illuminate the whole man. This was one of them. Disclosed here was a certain precise, [75]firm touch of workmanship as typical as was the pluck demanded to say such a thing. The perfect barbing of the satirical arrow no Philippine audience could miss; Spain so bad that the devil himself condemned her! Nothing could be more poisonous. But among the persons whose attention was enchained by the daring flight of fancy were members of the Government’s secret service. To keep watch against such young enthusiasts tempted to raillery upon the existing order was a chief point in their varied and malign industry, and in this instance the author of these burning thoughts was no stranger to them. Even if the bold iconoclast had never shocked right-minded people by calling the Philippines his fatherland, he must have been from the first an object of suspicion to the souls that could find sedition in the drooping of an eyebrow. Brother of Paciano Rizal, son of Francisco Rizal Mercado, should aught but evil come of that stock? To these ferrets, his outbreaks in verse must have been no more than the fulfilment of prophecy.

Then, again, Rizal did not like Santo Tomas. He was galled to think that its methods of instruction lagged behind those of the Ateneo, which it should have led. He knew well enough that the cold frown of hostility was turned upon him by the friar professors. Santo Tomas was Dominican; the Ateneo was Jesuit. In Rizal’s case jealousy between the two orders was added to the heavy handicap he must pay as a reputed insurgent against the System. The Jesuits had sent forth this prize-winning prodigy. Logically, then, the other orders were constrained to sniff at him.

He had other encounters with the System that in [76]so many and diverse ways wearied his people. One night when he was visiting his mother at Calamba he came, half blinded, out of the lighted house into the darkness of the street and dimly perceived passing him the figure of a man. Not knowing who or what it was, Rizal said nothing and made no movement. With a snarl, the figure turned upon him, whipped out a sword, and slashed him across the back. It was a Civil Guard—so called. Rizal’s duty as a Filipino under the barbarous code of the times was to make a salute whenever he might see one of these strutting persons. Spaniards need not salute; only Filipinos. If he had known that this was one of the precious police Rizal would have performed the important ceremony and so fulfilled his obligation to king and country. As in the dark the policeman looked like anybody else he thought it hard to be wounded for not possessing the vision of a cat. The injury was painful but not serious. When he recovered, he deemed it his duty to report to the authorities what had occurred. Jeering indifference was all his reward. An Indio had no rights that a Civil Guard was bound to respect, and instead of complaining Rizal should be offering thanks that the offended soldier had not taken his life.

All these experiences must have weighed together, but it was the political aspect of his plight, no doubt, that decided him. He had set out in life resolved to win the best education his times and his means might allow; for himself and more, for his cause much greater than himself. He now began to see that in his country, and even because of his love for it, he would [77]be debarred from the knowledge and training he desired for its sake. Often the sage old counselors had told him to look abroad for that training, not at home. Most Filipinos that had won any eminence had first escaped from the evil environment of their nativity. So long as he could he resisted these arguments. The lost prize seems to have completed the business for him. He made up his mind to get the rest of his education abroad.

To go was not so easy as to dream of going. He must have a passport, and of all men in Manila he was the last to which the Government would allow that or any other favor; the patriot poet, the singer of the “fatherland,” the critic of Spain, suspected of sowing treason in the minds of youths at best none too docile. Through the help of a cousin and his own ingenuity, he evaded this difficulty and all others. The cousin got a passport in another name. Paciano and an uncle supplied funds;19 a sister gave him a diamond ring to pawn. To outwit official suspicion, José went to Calamba ostensibly to visit his family, and really to wait until a vessel should be ready to sail. A cryptic telegram gave him the warning. He slipped into Manila and after midnight stole aboard his steamer. When day broke he was well on his way to Singapore.20 [78]

What life meant for average millions in the Philippines, under what chill shadows of the jail and visions of the firing-squad they must draw breath, how shifty and blackguard was the Government imposed upon them, we may glimpse from what happened as soon as Rizal’s absence was discovered. Civil Guards and official eavesdroppers were busy at Calamba; all members of the family were dogged, watched, waylaid, and cross-questioned as if suspected of murder. They must do more than lie to protect themselves. Paciano, the brother, who had been a confidant in this desperate plot to take ship and go, was reduced to a kind of play-acting, running about Rizal’s lodging and inquiring frantically for his lost brother as if he conjectured suicide, assassination, or kidnapping. All the Government seems to have been thrown into chill alarm by the fact that one college student, not yet of age, had left Manila without its permission. If there has been upon this earth a tyranny that existed without the finger of fear upon it history, surely, has no mention of it, and in the case of the Spanish tyranny in the Philippines the vague and kindergarten terrors that assailed it had long been notorious. To be afraid of a solitary student whose most dangerous manifestation had been a taste [79]for radical poetry may seem fantastical to steadier pulses but was real enough to the anxious souls that then steered Spain’s sovereignty through unquiet waters. In due time the fact could no longer be concealed; gone he had indeed and in very truth—gone, quite gone. Then, in characteristic fashion, the Government proceeded to revenge itself upon the fugitive’s relatives. It was again a case of a second cousin where the offender or his brother was not available. In vengeance the taste of the Government was never overnice. To make somebody suffer was its length and breadth, and not too much haggling as to the identity of the victim.

Sketch-book in hand, the cause and occasion of all this uproar pursued his way in peace, recording types among his fellow-passengers and sopping up information like some form of sponge. From Singapore he journeyed by French mail-boat through the Suez Canal to Marseilles, and so to Barcelona. There he tarried some months and observed without infection the extreme revolutionary movement that centered always in that restless city.1 Many Filipinos were in Barcelona; it was passing strange to one late escaped from the gag-law and press-gang conditions of the Philippines to a place under the same flag where men could say and print what they thought. There were publications in Barcelona that in the Philippines would have brought out the executioner and added martyrs to the overcharged lists of Bagumbayan Field. The Socratic mind of Rizal, with a question for every phenomenon, could not fail to note this nor to find the [80]cause of it. Government loved freedom of speech no better in Barcelona than in Manila. But in Barcelona the people were ready to fight for their rights as they had fought for them more than once. In this fact lay all the contrast.

At the University of Madrid, where he came soon after to anchor, he elected to study medicine, literature, and philosophy, while outside the university he took on art and modern languages. The burden of so many studies was less than its appalling appearance, or less for Rizal. With him, as with other good minds reared in a bilingual atmosphere, languages were an easy acquisition. In his childhood he had spoken Tagalog and Spanish; at school he had added Latin and Greek; after the school of the pedant, to be sure, but still Latin and Greek. He now assailed French, English, and Italian, all at the same time, and without apparent difficulty. A little later, he mastered Catalan, Arabic, German, Sanskrit, and Hebrew.

At Madrid it was with him as it had been at the Ateneo. In a few weeks the university buzzed about this rare young Filipino that could do so many things brilliantly and lived so much like a Trappist monk. His fellows remarked of him that he had at its best the fine, gracious courtesy characteristic of his people but was no great addition to the university’s social assets. If the cafés, clubs, and other places the students thronged knew little of him, he had two good reasons for keeping to himself and living modestly. His excursion in higher education was financed on slender terms by his father and his brother, and he had work in hand that took all his attention; he must be at all times [81]about his country’s business. To a certain extent when he walked apart he was doing violence to his own nature. By temperament he was no horseman for black care to ride behind. He was frank, cordial, quick, rather sanguine, and appreciative of good company and of conversation with good minds. When he had the luck to fall in with these and loosened the rein upon himself, or when he was with his own circle and forgot the great thing he lived for, he made the common air sparkle with shrewd, witty comment.2 His studies in so many languages had given him an unusual vocabulary; his talk flowed on without a break.

LEAVES FROM RIZAL’S TRAVEL NOTES AND SKETCHES THROUGH EUROPE

At the left a sketch of the statue of Voltaire

His own circle was a group of about a score of Filipino students, and (strange to say) one Englishman and one German, that somehow found themselves to be congenial and elected to meet at one remote café. There they read the newspapers (London), played dominoes and chess, and talked about serious things. It was the opinion of these young men that Rizal came too seldom to their meetings, but whenever he consented to be of the company he was its intellectual electric battery. He liked to play chess and played it well; he liked better to discuss and to learn. One afternoon he came in and announced that he was going away. He sat by the side of the table and drew with his pencil on its bare top a merry caricature of every person present. Then he bade them good-bye and disappeared, and a waiter came with a cloth dipped in [82]kerosene and erased the drawings. The place did not see him again.3 A few years later, the price of those caricatures the waiter so easily expunged would have equaled the value of the café.

He carried to Madrid his favorite notion of life led by time-tables; and, dividing his day into segments, set apart one for general reading. In this his choice was liberal; anything that would be likely to assist his purpose was welcome. French classics, Shakespeare, Goethe, to help his lingual studies; books on modern political questions; history above everything, any history; biography by way of illustration; and the theater (which he attended as often as his purse would allow) for readjustment.

A book that early captivated him was a volume of the lives of the Presidents of the United States, printed in Spain and in Spanish.4 It seems to have made a deep impression upon him; he all but wore it out with frequent thumbings, and procured another edition with later biographies that he carried with him wherever he went. These stories of so many picturesque careers to eminence must have had an apt relation to Jagor’s prophecy, a thing he never forgot. The application was too obvious to escape such a mind. In a democracy, men born into the utmost poverty, men born in log huts, the sons of peasants, the sons of artisans, made their way to the highest positions, and not a soul cast their birth at them. It was so; here were the recorded proofs. Under the old monarchical system of society they would have found every door [83]shut in their faces and a thousand chains of caste to hold them in the pit where they had been born. In a democracy every door stood open and nothing impeded their ascent. Why does anybody write fiction when fact is so much more dramatic and wonderful? In a student’s cell in a back corner of Madrid was then being forged the wedge of brass that was to overthrow moldering antiquity in all the Pacific and all the Far East, and was so far hidden from the wise and prudent of earth they would have laughed at the mere suggestion of it. Yet there it was, day and night—forging. Well could Prophet Jagor see what was to happen but not the manner of it. He knew that in the end it was the United States that would remake the Philippines, even if at the time he wrote the American people in general were so little acquainted with this part of the sun’s dominions that to many of them Filipino suggested only something to eat; even if he never dreamed that the instrument Fate would use in strange ways to bring all this to pass was in the hand of a slim brown youth naturally addicted to poetry and mooning.

While he was yet in the university, Rizal came into contact with another influence that affected both his career and the story of his country. He became a freemason. Upon all secret societies, but especially upon the freemasons, the governing class in the Philippines had scowled implacably; the friars and the church generally being still more hostile. The governing class in its jumpy way believed that any kind of secret organization must signify treason; the Civil Guards objected because here were keyholes at which [84]one could not watch; the friars thought freemasonry threatened the economic welfare of the church. By these, Rizal’s religious convictions were gravely doubted, but need not have been since they were easily ascertained. He was of a broad and sweet faith and a charitable practice, cherishing a universal tolerance refreshing to encounter, but he was in the substance of his belief a loyal Catholic. In his father’s house he had been accustomed to hear religious questions discussed without the least restraint;5 within those walls Francisco Mercado would have freedom of speech if it existed nowhere else in Filipinas. From such discussions he had learned that religion was a matter about which men would differ widely and yet without just reproach; the independent, courageous, and conscientious man would decide for himself. When he came to understand the subjugation of his country and the part played in that great wrong by the monastic orders his faith in the organized church as the custodian of men’s minds and thinkings faded out, but not his faith in the essentials of the Christian religion, from which he seems never to have wandered.

At the suggestion that freemasonry was or could be a foe to religion he scoffed. Not only did he accept masonry for himself but he resolved that upon his return to the Philippines he would further it among his countrymen. He may have loved it for the enemies it had made; he would have been scarcely human if he had not felt some such impulse. But beyond all such considerations he must have found in the ritual something of beauty and in the associations something of [85]the calm and fortitude for which the sorely tried soul yearned within him. We are to remember here again that he was one carried by fate and the stress of conditions out of his inclinings. He had the soul of an artist; by sheer force of will he put himself down into an arena of strife. He loved the cloister, books, and meditation; he forced himself to battle with primitive men for primitive rights. He was a poet, with an ear peculiarly sensitive to sweet sounds, a soul on fire about beauty and its recompenses; and he turned his back upon all these because he thought he heard a call to duty. Some men give their lives to a great cause; some men give still more.

To reinforce the pittance his uncle was able to send him he earned money by tutoring, though to work one’s way through a university was not so easy nor so common at Madrid as we know it in America. He seems to have been a fairly human kind of instructor. According to a letter from one of his class in German he showed an exceedingly human impatience when his pupils failed to grasp his ideas as rapidly as he uttered them.6

Throughout all his studies he performed better in languages, history, and belles lettres than in medicine; conclusive proof that he had not followed his own desires but made a sacrifice of them when he chose this profession. We have here his school ratings from 1878 in Manila until the time he left Madrid University; they offer material for an interesting mental clinic if one cares to undertake the exercise: [86]

SCHOLASTIC RECORDS OF JOSÉ RIZAL

Studies in Medicine

• In Manila: First Year (1878–79)
  • Physics—Fair
  • Chemistry—Excellent
  • Natural history—Fair
  • Anatomy No. 1—Good
  • Dissection No. 1—Good
• Second Year (1879–80)
  • Anatomy No. 2—Good
  • Dissection No. 2—Good
  • Physiology—Good
  • Private hygiene—Good
  • Public hygiene—Good
• Third Year (1880–81)
  • Pathology, general—Fair
  • Therapeutics—Excellent
  • Operation (surgery)—Good
• Fourth Year (1881–82)
  • Pathology, medical—Very good
  • Pathology, surgical—Very good
  • Obstetrics—Very good
• In Madrid, Spain: Fifth Year (1882–83)
  • Medical clinics No. 1—Good
  • Surgical clinics No. 1—Good
  • Obstetrical clinics—Fair
  • Legal medicine or medical law—Excellent
• Sixth Year (1883–84)
  • Medical clinics No. 2—Good
  • Surgical clinics No. 2—Very good
  • He became licentiate in medicine on June 21, 1884, with the rating “fair” (aprobado) (degree granted June 1, 1887). [87]
  • He obtained the doctor’s degree (1884–85):
    • History of the medical science—Fair
    • Chemical analysis—Good
    • Histology, normal—Excellent

Studies in Philosophy and Letters

• In Manila, March 14, 1877, he obtained the bachelor’s degree with the rating “excellent”
• In Madrid, 1882–83:
  • Universal history—Very good
  • General literature—Excellent
• 1883–84
  • Universal history No. 2—Excellent
  • Greek and Latin literature—Excellent with a prize
  • Greek No. 1—Excellent with a prize
• 1884–85
  • Spanish literature—Excellent with free scholarship
  • Arabic language—Excellent with free scholarship
  • Greek No. 2—Excellent
  • History of Spain—Good
  • Hebrew—Excellent
  • Cosmology, metaphysics, theodicy, and history of philosophy were studied by him in Manila and finished in July, 1877, and March, 1878, with rating “excellent”
  • Licentiate in philosophy and letters, June 19, 1885, “excellent.”

Three years elapsed between the bestowing of his licentiate in medicine and the taking of his degree. The lapse was never explained by Rizal, but the reason was his poverty. His father was now in much distress, and Rizal to prosecute his studies must live with narrow scrimping and sometimes on crusts. He could not afford to pay the fee for his doctor’s degree and went without it until his fortunes mended. [88]

But his record of triumphs in philosophy and letters must have balanced all possible regrets for the lack of this laurel while it added to his great fame in the student world. So many scholarships, honors, mentions, “excellents”!—these were the prizes he had won with so much industry. The plan of his career he had now worked out to his satisfaction: he was to visit the foremost countries of Europe, study their institutions, learn the secrets of their progress, and carry home to his countrymen information that might spur them to cast off their lethargy and emerge from the national eclipse. Meantime, he was to perfect himself in his profession that he might add to his usefulness and take up his work among them. From Madrid, therefore, he went to Paris, where he became clinical assistant to Dr. L. de Weckert, one of the most famous oculists of Europe.7

It was in Paris that he took the first direct steps to his own ruin. While still in Madrid he had come upon the idea of addressing his countrymen through the medium of a novel. He had been reading and studying Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and he pondered with awe the far-reaching effect upon history and human progress of that inspired work. The thought occurred to him that similarly wrought pictures of the servitude of the Filipinos might awaken them to a knowledge of the yoke that was slowly crushing them, pictures that might at the same time reveal to the world the justice of the Filipino cause. He went so far as to suggest such a work to the Filipino club at Madrid, the story to be of joint authorship; [89]for he seems to have had doubts of his own ability. When his fellow-members failed to see how great were the opportunities involved he was driven back upon himself, as he so often had been and was to be. From Madrid to Paris the idea grew upon him. At Paris he took his pen and started seriously upon the composition of a story of Philippine life.

This was the beginning of “Noli Me Tangere,” the greatest work in Philippine literature and one of the great achievements of all times and all lands. He was not perfectly equipped to be a novelist, for he had not the great dramatic fictional sense that sees a moving tale in the large and coördinates to the catastrophe every incident as the plot unfolds; but he had assets many dramatic fictionists never possess. He had the compelling fire of a lofty indignation, the sense of a great cause, the faultless knowledge of the hearts and minds and sorrows of the people of his little stage. He had something else that put him in a class with Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and William Dean Howells. He was a great reporter. Nature had gifted him with a marvelous power of observation; as truly as with his pencil he made those startling and hardly surpassed sketches of men and things, so accurately his mind seized and stored the significance of incidents, conversations, petty broils, clashing ambitions, village tyrants, unsung Hampdens, and cities of men and manners.

He wrote in Paris the opening chapters of “Noli Me Tangere” and carried them to Heidelberg, where the next year he was a student at the university.8 [90]

By this time he had begun to attract the attention of scientists for zealot-like devotion to his scientific research. At Madrid, Paris, Heidelberg, he was first the student and then the close friend and coadjutor of the foremost oculists of that time. It appears that upon his capacity and powers of concentration, which were extraordinary, they founded large hopes of a brilliant professional career. Despite his preoccupation and his aloofness, it is equally apparent that he exercised upon them the charm of a singularly magnetic manner. Readily he made friends; as easily he kept them. To the end of his life some of the greatest scientists in Europe, men like Virchow, Jagor, Blumentritt, and de Weckert held him in affectionate esteem and delighted to correspond with him.

They had sound human reasons for liking him. In addition to so liberal a store of other good gifts, this man was a master of the now rare art of letter-writing. To the family at home he sent the most charming epistles, full of shrewd observations, colorful descriptions, and a cheerful wit. Often they were illustrated with his incomparable thumb-nail drawings and humorous designs, and sometimes when he wrote to his mother he sent her the latest poems on which he had been engrossed.9

From Heidelberg he went to Leipzig and its university, studying, in especial, psychology; thence to Berlin, where he took cheap lodgings and settled himself to complete his novel while he should still pursue his [91]studies; for besides his specialties he had lately taken on anthropology and entomology.

His association with Virchow enlarged and enlightened his views concerning democracy and overcame much of the grave disadvantages of his birth. Men born under a monarchy have always this to overcome if they are to become effective soldiers of the Common Good. Virchow was a philosophical democrat that had seen, as in a long perspective, the ascent of man and had drawn thence an unshakable faith. Although Rizal was now more than ever a democrat, on calmly reviewing the state of his countrymen he believed that for his day the national independence of the Philippines was out of the question. Memories of the popular ignorance oppressed him. To be free, he thought, a people must know how to use freedom. It seems not to have occurred to him that there was no school but one in which that precious wisdom could be taught, and in it were and could be no text-books. For, whatever scholiasts may imagine and Utopians dream, it is experience and experience alone that tutors man in the good use of his freedom. The theory that a nation must wait until all its men have university degrees before it can be trusted with its destinies is either the dishonest handmaid of exploitation or, as in Rizal’s case, the footless product of the cloisters. Man, endowed with freedom, will use it wrongly and use it rightly; and which is the right way and which the wrong he will not know until responsibility enlightens him. After all, it is not wholly strange that even so excellent a mind as Rizal’s should have gone astray [92]on this point; for he was codisciple of the schoolmen, and in his day schoolmen taught only his error. We need not on this account lower any estimate of his worth and genius. He could see that if in his day and with their antecedents the people of the Philippines should suddenly arrive at their independence they would probably make for a time but erratic use of it. What he could not see was that at its worst their condition then would be better than the blight and curse of their previous state, and that under the tuition of experience they would work out their problems and vindicate their capacity.

But we have to deal here with the unfolding of this marvelous man and the heritage of his deeds and thought. He meditated long upon the unfortunate state of his people; he saw them bogged in ignorance and blinded by superstition, and hence he concluded that until there should be popular education, independence would mean only failure and temporary reversion. Of the eventual freedom of the Philippines, as of their eventual greatness and glory among men, he had never a doubt.

Meantime, the first work in hand was to arouse these people to the need of education and to wrest from Spain by peaceful means some practical relief from the savage tyranny that weighed down their hearts, darkened their lives, and of purpose kept them in ignorance.

With all his other occupations he found time to press the work on his great book, until he had completed in it an exposition of the full body of his faith. Perhaps in the way of construction it is not so much a [93]novel as a series of vivid pictures of life in the Philippines of that time; but with a strangely vivifying necromancy difficult to analyze or define, the power of these pictures is hardly excelled in modern literature.10 We may believe that the secret of this compelling power is the intensity of Rizal’s feeling; it gives to his portraitures a sincerity and virility no striving and no art could come by. He obeyed, unconsciously, the Sidneyan injunction about the heart and the writing; some of the passages seem to be done in his blood and some in his tears. The test of their might is easily made. Take to-day a reader that has never been in the Philippines and knows nothing of the peculiar life there; when he has read “Noli Me Tangere” he will not only feel that he knows that life but it will be to him as if he had seen it, as if he had heard these characters talking, noted their visages, and discerned their motives no less than their acts. All this he will feel in spite of the insulating septum of translation, against which all the finer beauties of the style must fall dead; the terse, vigorous, often biting sentences through which this tortured heart uttered its protest, and even the almost magical charm of the descriptions of the Philippine environment.

To be thus vivid and convincing about any phase of life is not easy; to make intimate to the European a life in the world’s remotest outskirts, of whose terms the European has no conception, in which he has no natural interest, whose actors are of a different race, color, and psychology from his own, is a feat bristling [94]with difficulties. Some critics, piqued, maybe, that a Malay at his first attempt should have triumphed in a form of art deemed the exclusive heritage of the white man, have objected that Rizal’s work has no great connected moving story, such as Dickens or Ohnet would have dealt in. Suppose this to be true, it is but a narrow view of fictional art. The mirror fiction holds up to nature may be of many shapes, and the life chosen for mirroring may be of many phases. All that the world can insist upon is that they shall be representative and perfectly shown, and for these Rizal had a facility like that of Cervantes.11

The theme is the gross, fat-witted tyranny that had enchained the Filipinos and the extent to which they themselves were to blame for it. Neither oppressor nor the complaisant among the oppressed was spared in those cadent pictures; here each might behold his ugly countenance faultlessly drawn. With bitter reproach he showed to his countrymen their ignorance, their sloth, their tame submission that invited more wrongs. In all human experience one observation has been invariable. It is that the force that rules with autocratic and irresponsible sway is able to bear anything else better than ridicule. The ridicule that Rizal poured upon the dominant powers in the Philippines would have stung to the quick Caracalla himself. One by one he marches them across the stage, the whip of his terrible sarcasm always on their shoulders. It is an immortal procession: the scheming, arrogant, lawless, immoral friar, drunk with power and greed; the Spanish government officer, all brute to the native, all [95]crawling sycophant before the powerful orders; the arrogant Spanish émigré, stuffed with the ridiculous bombast of a bygone century, the émigré that has become rich in the islands at the expense of the native and now hates and despises the rounds of the ladder by which he did ascend; the native that cringes before the feet of the classes that have so unspeakably wronged him; the woman of Spain’s Island colony, “more deadly than the male”; the pretentious and all but worthless educational system; the raw excesses of the courts; the wanton cruelties of a Government conducted by expatriated savages; the tortures and pathetic helplessness of the native masses. On all this the man worked like Hogarth; he will startle and frighten you, but he will convince you on every page that this is the truth. In this misery, exactly this, dwelt the unfortunate millions that Spain misgoverned; in this terror, thus trampled upon, overawed, silenced, but not subdued. These were the people’s oppressors, lustful, cruel, rapacious, their burning eyes following every pretty woman or girl, their pockets lined with the peasants’ money, their claws reaching for more. All the scenes of the drama and all the players in it, drawn with irresistible art: the Civil Guards, the coarse instruments of this despotism; the means by which terror was capitalized; the constant temptation to revolt; the devilish work of the agents provocateurs; the sickening punishments devised for those that yielded to the wiles of such agents.12 Against this shone the native grace and charm of the Filipino woman, justly illumined, her goodness, kindness, [96]ready and apprehensive mind, the pitfalls dug for her by the bestial oppressors of her people. You will say that all the materials are here for one of those great dramas of human life that reach down to the primeval base of first causes and of such framing this book has been made.

Everywhere is dense ignorance. The world that three hundred years before left all these conditions behind still goes rolling in advance, and hardly a Filipino knows of its passing. A great population endowed with the potentialities of free minds, free limbs, free souls, free ideas, is submitting to a yoke pressed down into men’s very flesh by superstition on one side and brute force on the other.

We know that many of the incidents were but transcripts of what Rizal himself had seen and known; many of the characters transferred themselves from Calamba to his pages. Even when we read them for the first time, and have, maybe, no previous knowledge of the locale, this conviction of truth and sincerity possesses us; how much more it must have reached and stung those whose enormities it paints! “It is only the truth that hurts.” [97]

The story is of a young Filipino, Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra, whose father had wealth, was respected by the Spaniards, and wielded much influence among his own people. Juan, still in his boyhood, is sent to a school in Europe, that his education may be of the best. All prosperous Filipinos hoped to send their sons, if they had any, on this quest for the classical golden fleece. While Juan is gone his father becomes involved in a dispute with the local friar magnate, the virtual dictator of all the region about, as always; but this man brutal, arrogant, revengeful, and lawless beyond the average of his peers. The quarrel is about land; most quarrels with the friars had to do with land or rents or fees or graft or some fancied lack of crawling humility toward overblown pomp. As a rule the ill will of a friar meant for the layman involuntary exile taken at utmost speed or a persecution to the grave and without defense; it being part of the friars’ system of government that of any person that dared to offend them a salutary warning should be made. In the pursuit of this serviceable design, men put to death for alleged sedition but really because they had fallen out with the friars were sometimes quartered and hideous fragments of their bodies nailed up in the towns,1 as in Spain five hundred years before. [98]

Father Damaso is the friar that the elder Ibarra has offended. The power of the System has been put forth. Ibarra, though innocent of any crime, is arrested and thrust into prison, where he is kept without examination or trial until he wilts away and dies, crying out the name of his son. All ignorant of these events, Juan comes home; he knows his father is dead, but he suspects nothing of foul play. Gradually the truth is unfolded to him. He has returned full of hope for the Islands, full of faith in their Government. Gradually he is disillusioned, as one ugly development after another shows him the blight under which his people drag out their lives.

Still he knows nothing against Father Damaso. That dark and scowling figure he greets as his father’s friend.

The views of Island life, sharp, vivid, are like those of a stereopticon or the wizard Zola. There is a native woman, Sisa, married to a worthless dog of a husband who beats her, robs her, and gets drunk. All her life centers in her two boys, Basilio and Crispin. They earn a pittance each, working for the sacristan of a church in another village, ringing the bells and cleaning the chancel. They are to come home to-night, and Sisa has been preparing something to please them, a supper with things they like to eat, earned by her hard work and self-denial. She has bought some small fishes, picked the most beautiful tomatoes in her little garden (for she knows how fond Crispin is of tomatoes), and begged from a neighbor some slices of dried wild boar’s meat and a leg of wild duck. To this she adds [99]the whitest of rice, which she herself has gleaned from the threshing-floors.

Then her worthless husband comes in and eats most of the boys’ supper.

Sisa says nothing, although she feels as if she herself were being eaten. His hunger at last appeased, he remembers to ask for the boys. Then Sisa smiles happily and resolves that she will not eat that night because what remains is not enough for three. The father has asked for his sons; for her that is better than a banquet.

The boys do not come, and the father goes away. At the church serious trouble has fallen upon Basilio and Crispin. The curate has accused Crispin of stealing and demands restitution; otherwise, the boy, says the humane curate, will be beaten to death. That night while their mother waits for them they are kept ringing the great bells in the church tower, for a storm is raging and it is well known that the sound of church-bells ringing keeps off the lightning. In the midst of this employment, the sacristan suddenly appears, fines the boys for not ringing in tune, renews the accusation of theft (which is quite groundless), and drags Crispin off to punishment, locking Basilio in the tower. He hears his brother’s cries for help dying out in the distance. Then he climbs the belfry, unties the ropes from the bells, ties them to the railing, lets himself out of a window to the ground, and runs home. But Crispin never appears. He has been shot and killed by a Civil Guard.

Two or three days later Civil Guards come to Sisa’s house and arrest her for Crispin’s alleged theft. She [100]is paraded through the streets as a common malefactor and locked in the common jail. Basilio has crept to the woods. Sisa begins to learn of Crispin’s fate. When she is released from jail she has become insane.

She wanders about the country, living on alms and sleeping in the woods. Basilio comes home to find her gone and starts in search of her. When at last he comes in sight of her, she in her madness believes him to be another enemy and flees. He runs after her and overtakes her in time to hold her in his arms as she dies.

The story of Sisa is interwoven with the development of the story of Ibarra.

Gradually the truth is unfolded to him, the legalized murder of his father, the dishonor to his father’s ashes; for, buried in a cemetery, the body of the elder Ibarra has been, at the friar’s orders, disinterred2 and cast into the lake. Still he does not quite perceive what part Damaso has played in this nor understand that he himself is pricked next upon the roll of death. Soon or late, he must learn all. Then will devolve upon him the duty of vengeance. For safety’s sake the friar plans to silence him betimes.

Meanwhile, the youth, in whom Rizal has typified the large generous notions he himself once entertained of Utopia under the rule of Spain, gives himself to projects for the elevation of his countrymen. He is impressed with the darkness of ignorance around him, [101]with the almost comic futility of the educational system, which is no system at all. Meeting an old schoolmaster, he discusses these conditions, and thus is laid bare to us the means by which the native mind is kept in its prison-house.

“How many pupils have you now?” asked Ibarra, with interest, after a pause.

“More than two hundred on the roll, but only about twenty-five in actual attendance.”

“How does that happen?”

… The schoolmaster shook his head sadly. “A poor teacher struggles against not only prejudice but also against certain influences. First, it would be necessary to have a suitable place and not to do as I must do at present—hold the classes under the convento by the side of the padre’s carriage. There the children, who like to read aloud, very naturally disturb the padre, and he often comes down, nervous, especially when he has his attacks, yells at them, and even insults me. You know that one can neither teach nor learn under such conditions.…”

The curate is the same Father Damaso, the friar with whom Ibarra’s father had quarreled. In his overbearing arrogance he has wantonly insulted the poor schoolmaster, who goes on thus with his narrative:

“What was I to do with only my meager salary, to collect which I have to get the curate’s approval and make a trip to the capital of the province—what could I do against him, the foremost religious and political power in the town, backed up by his order, feared by the Government, rich, powerful, sought after and listened to, always believed and heeded by everybody? [102]Although he insulted me, I had to remain silent, for if I had replied he would have had me removed from my position, by which I should lose all hope in my chosen profession. Nor would the cause of education gain anything, but all to the contrary; for everybody would take the curate’s side, they would curse me and call me presumptuous, proud, vain, a bad Christian, uncultivated; and if not those things, then ‘anti-Spanish’ and ‘a filibuster.’ Of a schoolmaster neither learning nor zeal is expected; only resignation, humility, and inaction are demanded. May God pardon me if I have gone against my conscience and my judgment, but I was born in this country, I have to live, I have a mother; so I have abandoned myself to my fate like a corpse tossed about by the waves.”

He has tried to abolish whipping in his school. “I endeavored to make study a thing of love and joy, I wished to make the primer not a black book bathed in the tears of childhood but a friend that was going to reveal wonderful secrets; of the school-room not a place of sorrows but a scene of intellectual refreshment. So, little by little, I abolished corporal punishment, taking the instruments of it entirely away from the school and replacing their stimulus with emulation and personal pride.”

The innovation was regarded as sacrilege and heresy.

“The curate sent for me, and, fearing another scene, I greeted him curtly in Tagalog. On this occasion he was very serious with me. He said that I was exposing the children to destruction, that I was wasting time, that I was not fulfilling my duties, that the father who spared the rod was spoiling the child—according to the Holy Ghost—that learning enters with [103]the blood,3 and so on. He quoted to me sayings of barbarous times as if it were enough that a thing had been said by the ancients to make it indisputable, according to which we ought to believe that there really existed those monsters which in past ages were imaged and sculptured in the palaces and temples. Finally, he charged me to be more careful and return to the old system, otherwise he would report me to the alcalde of the province.”

So in despair he brought out the whips again, and sadness reigned in the school where he had introduced happiness and work. The number of his pupils was reduced to a fifth of the former attendance.

“So then I am now working to the end that the children become changed into parrots and know by heart so many things of which they do not understand a word.”

It is doubtless a perfect picture of education in the Philippines and outlines the size of the task that Rizal had shouldered.4

“Let us not be so pessimistic,” said Ibarra.

He resolves to build and endow for the town a modern school-house. As the time comes for the laying of the corner-stone, at which ceremony he is to officiate, he receives a mysterious warning that an attempt will be made upon his life. This he seemingly disregards; and yet, when he must descend into the trench and stand beneath the corner-stone suspended from the scaffold, he looks anxiously above him, watches the apparatus, and is tense for a leap. There is a sound [104]of cracking timber; in an instant the great stone falls, but he has sprung aside and saved his life.

At the dinner with which the day’s ceremonials are concluded, Padre Damaso is a conspicuous guest. Not even yet is Ibarra, despite certain intimations, aware that Damaso was his father’s remorseless enemy, that the gloomy, vindictive friar had put forth the hidden powers of the orders and dragged his father to death. But at the dinner Damaso, stung with baffled hate because Ibarra has escaped the gin so cunningly spread for his life, loses all self-control and utters against Ibarra’s father an insult no son could be expected to endure. Ibarra springs at his throat, knocks him down, and stands glowering over him. In the eyes of the petrified spectators murder is about to be done, when Maria Clara, Capitán Tiago’s reputed daughter, throws herself between the infuriated youth and the prostrate friar.

Maria Clara is Ibarra’s sweetheart. She pleads with him with her eyes, and he recovers enough self-command to take himself away.

But the assault upon the friar is his ruin. He has committed the unpardonable sin, the blackest crime in the calendar: he has laid “violent hand upon a friar, representative at once in his own person of the might of the church and the majesty of the realm.” That day he is excommunicated, a punishment that in the Philippines, nineteenth century, retained all the poignancy it had in Darkest Europe, 1000 A.D.

He has become a moral leper.

Capitán Tiago breaks off the engagement with his daughter; in his view the word of the friars is sacred, [105]oracular, final. He is one of the great portraits of the book, this Capitán Tiago; a typical Filipino of the class that bent assiduously at the feet of power. The drawing is like many a sketch in Rizal’s note-books, a piece of startling realism. Tiago is a living, talking, sputtering, foolish thing of flesh and blood that we see and hear. Even though we have never seen another being of his kind anywhere, we see him in this picture-making. He is vain, pretentious, fearful, abjectly superstitious, filled with strange notions about the influences of graven images and the grandeur of Spain; a Filipino perverted by some wealth, the allurements of a social ambition, and an education grotesquely awry. Against the ills of the flesh and the chances of loss in the cockpit, he has recourse to the same arcana: so many candles burned before this shrine or that, so many bombs to be exploded at a fiesta, or so many masses bought at current rates. In all things, to cultivate the favor of the friars is the boundary of his more earthly philosophy. Ibarra, rich and eminent, newly returned from Spain with the gloss of a European education fresh upon him, is in his eyes a delectable son-in-law. Ibarra under the ban of the friars is an object of horror.

The affection between Ibarra and Maria Clara has the welcome fragrance of purity and exaltation in the midst of these miasmas. They had been playmates in childhood, they had grown up together, they had really plighted their troth when Ibarra went to Europe. He had been chivalrously true to her in all his seven years of travel. He has come back to her sure of her love and looking forward to an early marriage. Upon all [106]such dreams Tiago sets his foot; he not only forbids any further communication with Ibarra, but he favors another lover, one Linares, a feeble-willed young Spaniard brought forward with suspicious haste by Father Damaso. With this candidate, against the vehement protests of Maria Clara, an engagement is quickly made.

Meantime, the governor-general comes to the town and hears about the troubles of Ibarra, whose father he had known and admired. The governor-general is a type of many that Spain sent to the Philippines, excellent in purpose, well aware of the malignant fever of friarism, resolved to withstand it, and invariably finding his good resolutions crumbling under him. Yet, in this instance, he will save if he can the son of his old friend from the clutches of the modern Inquisition. Between the friars and the archbishops of Manila is a smoldering feud, for the archbishop is usually chosen outside of the four orders. The governor-general nudges the archbishop; the archbishop cancels the excommunication; and Ibarra, escaped from this damnation, is doomed by the friars to another still worse.

With Tiago the lifting of the ban upon Ibarra makes no difference; he is still anathema to the all-powerful orders. The campaign for Linares and against Ibarra is waged vigorously with the aid of many candles on many shrines and the promises of many bombs. At fiestas, it should be explained, the custom was to burn great quantities of fireworks by day and night; and the piety of the devout, as expressed in squibs, crackers, rockets, pin-wheels, and bombs, was supposed to [107]insure their salvation. In this form of divine worship, the friars had a commercial interest; it may be believed that if a doubt of its perfect efficacy occurred to them they managed to master it.

Under the Spanish social system, Philippine maidens of all complexions married whomsoever their parents told them to marry and silenced their objections, if they had any; hence, in the Tiago household the preparations for the marriage of Maria Clara and the half-witted Linares are urged with a sweet confidence. Maria Clara herself contributes the only flaw in these proceedings. She falls desperately ill.

News of her condition is brought to Ibarra by the person in the book called “the Pilot Elias,” who is one of the pivots on which the narrative turns. It was Elias that warned Ibarra of the plot to crush out his life with the corner-stone. In a picnic fishing expedition Ibarra had saved Elias from the jaws of a cayman (crocodile) and Elias had sworn his gratitude. He is evidently much above his caste, which is that of a boatman; he has had an education. In and out of the story he flits mysteriously until his true vocation is revealed; he is a man with a history, a victim of the prevailing despotism, forced by his sufferings to ponder the ills of his people and become at last a secret, restless, wary, and intelligent agitator against the System of his day.

It is through him that Rizal voices his protests. As the plot unfolds, Ibarra wins Elias’ story. We shall repeat it here, but with a preface of warning. In these times, the average reader, the more if he is an American, will look upon the tale as a wild extravagance, so [108]easily are the conditions of one generation obliterated in the next, and so difficult is it to believe the life of one country is not like the life of all countries. Yet what Elias is fabled here to have told Ibarra might have been taken with changes of names from veritable records. Exactly these things happened in the Philippine Islands in the nineteenth century, even in the last decade of the nineteenth century. They happened in many regions and to many persons. Still worse things happened, if worse can be conceived; for lust and greed and reversion ran savage riot under two conditions that have always been hothouses for such growths: autocracy, and distance from the world’s observation.

ELIAS’ STORY

“Some sixty years ago my grandfather dwelt in Manila, being employed as a bookkeeper in a Spanish commercial house. He was then very young, was married, and had a son. One night, from some unknown cause, the warehouse burned down. The fire was communicated to the dwelling of his employer and from there to many other buildings. The losses were great, a scapegoat was sought, and the merchant accused my grandfather. In vain he protested his innocence, but he was poor and unable to pay the great lawyers; so he was condemned to be flogged publicly and paraded through the streets of Manila. Not so very long since they still used the infamous method of punishment which the people call ‘caballo y vaca,’ and which is a thousand times more dreadful than death itself. Abandoned by all except his young wife, my grandfather saw himself tied to a horse, followed by an unfeeling crowd, and whipped on every street-corner in the sight of men, his brothers, and in the neighborhood of numerous temples of a God of peace. When the wretch, now for [109]ever disgraced, had satisfied the vengeance of man with his blood, his tortures, and his cries, he had to be taken off the horse, for he had become unconscious. Would to God that he had died! But by one of those refinements of cruelty he was given his liberty. His wife, pregnant at the time, vainly begged from door to door for work or alms in order to care for her sick husband and their poor son, but who would trust the wife of an incendiary and a disgraced man? The wife, then, had to become a prostitute!”

Ibarra rose in his seat.

“Oh, don’t get excited! Prostitution was not now a dishonor for her or a disgrace to her husband; for them honor and shame no longer existed. The husband recovered from his wounds and came with his wife and child to hide himself in the mountains of this province. Here they lived several months, miserable, alone, hated and shunned by all. The wife gave birth to a sickly child, which fortunately died. Unable to endure such misery and being less courageous than his wife, my grandfather, in despair at seeing his sick wife deprived of all care and assistance, hanged himself. His corpse rotted in sight of the son, who was scarcely able to care for his sick mother, and the stench from it led to their discovery. Her husband’s death was attributed to her, for of what is the wife of a wretch, a woman who has been a prostitute besides, not believed to be capable? If she swears, they call her a perjurer; if she weeps, they say she is acting; and that she blasphemes when she calls on God. Nevertheless, they had pity on her condition and waited for the birth of another child before they flogged her. You know how the friars spread the belief that the Indians can only be managed by blows: read what Padre Gaspar de San Agustin says!

“A woman thus condemned will curse the day on which her child is born, and this, besides prolonging her torture, violates every maternal sentiment. Unfortunately, she brought [110]forth a healthy child. Two months afterward, the sentence was executed to the great satisfaction of the men who thought that thus they were performing their duty. Not being at peace in these mountains, she then fled with her two sons to a neighboring province, where they lived like wild beasts, hating and hated. The elder of the two boys still remembered, even amid so much misery, the happiness of his infancy, so he became a tulisan as soon as he found himself strong enough. Before long the bloody name of Bâlat spread from province to province, a terror to the people, because in his revenge he did everything with blood and fire. The younger, who was by nature kind-hearted, resigned himself to his shameful fate along with his mother, and they lived on what the woods afforded, clothing themselves in the cast-off rags of travelers. She had lost her name, being known only as the convict, the prostitute, the scourged. He was known as the son of his mother only, because the gentleness of his disposition led every one to believe that he was not the son of the incendiary and because any doubt as to the morality of the Indios can be held reasonable.

“At last, one day the notorious Bâlat fell into the clutches of the authorities, who exacted of him a strict accounting for his crimes, and of his mother for having done nothing to rear him properly. One morning the younger brother went to look for his mother, who had gone into the woods to gather mushrooms and had not returned. He found her stretched out on the ground under a cotton-wood tree beside the highway, her face turned toward the sky, her eyes fixed and staring, her clenched hands buried in the blood-stained earth. Some impulse moved him to look up in the direction toward which the eyes of the dead woman were staring, and he saw hanging from a branch a basket and in the basket the gory head of his brother!”

“My God!” ejaculated Ibarra. [111]

“That might have been the exclamation of my father,” continued Elias coldly. “The body of the brigand had been cut up and the trunk buried, but his limbs were distributed and hung up in different towns. If ever you go from Calamba to Santo Tomas you will still see a withered lomboy-tree where one of my uncle’s legs hung rotting—nature has blasted the tree so that it no longer grows or bears fruit. The same was done with the other limbs, but the head, as the best part of the person and the portion most easily recognizable, was hung up in front of his mother’s hut!”

Ibarra bowed his head.

“The boy fled like one accursed,” Elias went on. “He fled from town to town by mountain and valley. When he thought that he had reached a place where he was not known, he hired himself out as a laborer in the house of a rich man in the province of Tayabas. His activity and the gentleness of his character gained him the good will of all that did not know his past, and by his thrift and economy he succeeded in accumulating a little capital. He was still young, he thought his sorrows buried in the past, and he dreamed of a happy future. His pleasant appearance, his youth, and his somewhat unfortunate condition won him the love of a young woman of the town, but he dared not ask for her hand from fear that his past might become known. But love is stronger than anything else, and they wandered from the straight path; so, to save the woman’s honor, he risked everything by asking her in marriage. The records were sought, and his whole past became known. The girl’s father was rich and succeeded in having him prosecuted. He did not try to defend himself but admitted everything, and so was sent to prison. The woman gave birth to twins, a boy and a girl, who were nurtured in secret and made to believe that their father was dead—no difficult matter, since at a tender age they saw their mother die, and they gave little thought to tracing genealogies. As [112]our maternal grandfather was rich our childhood passed happily. My sister and I were brought up together, loving one another as only twins can love when they have no other affections. When quite young I was sent to study in the Jesuit College; and my sister, in order that we might not be completely separated, entered the Concordia College. After our brief education was finished, since we desired only to be farmers, we returned to the town to take possession of the inheritance left us by our grandfather. We lived happily for a time, the future smiled on us, we had many servants, our fields produced abundant harvests, and my sister was about to be married to a young man whom she adored and who responded equally to her affection.

DRAWINGS BY RIZAL

Intended to be illustrations for his novels

“But in a dispute over money and by reason of my haughty disposition at that time, I alienated the good will of a distant relative, and one day he cast in my face my doubtful birth and shameful descent. I thought it all a slander and demanded satisfaction. The tomb which covered so much rottenness was again opened, and to my consternation the whole truth came out to overwhelm me. To add to our sorrow, we had had for many years an old servant who had endured all my whims without ever leaving us, contenting himself merely with weeping and groaning at the rough jests of the other servants. I don’t know how my relative had found it out, but the fact is that he had this old man summoned into court and made him tell the truth—that old servant, who had clung to his beloved children, and whom I had abused many times, was my father! Our happiness faded away, I gave up our fortune, my sister lost her betrothed, and with our father we left the town to seek refuge elsewhere. The thought that he had contributed to our misfortunes shortened the old man’s days, but before he died I learned from his lips the whole story of the sorrowful past.

“My sister and I were left alone. She wept a great deal, [113]but, even in the midst of such great sorrows as heaped themselves upon us, she could not forget her love. Without complaining, without uttering a word, she saw her former sweetheart married to another girl; but I watched her gradually sicken without being able to console her. One day she disappeared and it was in vain that I sought everywhere, in vain I made inquiries about her. About six months afterward I learned that about that time, after a flood on the lake, there had been found in some rice-fields bordering on the beach at Calamba the corpse of a young woman who had been either drowned or murdered, for she had had, so they said, a knife sticking in her breast. The officials of that town published the fact in the country round about; but no one came to claim the body, no young woman apparently had disappeared. From the description they gave me afterward of her dress, her ornaments, the beauty of her countenance, and her abundant hair, I recognized in her my poor sister.

“Since then I have wandered from province to province. My reputation and my history are in the mouths of many. They attribute great deeds to me, sometimes calumniating me, but I pay little attention to men, keeping ever on my way. Such in brief is my story, a story of one of the judgments of men.”

Elias fell silent as he rowed along.

“I still believe that you are not wrong,” murmured Crisóstomo [Ibarra] in a low voice, “when you say that justice should seek to do good by rewarding virtue and educating the criminals. Only, it’s impossible, Utopian! And where could be secured so much money, so many new employees?”

“For what, then, are the priests who proclaim their mission of peace and charity? Is it more meritorious to moisten the head of a child with water, to give it salt to eat, than to awake in the benighted conscience of a criminal that spark which God has granted to every man to light him to his welfare? [114]Is it more humane to accompany a criminal to the scaffold than to lead him along the difficult path from vice to virtue? Don’t they also pay spies, executioners, Civil-Guards? These things, besides being dirty, also cost money.”

“My friend, neither you nor I, although we may wish it, can accomplish this.”

“Alone, it is true, we are nothing, but take up the cause of the people, unite yourself with the people, be not heedless of their cries, set an example to the rest, spread the idea of what is called a fatherland!”

“What the people ask for is impossible. We must wait.”

“Wait! To wait means to suffer!”

“If I should ask for it, the powers that be would laugh at me.”

Elias desires Ibarra to put himself at the head of the people and secure their emancipation from these horrors. Ibarra draws back; all the instincts of his class and the prejudices of his education are against anything of that kind.

“But if the people support you?” said Elias.

“Never! I will never be the one to lead the multitude to get by force what the Government does not think proper to grant, no! If I should ever see the multitude armed I would place myself on the side of the Government, for in such a mob I should not see my countrymen. I desire the country’s welfare; therefore I would build a school-house. I seek it by means of instruction, by progressive advancement; without light there is no road.”

“Neither is there liberty without strife!” answered Elias.

“The fact is that I don’t want that liberty!”

“The fact is that without liberty there is no light,” replied the pilot with warmth.

[115]

It is like a conversation in Rizal’s own heart between the spirit of the college and the spirit of his country. Into it, beyond a doubt, he put the conflict that was torturing his soul. The spirit of love and good will in him grappling like Jacob with the soul that told him that from oppressions by violence could come only revolt by violence.

It may be profitable to follow this farther. It is a page of Rizal’s own revealing always overlooked by those that insist he was opposed to Philippine independence.

“You may say [the pilot goes on] that you are only slightly acquainted with your country, and I believe you. You don’t see the struggle that is preparing; you don’t see the cloud on the horizon. The fight is beginning in the sphere of ideas, to descend later into the arena, which will be dyed with blood. I hear the voice of God—woe unto them who would oppose it! For them history has not been written!”

No one can believe Rizal wrote this without feeling it in his heart and soul.

Elias was transfigured; standing uncovered, with his manly face illuminated by the moon, there was something extraordinary about him. He shook his long hair and went on:

“Don’t you see how everything is awakening? The sleep has lasted for centuries, but one day the thunderbolt struck, and, in striking, infused life.”

He means the slaying of the guiltless priests, Fathers Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora, victims to the homicidal mania that descended upon the Government after the revolt of 1872. [116]

“Since then [the pilot continues] new tendencies are stirring our spirits, and these tendencies, to-day scattered, will some day be united, guided by the God who has not failed other peoples, and who will not fail us, for his cause is the cause of liberty!”5

The trap the friars have prepared for Ibarra is a thing infamous in Philippine history, and yet so common that in fact and not in fiction it has sent scores of innocent men to their deaths. It had never been known to fail. Agents provocateurs stage a pretended revolt. Nothing is easier; the materials are always to hand; likewise the occasion. It is but necessary to take the latest outrage by the Civil Guard and stir some one to object to it. The rest follows automatically. In this instance Ibarra is the pretended instigator, although he has never heard of the wrong he is supposed to resent.

Elias warns him of what is afoot and urges him to escape; innocent as he is, he shall have no chance for his life before the tribunal that will try him if he waits for arrest. He will not go until he has had word with Maria Clara. The last scene between them is excellent drama; he gets under her window in a boat and climbs up the vines. For the charge of complicity in the stage rebellion is no basis except a letter that seven years before he had written to her. Some phrases that might be construed to suggest a vague discontent with conditions in the Philippines make up the entire case. On slighter evidence many a man has been tortured first and gone next to the Golgotha at Bagumbayan Field. The friars have this letter. How did they get it when [117]for so many years it had been one of the dearest possessions of Maria Clara? Ibarra can surmise only that she has willingly surrendered it and so betrayed him. In that last interview he learns that it was filched from her by the friar Silva, whose interest in her has been more than ecclesiastical and who on the same occasion has disclosed to her the facts as to her own parentage.

She is not the daughter of Capitán Tiago but of Father Damaso—an illegitimate daughter.

Satisfied that she is innocent, Ibarra now consents to escape from his foes. Elias, the pilot, who has so often befriended him, is waiting below in the banca. They row up the Pasig River. When they approach a soldier, Ibarra hides himself in the bottom of the boat under the freight. At last the Civil Guards are in pursuit. Elias tries to escape by hard rowing. The Guards begin to fire. Elias slips overboard. Taking him for Ibarra, the Guards follow in their banca, firing constantly. The hunted man is seen to sink. When the Guards come up they think they see blood. They take the news back to Manila that Ibarra, the desperate revolutionist, trying to escape, has been shot and killed. At the word Maria Clara gives up all earthly hope and flees to a nunnery. [118]

By the title of his novel Rizal meant not that he was touching a person forbidden, but a subject. The words he had found in a Latin version of the New Testament in the passage where the risen Christ is beheld by Mary Magdalene; but he used these words in a sense wholly different from the scriptural significance. Conditions in the Philippines he had thought of as having become a social cancer that persisted first because of a notion that nobody must treat or touch it. Of all the men of his times and country, he was the only man that had the courage to break through this barrier and the skill and perfect knowledge to dissect the hideous growth behind.

With one of the first copies that came from the press he wrote to his close friend, Dr. Blumentritt, a letter in which he lays bare his own idea of his work:1

The novel [he says] tells of many things that until now have not been touched upon. They are so peculiar to ourselves that we have been sensitive about them. In this book I have attempted what no one else seems to have been willing to do. For one thing, I have dared to answer the calumnies that for centuries have been heaped upon us and upon our country. I have written of the social condition of the Philippines and of the life of the Filipinos. I have told the truth about our [119]beliefs, our hopes, our longings, our complaints, and our sorrows. I have tried to show the difference between real religion and the hypocrisy that under its cloak has impoverished and brutalized us. I have brought out the real meaning of the dazzling and deceptive words of our countrymen. I have related our mistakes, our vices, and our faults. I have exposed how weakly we accept miseries as inevitable. Where there has been reason for it, I have given praise. I have not wept over our misfortunes, but rather laughed at them.

No one would want to read a book full of tears, and then, too, laughter is the best means of concealing sorrow.

The incidents that I have related are all true and have actually occurred.

But for his habitual reticence about himself he might have said much more; if he had known his own powers he might have spoken of his lifelike delineations; he might have urged a gift like prophecy. All the impression of a strong personal relation one has throughout the reading of “Noli Me Tangere” is well founded. Into it Rizal was writing himself. Ibarra was a prefiguration, in some respects marvelously accurate, of himself in the days at hand when he should return to his native country. Of the material of the book the greater part had been verified in his own experiences. The imprisonment of Ibarra’s father was the story of Rizal’s own mother. Father Damaso he had seen and watched, and Father Silva no less. In Tasio, the philosophical evolutionist, he had but drawn his own elder brother, Paciano. But above all, the story of Maria Clara was a tragedy from his own life; at that time a tragedy he might have feared but had not as yet experienced, strange as that may seem. [120]

Maria Clara is Rizal’s cousin, Leonora Rivera, his sweetheart and first great disappointment. She was born in Camiling, province of Tarlac, on April 11, 1867, the daughter of Antonio Rivera, who was Rizal’s uncle, benefactor, and ardent partisan.2 She was twelve years old when the family moved to Manila, where they rented lodgings to students in Santo Tomas and the Ateneo. Among these, after a time, came Cousin José Rizal, at about the third shifting of his quarters in Manila. Leonora was enrolled as an undergraduate at Concordia College for girls, where Rizal’s youngest sister, Soledad, was likewise a student. He would sometimes spend a half-holiday at Concordia to see and to amuse his sister, whereupon he and his beautiful cousin became good friends, although she was six years his junior. She was not only beautiful, but she seems to have had an unusual intellect of the kind that would be likely to attract Rizal; for she was in fact, and not by repute alone, studious, thoughtful, of the Malay seriousness, but with also the Malay delight in music. She sang well; she is said to have played the piano with a skill that distinguished her even in the corps of able pianists of which Concordia was proud. If so, the eminence was not lightly won; for the worthy Sisters that conducted that institution taught music thoroughly and well.

She must have been also of a sweet and gentle spirit; all the memories extant of her twenty years [121]after her death included this tribute. The various commentators that have differed often about other phases of Philippine life have been of one mind in praising the typical educated Filipino woman and yet have not exaggerated her worth. In a world wearied of artificiality, her simple sincerity shines to cheer as much as to charm. Visitors that have observed her well have usually noted the excellence of her mind, the honesty of her walk, and the reserve strength of her character. Rizal’s mother was of this order, the diligent ruler of the household, the laborious instructor of her children; and, when the blows of the Spanish tyranny fell upon her head, bearing them with the proud fortitude of a Roman matron of the republic. Doubtless, the halo of Rizal and Leonora’s own romantic story have magnified her intellectual stature; yet when all allowance is made for exaggeration that may color the work of a friendly biographer, the fact is apparent that she also was of this same admirable womanhood.

The first time she seems to have suspected in herself a feeling for her handsome young cousin stronger than cousinly regard was on a day at her father’s house when the young leader of the Filipino forces at the Ateneo was brought in with a broken head and covered with dust, blood, and glory. It was not the first time he had been so ornamented, but only the first time she had seen him thus. At the sight of the youthful champion of the Filipino people disabled early in the fray, Leonora ran with speed to get warm water and bandages to dress his hurts. The rest was easy and according [122]to the formulæ for such cases well known and accepted. She loved him for the battles he waged, and he loved her that she nursed him so tenderly.

A year later with the full approbation of their parents they were betrothed. Mr. Rivera was fond of his nephew; to the aunt, José was at least not objectionable, though she seems to have been a lady of a captious and changeable temperament. It was the uncle that first suggested Rizal’s withdrawal from the Philippines when it became evident that the governing class had marked him as a young man to be suppressed. Mr. Rivera knew well enough what that would mean in Santo Tomas and elsewhere: every avenue closed, every possible obstacle thrown in his way. The malice he had aroused he could hope to defeat in some measure if he could win in Europe a training and a distinction that would on his return provide him with a practice in spite of Spanish opposition. Mr. Rivera assisted his flight, sent him money while he was pursuing his studies in Madrid, and showed at all times a sincere interest in his welfare. The lovers had a tender parting just before Rizal went aboard his ship that night; as a sign or image of his presence when he should be far away he left with her a poem that began:

[123]

At Madrid he wrote her regularly and with deep affection and received replies that, his diary says, gave him unbounded joy, as these entries indicate:

1884. January 10. Received two letters, one from Uncle Antonio [Leonora’s father] and the other from L. Nov. 30. The letter from Leonora was lovely with a sweet ending.

January 25. To-night I had a sad dream. I returned to the Philippines, but oh, what a sad reception! Leonora had been unfaithful; an inexcusable unfaithfulness without any remedy.

April 13. To-day I received letters from Leonora, Uncle Antonio, and Changoy. I am well satisfied with what Leonora writes but not with her state of health.3

No trait is more to be emphasized in observing the Filipino people than their respect for womanhood. It is hardly less than phenomenal. In Burma the women may have as much power; in Filipinas they have power and respect as well as affection. Rizal was all of this order; the most sacred object in the world was his mother; the next most sacred the woman that should be his wife; after her came his sisters. He had developed in advance of his times a certain philosophy of feminism that has since become much more general. In his letters he dwelt upon it. He thought the Filipino woman might be one of the great instruments for the deliverance of the country, exercising her power and influence conscientiously for education and liberty. Therefore, every Filipino woman ought to prepare herself for this service by utilizing every road to knowledge and enlarging her understanding of the [124]nation and its possibilities. He believed that a general effort on these lines by the educated women would make a profound impression upon the young and be invaluable in the next generation.

There seems to have been no flaw in his attachment to Leonora; his career abroad has been searched in vain for a reminiscence of an escapade. He lived a life of purity and that self-control that he held to be the first demand of the moral code he professed. Seldom has the biographer a career like this to write in which appears not enough of human frailty to spice the narrative. He had made for himself certain rules of conduct—abstemiousness, temperance, chastity, no wasting of time, no wasting of health—and to these he adhered with the stern inflexibility of an ascetic. The artist is usually saved, says Edmund Clarence Stedman, by his devotion to beauty. Rizal was an artist, and never has knelt before the ideal of beauty a worshiper more devout. The beauty of righteousness seemed to rule out of him all promptings to the coltish excesses of youth; that, and the dignity of his love, and his conception of the gravity of his mission. He that is called to bring light to his people must not linger at the wayside inn nor ruin their hopes by capitulation to man’s grosser senses.

Meantime, the Riveras had moved from Manila to Dagupan, in the province then called Laguna. The reputation that Rizal had left behind him was not bettered by the handling it had from the governing class after his flight. Evil propaganda has always been easy to great power in any form. In his absence the spies and agents provocateurs of the Government [125]made it but the day’s work to smear with lies the name of Rizal. “Some of it will stick,” is the philosophy of the professional slanderer. In this case the word proved true enough. Mrs. Rivera seems to have been much affected by the sad decline and fall of her prospective son-in-law. She was an excellent lady but one that set exaggerated store by the verdict of society and what Shelley called the great god “They Say.” Among all colonists everywhere this is a deity of might. With the slender group of Filipinos that strove to grasp the skirts of a society drawn disdainfully away from them, the cult amounted sometimes to a frenzy.

The reports that came from Madrid about Leonora’s lover, or were affirmed to come thence, were no salve to the mother’s wounded sensibilities. He was said to associate with sad young dogs, revolutionists and outcasts and all that, with Filipinos that had been exiled after the governmental sand-dance of 1872 and with other agencies of treason. The thought of the career that such a man would probably have in the Philippines seems to have struck Mrs. Rivera with inexpressible terror. What her friends and social co-mates would say when her daughter should be married to one sure to be a pariah if not a victim of the garrote was beyond her strength to endure.

She had also the strange notion that steals into the minds of some subjugated people that intermarriage with the dominant color promises relief from the sting of inferiority. About this time the railroad was being extended to Dagupan, and a young English engineer, Henry C. Kipping, came to take charge of the building of the last section of the new line from Bayambang. [126]His work took him often to Dagupan, where he met and fell in love with Leonora. He seems to have urged his suit with ardor and persistence and to have had from the beginning an adroit partisan in Leonora’s mother. Here had come, as if by the order of Providence, a means to save her daughter from an unhappy marriage. How much better to wed an English engineer than a Filipino agitator! With joy she seized every opportunity to praise the ingenious Kipping, gave thanks (for she was of a resolute devotion) to the wisdom that had arranged all this, and even prepared to give it help of her own devising.4

Cold fell her eulogies on Leonora’s ears. When Kipping talked love to her she told him frankly that she was engaged to marry Rizal, whom she loved and would always love, and that another suitor was for her impossible.

Nothing in Kipping’s reports of these chilly receptions daunted Mrs. Rivera, her heart being set on this match. She knew well the weight of parental authority among her people. Also, she had faith in the effects of absence, if judiciously interpreted and assisted. She can hardly have read the novels of Charles Reade, but that eminent author would have found in her a character all made to his mind. She now had resort to an expedient that was one of favorite practice among his own villains. Many a reader of his it has left cold, deeming it impossible or extravagant. Behold, then, vindication for the novelist, and straight from history. Mrs. Rivera augmented the glacial effects of separation by stopping all letters [127]between the young lovers. To this end she bribed two postal clerks.5 For a monthly stipend they agreed to bring to her all the letters that Leonora wrote to José and all the letters that José wrote to Leonora.

Months went by and not a word came from Madrid. Leonora began to droop under the suspense. Skilfully and industriously her mother plied her with insinuations and the wise shaking of the head so eloquent to the anxious. We could and if we would, and that line of ambiguous givings out. At last, she openly declared that Rizal had found another sweetheart. Leonora hysterically affirmed her faith in her lover. But the physical fact persisted that mail after mail arrived from Spain and not a line from Rizal. “He is sick,” said Leonora, “and I am here, I cannot take care of him.” The next time the expected letter failed she said deliberately, “I know José. He has given his word. He will die before he breaks it.”

The mother seems to have known how to beat down this spirit. At last she brought to an issue the slow, sure undermining in which she had been employing her wits. “If you truly love me, you ought to remember that, after God, you owe to me all you are, and after God, then, you owe me your duty. I urge this marriage, not because it means anything to me, but because I am your mother. I seek your true happiness. All the hope of my life is centered upon it. Do you wish to kill your mother?”

At this, Leonora capitulated. So great is the maternal influence in the Filipino household it is likely that most other Filipino girls in the same conditions would [128]have yielded. According to Miss Sevilla, Leonora’s sympathetic biographer, the daughter now fell into the mother’s arms and said:

“I owe you my life; I will sacrifice it for you, and make this marriage as you wish, but you will find that I shall not live long after it. In return, I ask you three things, that I shall not again be asked to play or to sing, that my piano shall be kept locked, and that you shall be at my side when I am married.”6

The next day she burned the letters she had received from Rizal before her mother had interfered with her happiness. Following a Filipino custom, she put the ashes into a little box which she covered with a piece of the dress she had worn when she was betrothed and a piece of the dress she had worn when she yielded to her mother about Kipping. The box is still in existence. It bears on its covers the letters “J” and “L” worked in gold.7

The wedding was fixed for June 17, at Dagupan. A few days before this date, Mrs. Rivera was called to Manila by some business transaction in which she must take a part. She seems to have forgotten the postal clerks, or they to have forgotten their employment; for while she was gone a letter arrived from Rizal to Leonora, and it fell into her hands. She opened it with wonder and trembling, and lo! it was filled with tender reproaches for her long silence. He had written to her regularly by every mail, but all these months had come not a word in answer. Had she forgotten him?

The next scene may be deemed to justify the [129]writers both of fiction and of melodrama. Leonora waited in silence until her mother returned from Manila, for her quick intelligence showed her unerringly who had been the author of this wreck of her happiness. The moment her mother opened the door the storm broke. Leonora, for once, defied the restraint the Filipino girl must traditionally feel in the presence of her parents and spared nobody in her passionate denunciation of the treachery of which she had been the victim. Mrs. Rivera seems to have admitted everything and borne with composure the whirlwind of her daughter’s wrath. She knew that the discovery had come too late to disturb her own success. The wedding was close at hand, the banns had been cried, the guests invited, the peculiar Filipino pride was involved and her daughter would hold to her word.

Kipping was baptized and became a Catholic. The wedding took place at the appointed hour. Afterward some of her relatives recalled that it was a ceremony without joy or good omens. They said that from it the bride returned in a state of chill lassitude. Contrary to her mother’s hopes, the marriage proved unhappy, and Leonora survived it only two years.

THE ORIGINAL COVER OF THE GREAT NOVEL, “NOLI ME TANGERE”

Rizal’s work. Note its elaborateness

[130]

Still unaware of the ruin that had come upon his hopes, Rizal was living in Berlin and working on the last chapters of “Noli Me Tangere.” He had taken cheap lodging in one of those huge modern German apartment-houses, in the complex depths of which he could bury himself, press on with his work, and be as remote as Tahaiti. He had known from the beginning that he must bring out his book at his own expense, poor as he was, if it was to be published at all. To a European publisher the subject would seem too unconventional and outlandish; and as for the Philippines, not a printer there would venture on his life to so much as look at it. The type was set (in Spanish) in a small job-office not far from Rizal’s lodging. Of the report that he himself eked out his remittances by working at times as a compositor in this shop, there is no satisfactory evidence; he had not previously appeared as a printer, but with his marvelous dexterity and ease in assimilating all knowledge he might have picked up even this craft, too, with others, difficult as it is. If so, he may have enjoyed in Berlin an unusual experience. He may have been an author putting into type his own copy.

One problem had harassed him. Whence could he [131]hope to get the money to pay for the publication? He was still largely supported by remittances from home, from Paciano the ever faithful, from other members of his family; but these were not more than enough to keep him alive. The Fates that packed his wallet so full of other good gifts seem to have omitted a facility in making money, but supplied in its stead an abnormal power of self-denial. He now started out to save the sum he needed by inciting the spirit to triumph over the flesh. About this time there came to visit him in Berlin Maximo Viola, a wealthy and excellent young Filipino he had known in Madrid. Viola records that he found the young author living in a rear room and subsisting upon one meal a day, largely bread and coffee,1 which were cheap.

The raven had come that was not only to feed this prophet but to lead him out of the wilderness. Viola’s object had been to invite Rizal to go with him upon a walking tour through rural Germany and Switzerland. At the proposal, Rizal’s eyes blazed; no project could be more alluring to him, as Viola had well known. Then he said that it was impossible; he could not go. Why impossible? asked Viola. Native pride forbade any direct answer, but Viola extracted the truth. He was saving money to publish a book. What kind of a book? Rizal told him, whereupon the Filipino blood stirred in Viola’s veins also, and he offered on the spot to advance enough money to bring out the book and then enough to take Rizal on the walking tour.

A few weeks later, “Noli Me Tangere,” a finished [132]novel of five hundred pages, was printed and bound and launched upon its eventful way.2

The facts about this man would stagger credulity if they were not of so sure and recent record. This novel of his contains more than two hundred thousand words. He obtained his medical licentiate at Madrid in June, 1885, and nothing of his book had been written then; nothing was written until months later. After a time he went to Paris, where he was employed as a clinical assistant to a busy oculist and also in pursuing his studies. Thence he went first to Heidelberg, then to Leipzig, where he entered the universities. Next we find him in Berlin, again an active and laborious student. Yet “Noli Me Tangere” was completed on February 21, 1887. The thing does not seem to be in nature. We cannot recall another instance in literature of such rapid composition under the like conditions of distraction.

It was a stormy petrel that he had set free, and trouble began early because of and around it. His first object was to circulate it in the Philippines. Nothing could have been more unpromising, with a censorship keeping watch and ward and an author loathed and feared by the whole System. Yet he accomplished the difficult feat. He had stout friends in Barcelona and Madrid, Fernando Canon, Mariano Ponce, Damaso Ponce, Ramon Batle, and, in especial, Teresina Batle, who was Mr. Canon’s sweetheart. Her quick wit helped the conspiracy. Rizal sent to Mr. Batle certain [133]boxes containing copies of his book. These his friends disguised as dry-goods and the like innocent freight and forwarded to Manila. Ramon Eguarras and Alejandro Rojas were Manila proprietors of substance and good repute. They smuggled the boxes past the official Argus and before his very face.3 When the authorities awoke, the fierce new appeal was going from house to house with ominous rumblings in its wake.

This could not last long. To know what the submerged people were reading and thinking was one of the chief businesses of the bureau of spies and department of sleuthing. Soon the censor was hot upon the trail of this omen of unrest. A copy of the book was brought to him; he read it with a horror that seems to have shaken his soul. Now the attention of Government was called to the scandalous work. Government, ever responsive to such ill news, appointed a committee of solemn owls from the faculty of Santo Tomas, no less, to study and report upon a literary felony so momentous; Government being apparently impressed with the notion that a crisis was near and revolution was to be crushed as usual in the serpent’s egg. For this nothing could be so effective as the weight of an awe-inspiring authority from the university. No great deliberation was needed to enable the committee to reach its findings. In what was plainly intended to be a blasting fire of ecclesiastical wrath, book and author were condemned, and Government was austerely warned that here was a most insidious and perilous attack upon all the safeguards of society, [134]upon law and order, civilization, monarchy, the supremacy of Spain, business, holy church, and religion itself.4

Long experimentation with the surviving methods of the Inquisition had made the Government expert in these matters. It issued at once a decree excluding from the pious Islands a work of such sacrilege and ordered diligent search to be made for any copies that might have slipped in to corrupt virtue and overthrow the king. Wherever such copies might be found they were to be burned by the public executioner. Most rigorous punishments waited upon the heels of this decree. Any Filipino found after a certain date in possession of a copy of “Noli Me Tangere” was to suffer imprisonment or deportation, with the loss of all his property; this to be confiscated for the benefit of whomsoever should inform against him. Despite all this valorous resolving and proclaiming and shaking of the long ears of senile decrepitude, the book continued to come in and to be circulated. One may suspect that what the Government chiefly effected was gratuitous advertisement. In a short time “Noli Me Tangere” became the first topic of conversation throughout the educated circles in the islands. The classes whose vices and villainies were most fiercely attacked in it were its most determined readers. Let the Government do its utmost to annihilate the book; in the teeth of decrees, Civil Guards, spies, and inquisitors, Rizal’s purposes were already accomplished. The corrupt, greedy, tyrannical friar, the plundering, swaggering, brutal Spanish officer, the beneficiaries of [135]the System and those consenting to it, saw themselves for the first time pilloried in print.5

About this process is always something more potent and salutary than can be easily explained. It is the elusive, indomitable spirit of that pitiless publicity, at once the armed champion of modern social progress, the healer of its diseases, and the corrector of its errors. Suppose the social malefactor to know full well, as well as he knows anything, that when he reads in print the story of his misdeeds not one hundred other persons are likely to see it; he is shaken with ineffable alarm, nevertheless. The magic of the printed page overwhelms and confounds him; in his ear every type-letter is a separate demon yelling “Scoundrel!” Suppose him to have known theretofore that one hundred thousand men were saying among themselves this that he now reads in print; the knowledge would have disturbed him not to the quiver of an eyelash. But to have it thus in visible record, open to the world’s eye—intolerable! Many a man case-hardened otherwise to conscience or reproof has fled to suicide before that unwavering finger and relentless condemnation.

The life of all this is truth. Against printed words that are not true even the guilty can make a stand, but it is invincible verity that leaves him naked and trembling. When the first cold shiver had gone by of the discovery that some one had at last dared to put into print the horror of the Philippines, one cry for vengeance went up from the stripped and shamed exploiters. It was a cry like the angry snarl of hurt [136]hyenas, ready to tear into pieces whomsoever should fall into their den.

Presently there came among them the very man of their desire, the author of all this, the object of all their furious hatred; unsuspectingly he walked into their jungle.

When he had finished his book Rizal felt free to make the excursion Viola had proposed. They tramped together through remote Germany and saw something of Switzerland and of Austria. Rizal, as he went, studied peasant life, and diligently he compared it with the conditions of the Philippine farmers. At the end of the tour, he went to Dresden. There he found that by reputation he was already known to Dr. A. B. Meyer and other scientists, most of whom speedily became his friends.6

For some weeks the museums of Dresden detained him; now the splendid collection of pictures, and now the unusual specimens in the zoölogical and ethnological museums. Thence he passed to Leitmeritz, old Bohemia, where he began that close and intimate friendship with Dr. Ferdinand Blumentritt, the famous ethnologist, that was to last so long as Rizal lived. For months they had been in correspondence; they had even progressed in their letters to the stage of a more than ordinary esteem; for Rizal, as we have seen, having so many other good gifts, had also this abundantly, that he could cause his real self to shine through the imperfect medium of the written word and make it appear what it was, a spirit of power and grace. That he might be identified at the station by his Austrian [137]friend, Rizal sent in advance a pencil-sketch he had made of himself, and with this in hand Dr. Blumentritt knew him instantly. The high opinion the elder scientist had formed of Rizal’s character and talents must have been justified upon closer acquaintance; it appears that Rizal spent most of his time at the Blumentritts’, and Mrs. Blumentritt signified her approbation of him by cooking for him rare old-time Bohemian dainties, unknown to the restaurants and hotels.7 Thence to Vienna, where he became intimate with Nordenfels, the Austrian novelist, and met other men prominent in literature and art. Upon all these he seems to have left the uniform impress of a mind strong, capacious, and candid, and a soul disciplined and enlightened.

His studies in Vienna completed, he passed into Italy, and in a few weeks was pondering the antiquities of Rome. Reviewing there his observations and researches in so many lands, he concluded that the time had come for him to return to the Philippines. The irregularity of his passport by which he had escaped from Manila he had since corrected; legally, he was as free as any one else to travel in the Islands. His objective had been won; he had made good use of his time. He might even have congratulated himself on the diligence of his service. Consecration and an almost prodigious industry had made him one of the foremost scholars of the day; he must now put to use the resources he had gathered for the chief purpose of aiding his people. If we knew more about his disastrous romance we might possibly find that Leonora’s [138]silence had become a motive to draw him home. What we do know is that he was distressed by the reports he had of his mother’s failing eyesight and eager to return to her and help her. For months a double cataract had been growing upon her eyes. He felt sure that he could remove it and restore her vision: it was to this branch of optical surgery that he had given most heed. From Rome he sped to Marseilles, took steamer on July 3, 1887, for Saigon, and transhipped for Manila. On August 5, after five years of wanderings and so many triumphs, he saw once more the green tide of the Pasig.

As soon as he landed he hastened to his mother at Calamba and, laying aside every other business, devoted himself to the care of her eyes. With entire success he performed the operation he had intended, the first of the kind ever done in the Philippines. The fame of Mrs. Mercado’s healing speedily went throughout all the Islands and beyond. In the opinion of most persons of that day and region it meant that, by a miracle as of old, sight had been restored to the blind; and, at a word, Rizal stepped into eminence and a great practice. Of this he was not unworthy. As we shall have occasion to see later, he was well aware of his skill and learning; and, so far as the Orient was concerned, he eclipsed all previous practitioners. Patients came to him with confidence from all parts of the Philippines and even from China.

He had time to renew some of his old friendships, notably with Fernando Canon, who had been fellow-student with him in old Spain and later one of the most effective agents in getting “Noli Me Tangere” [139]into the Islands, whither he had lately returned. Some of the boxes that contained copies of the book had been passed in as Mr. Canon’s stores. One day, walking up and down with him at Calamba, Rizal revealed how nearly the world had come to the loss of this work:

“I did not believe ‘Noli Me Tangere’ would ever be published. I was in Berlin, heartbroken with sadness8 and weakened and discouraged from hunger and deprivation. I was on the point of throwing my work into the fire as a thing accursed and fit only to die. And then came the telegram from Viola. It revived me; it gave me new hope. I went to the station to receive him and spoke to him about my work. He said he might be able to help me. I reflected and then decided to shorten the book and eliminated whole chapters. So he found it much more concise than it had been. This accounts for the loose pages of manuscript to which you have referred. But these will have a place in the continuation.

“I will publish seven volumes about Philippine conditions. Then if I do not succeed in awakening my countrymen, I will shoot myself.”9

To his account of this incident Mr. Canon adds:

“Still there vibrates in my ears the inflections of his voice as he said this. One could recognize Rizal anywhere by the tones of his voice.”

In the midst of his busy employments, there fell upon him, early in 1888, a summons to Manila to appear before Governor-General Terrero. [140]

This ominous message was the first repercussion from “Noli Me Tangere”; the classes affronted in that book and burning for revenge were moving to secure it. Here between the claws of their System was the man they hated; it would go hard if he escaped where so many lesser men had perished. With what feelings he obeyed the summons he has not told us, but there can be hardly a doubt that he knew by whose manœuvers he was now in the toils. It is the most singular fact in his whole strange career that he never betrayed the least concern as to what should become of him and throughout whatsoever process might be instituted against him behaved as if it were the trial of another person of which he was only the moderately interested witness. It was so now. With unruffled self-possession he passed before the governor-general. Terrero told him bluntly of the report of the committee appointed to examine “Noli Me Tangere.” Rizal observed that the examination must have been faulty, for the book was not what the committee had called it but innocent. He made so able a defense that Terrero said finally that as for himself he had read no more of it than the extracts the committee had cited in its report, but now he should like to read it all and judge for himself, and asked for a copy of it. This modest request being (despite all fierce decrees) complied with, the governor-general hemmed a little and said he feared that great enmity had been aroused against Rizal among the classes he had described. It was enmity that might even go so far as to attempt the author’s life. For his safety, therefore, [141]it had been deemed wise to assign to him a body-guard so long as he should remain in the Islands.

Of this labored device Rizal might have said that it was but glass, and the very sun shone through it. Henceforth every movement he made was to be watched and reported, and here was the spy provided by the Government, clumsy-clever, as usual, and forcible-feeble.10

Yet even this incident, as things fell out, was to contribute something to his fame and little joy to his enemies. The body-guard assigned to him was a young Spaniard, Lieutenant José de Andrade, born into the governing class and fulfilled with all Spanish prejudices. Although his associates were of the type that Rizal had so mercilessly pilloried, so that in “Noli Me Tangere” he could hardly fail to recognize portraits of intimate friends, Lieutenant de Andrade could not more than other men withstand the singularly magnetic charm of this unusual personality.11 From his initial status as official spy and watch-dog, he became Rizal’s devoted friend. Together they took long walking trips into the country, climbed mountains, compared notes and experiences, and recited verses. It is to be supposed that the lieutenant returned the reports he was assigned to make, but reasonably certain that they contained no matter that gratified the hatred of the reactionary element.

We have noted what frenzy of consternation seized upon that element at the lightest whisper of revolt [142]among the oppressed people. It was one of the invariable characteristics of the Spanish domination, an intermittent fever under the empire of which all reason or semblance of reason went to the winds and men outside the asylums acted like raving maniacs. Such manifestations of this strange psychology (only to be explained by recalling the Spaniard’s total misunderstanding of the Filipino nature) as followed the uprising of 1872 were still remembered by oppressor and oppressed. It was now revived for both as knowledge spread of this strange and powerful book. Besides the unendurable smart of its lash, the governing class saw in it consequences of the gravest import. It was standing and irrefutable evidence that the contempt for the native upon which Spanish rule proceeded was baseless; a native had created literature of the highest order. Still more alarming, it threatened to lead the way, to offer the example, to pioneer ceaseless ambuscades of the same kind, to show that the thing superstitiously held to be above all attack could be attacked safely and even with ridicule and this deadly laughter. If the author of “Noli Me Tangere” should escape without punishment, imitators might be expected on every side. Any native anywhere might take up similar weapons; hence, the white man’s supremacy in all the East was in jeopardy.

It is not easy for the Occidental mind to grasp the power this suggestion has upon men charged with the holding in subjection of vast Asiatic populations; but it is to such men always the first consideration. It must be, in fact; because their situation is so abnormal that in times of cool reflection they must wonder [143]at themselves. With bands of soldiers insignificant in numbers they are required to impose upon millions a sovereignty that the millions generally loathe. Diligently, then, they must support the fiction of the white man’s superiority, support it day and night without ceasing and be not too finical about means or manner. Doubtless, to many the task soon becomes congenial, so easily is race hatred bred in places out of the observation of Europe, and so strong is the addiction to it in some hearts not yet well removed from the stone age. Yet there have often appeared in these grimy scenes Europeans that instinctively hated the business and knew well enough that at bottom the real reason for dominating these subject peoples was dirty profits dirtily obtained.12 But these very men, again and again, by the clamors about them and by the panic nature of the fears of what the aroused brown millions might do, have been swept despite themselves into acts at which their better natures revolted.

Governor-General Terrero was of this order, and even above its average. He was willing at the instigation of angry friars to assign a spy to watch Rizal but was determined to avoid the silly and stupid crime of shooting or garroting or even exiling a man whose offense was that he had written a novel some persons did not like. In other days and other administrations men had been shot or garroted or exiled on charges as flimsy, but light was breaking in Spain; even in the face of tradition and old frowning privilege, light was breaking. The first rift in the medieval eclipse was [144]driven by the sword of Napoleon. Slowly ever since it has been widening to echoes of the world’s advance elsewhere. In 1888 the governing class in Spain had become aware of the scorn of that world and began to feel a little the sting of it. Not much, then, nor since, as we are to see in this narrative, and might illustrate by other citations. Lo, it was this same Spain, and so late as 1909, that murdered Francisco Ferrer, the most learned man in her dominions, for but teaching her children in the manner of other nations—nations so far in the front of her that, looking back, they could scarce descry the dust of her sluggard footsteps!

PHOTOGRAPH OF AN OIL PAINTING OF HIS SISTER BY RIZAL—MISS SATURNINA RIZAL

Terrero, at least, was not indifferent to the verdict of enlightened mankind; yet the pressure upon him to take some action against this atrocious leveler and dangerous character was greater than he could withstand. It came from the power that made or broke governor-generals, the power of the orders, supreme in the Islands, supreme in Spain on any matter that related to the Islands. By the beginning of 1888 their demand had reached a point where he must compromise with it, and he “advised” Rizal to leave the Philippines at once. The word is equivocal and was meant so to be; the real significance of “advice” in this instance was an unofficial order of deportation.13

Rizal obeyed, but not until he had given to the world new evidence of the versatility of a genius to which there is scarcely a companion in human records. We are to remember, first of all, he was a physician that had chosen diseases of the eye for his specialty, [145]wherein he stood in a place of distinction before his profession. He was next an artist in sculpture and painting; a poet; a master of terse and nervous prose in Spanish, in his native Tagalog, and in ten other languages. He was next a scientist, distinguished in original research, already honored with the regard of leading European minds in many branches of recondite knowledge. This, it will be admitted, is a most unusual range of pursuits. From them economics might be regarded as far removed and negligible. Yet he now showed that his many-sided mind could enlist its energies in even the “dismal science” and his skill in expression could illuminate it.

Taxes in the Philippines had always been haphazard. They were levied without system or anything akin to system. Only one feature about them could be said to be uniform: everywhere the wealthy evaded their just share of the taxation burden; everywhere the poor bore more than was right for them to bear. The history of Spanish rule was a succession of promises of reform, usually wrenched by an insurrection from the unwilling lips of a governor-general and ignored when the time of danger had passed. In the year of grace 1888 came such a reformatory spasm about taxes. When it reached Calamba it was received with exceptional interest for the reason that the Dominicans, with whom the householders had an ancient feud, owned a great deal of property there and on it paid very little.

This, though outside of Rizal’s studies, was a subject all within the purpose to which he had consecrated [146]himself. He was to live for his people; he was to do whatever came to his hand to help them to rise. Here was a poignant illustration of the vast and complicated evils that weighed them down. Since his first interview with Terrero he had been living at Calamba in his mother’s house, practising with brilliant success his profession and lending his influence to every project that seemed to promise good for the Filipinos. His prestige and influence had become great. Despite all the efforts of the Government, knowledge of his book and of its meaning was wide-spread. Copies were continually being smuggled into the country and passed from hand to hand. Often at the approach of officers they were buried in fields or rubbish-heaps and dug up again when the danger was gone. A Filipino that could read was a popular man, then, in his community; he found much employment reading “Noli Me Tangere” to groups that cowered in the brush, maybe, a sentinel posted to give warning of the approach of the Civil Guard. The result of all this could be but one thing. From the mass of the despised Filipinos he was emerging as their natural leader.

He observed now the approach of the taxation issue and, one might say, went forth to meet it. His facile and powerful mind absorbed the whole business. Taxation he studied until he seemed to know more about it than any other man in the Islands. In the manner of the true modern investigator, he sought for facts, not arguments: what the poor man paid upon his small holding, what the rich owner paid upon his great estate. When these had been gathered, he reduced them all to a report that the overburdened taxpayers [147]took for their own and presented to the Government impressively signed by their local officers.14

He had done more here, very likely, than he himself knew. The document thus prepared became the rallying-point for another of those struggles between the people and the Government that increasingly signaled the downfall of the existing System. Slowly the nineteenth century was closing in upon the sixteenth, democracy upon the autocracy that at the borders of civilization still outlived the date of its normal demise. Rizal’s work on taxation showed the Filipinos what they could do by uniting their efforts. In their country, too, the exploiter held the exploited by fomenting among them envyings, jealousies, and caste; a process that everywhere attends (and usually comprises) the white man’s burden, and whereof India offers the chief surviving example. In the face of every obstacle and discouragement the Filipinos were now learning the lesson of union, and the only shadow union cast forward was revolt.

Rizal’s leadership was a phrase we used in a foregoing paragraph. It is to be noted that he came into that eminence without an effort of his own, without planning or connivance. He was elated to find greatness thus thrust upon him and would not have been human otherwise; yet to be conspicuous had never been any real part of his scheme of life, and when elation was at its height it never obscured the fact that what he really sought was a result for the country and not kudos for himself. But he was the most famous of living Filipinos; knowledge of his place among the [148]world’s scientists was now general among his countrymen; those that had not been able to read “Noli Me Tangere” nor to hear it read were becoming aware by common report of the nature of its protest. He was the one man that had been able to make the bitter cry of the Filipinos audible to the world. He had best formulated and expressed the wrongs under which those people suffered. He alone, with this fierce derision, had dared to defy the power of the friars and the brutal fists of the Civil Guards. Naturally, the people turned to him, and the unanimity with which they sought his counsel might have shown the Spaniards again among what fires they were walking; for the spirit that gave rise to the popularity of Rizal was even more significant than anything he said in his book. Before that book was written the spirit had been there; it was growing while the friars debated the best means to suppress the audacious author; it was certain to break out into open revolt—if not under Rizal, then under some one else.

In view of these conditions, Rizal has been subjected to some criticism for obeying the sugar-coated deportation-order of the governor-general and taking himself from the Islands at a time so momentous. The criticism is not now important but, to keep straight the thread of narrative, may be examined here. To say nothing of the obvious fact that, as the power of the governor-general was absolute, hesitation to obey would be followed by an explicit command, other things were to be considered. All Rizal’s instincts strove against the idea of advance by physical violence. He believed in the weapons of the spirit, not [149]in the carnal sword. To defy the governor-general’s “advice” meant but one thing. It would be a direct appeal to physical force; it would be followed by revolution and slaughter; and to these he felt he could never consent.

Moreover, he was up to this time not in favor of immediate separation from Spain. On this issue his views have been distorted by controversialists that have selected expressions seemingly favorable to one side or the other of a disputed question. Long after events had wholly changed the face and the substance of Philippine affairs it was the custom of persons opposed to Philippine independence to cite Rizal in support of their arguments. This was unfairly done. Reference to one undeniable fact should be enough to dispose of the fabricated uncertainty about his views on this question. All the reforms he strove for looked to independence and could not look to anything else. It was not for academic satisfaction he desired increase of culture among his people, but that with wisdom and confidence they might take their place among the nations of earth. It was not for the mere sake of teaching that he desired to see them taught, but that they might be taught to be free.

When we recognize this basis, which shows plainly enough in his writings,15 his attitude toward Spain, otherwise mysterious or contradictory, is consistent enough to suit any taste. He wished Spain to grant reforms, to adopt a system of education that would meet some, at least, of the urgent needs of the people, to unchain the press, to remake the grotesque courts, [150]to recognize the people of the Islands as human beings, and to give them something to live for. The effect of these changes, he well knew, would be to release the Filipino mind, and when that should be set free the result could be only one thing. It was darkness and ignorance that enabled Spain to rule; the symbols of all her power were of the night. But he thought the reforms that would allow the Filipino to stand upright before the world Spain itself must grant; to try to wrest them from her, gun in hand, would be to miss them altogether. Spain must grant them. True, she would thereby be lighting her own eventual exit from the Islands, but he was able to make himself believe (for a time) that the Spanish Government could be persuaded, or led by events, to do this thing. This was a lovely dream and possible only to one of faith larger than the average man’s in the innate strength of a cause just and reasonable. It was not really in him inconsistent that all this time he was under no illusion about the bespattered record and reactionary tendencies of the controlling power in Spain; what he thought, apparently, was that by bringing home to that power a sense of the world’s contempt and urging the need of sweeping reforms such agitation would generate its own compulsive and undeniable force. He is not the only man in history in whom the sense of justice was so strong it obscured its total want in others.

But even so, in a way, what confronted him and the Philippines at the moment was beyond choosing. The immediate demand must be for the reforms that lay in Spain’s power to give or to withhold; these were imperative; [151]that a start may be made upon the road, let us unite and demand these first reforms.

There can be no manner of doubt that these were the ideas that controlled him when Terrero “advised” him to depart, and none that in the next few years his views on these subjects contracted as he looked more searchingly upon the troglodyte methods of the Spanish rulers. He was the less reluctant to leave the Philippines because his private life, apart from his career of service, had been darkened by the catastrophe of his love-affair; he had come home to find Leonora married. Two other impulses concurred to urge him away. The success of “Noli Me Tangere” (despite so many and powerful measures taken to suppress the book) and the manifest effect of it upon the Filipino mind must have strongly reminded him of that sequel he had vaguely intended when he completed the last chapters of his novel. He could not hope to accomplish any such work at home; he could not hope, even if he should write it there, to find a publisher for it in the Islands nor to smuggle out the manuscript. To write it he must be abroad. Next, he had seen much of Europe but nothing of that American Republic about which Jagor’s prophecy had so inflamed his youthful mind. Here, by Jagor’s logic, was the power destined some day to transform all the regions bordering upon the Pacific, and he had never seen it. This was also the country whose history and spirit he had glimpsed in the “Lives of the Presidents” that he so eagerly read and returned to. In that country farmers’ boys, canal-boat drivers, tailors’ apprentices, rail-splitters, journeyman printers, any son of the plain people could [152]rise to any place, even the highest. It was a country that conspicuously had won to freedom and independence out of a gross tyranny. Therefore, it had a peculiar claim to his attention. As he must go somewhere, he planned to return to Europe by way of the United States.

He was relieved of all anxiety about his mother. The eyesight of her youth had been restored to her.

This time there was no difficulty about his passport and no need that he should, like an escaping criminal, steal at night from the city. The responsible powers were but too glad to have him go. He sailed from Manila on February 28, 1888, going first to Hong-Kong. There and in the neighboring city of Macao he visited and talked with many refugees and exiles of 1872, annus hystericus in Philippine history. By deportation or flight that year the islands had lost hundreds of their best minds and ablest servitors. That many of these were afterward proved to have had nothing to do with the uprising for which they were banished or hunted is superfluous evidence of the mad psychology of the time. In most of these cases there were no trials, no investigations, no queries. Some one frenzied with fear imagined the man across the street to be behaving in a way that indicated conspiracy; to the Ladrones with him! Some one else saw two men in the street salute each other with suspicious gravity; the next morning both were on their way to the Carolines.16 The Herrara family had maintained a back yard quarrel with the Venturas. Mr. Ventura [153]was denounced and spent the rest of his life in loneliness at Macao. It was the Lion’s Mouth and the cachets of the Bastile, revived for the astonished instruction of the age of steam. Cases are in the records of men that were seen carrying home bundles—fish, maybe, or steak. “Bombs!” cried the officers, under the sway of emotion, and that night haled the unfortunate householder from his bed. Sometimes the intended victims of these maniacal manifestations received friendly hints before the blow fell and had time to flee to the woods, whence they made their way out of the country, to live, very likely, in the utmost poverty.

Such was the lot, in fact, of most of the men deported. One of them, a learned lawyer, the ornament of the Philippine bar, as innocent of the conspiracy as the premier of Spain himself, was twenty years later picking up the crumbs of a living by trying to practise a little Spanish law in London.17

It is to be assumed that conversation with such men did nothing to soften Rizal’s spirit or to cool his ardor of service. They were the living monuments to the hopeless incapacity of the existing System to govern or to advance. From his days and nights in their company he passed to Japan, where in the space of one month he achieved the almost incredible feat of mastering the Japanese language. But for the testimony of the facts the hardiest biographer would scarce dare the assertion. Rizal came to Japan with scarce a word of Japanese; he remained but one month; before he departed he was speaking it so well that the natives [154]thought he was a countryman of theirs, and he was acting as their interpreter. Thereafter he could speak and write Japanese as readily as English or German.

At Hong-Kong he had been somewhat surprised to find himself invited to the Spanish consulate and urged to abide there.18 At Tokio this experience was repeated, the Spanish legation offering him its hospitality and even suggesting employment as a translator. The purposes of these advances were clear enough. He was one that the Government willed, after its custom, to have always under surveillance; to have him beneath a legation roof was easier and cheaper than to hire secret service men.

From Yokohama he sailed for San Francisco, astonishing his fellow-travelers by conversing with all the aliens in their own tongues, whatever these might be. Among them was a Japanese that knew not a word of English. Rizal attached himself to this unfortunate and acted as his interpreter all the way to London.

When he landed at San Francisco, April 28, 1888, his first experiences under the American flag were hardly calculated to swell his enthusiasm for the republic. It happened to be a time when a terror of epidemics was afoot, and he might have reminded himself from what he saw that sporadic hysteria is not the exclusive possession of the Spaniards nor of anybody else. What a whisper of insurrection meant to a Spanish government officer in Manila, a vision of a cholera-germ might signify to a health-officer in America. The health authorities of San Francisco were then busily [155]quarantining everything that came into the port. To them the fact that Rizal’s steamer carried a clean bill of health meant nothing, nor that she had been properly inspected and cleared at Yokohama, nor that no disease had developed among her people on the way over. Who knew what horrent microbes might be lurking in her woodwork or snugging in the coal-hole? Therefore, authority decreed to hold her day after day in quarantine while the passengers chafed and fidgeted and the British among them complained to their consul and threatened an international scandal.19

Rizal seems to have endured the affliction with his customary philosophy. From the deck he made sketches of the new country that thus slammed its doors in his face—among them a reproduction of the revenue flag, with its eagle and perpendicular bars, which he thought was a novel and taking design. He did not fail to observe, however, that while the human beings on the steamer were rigidly quarantined the cargo was unloaded, and he wondered how infection could be carried by the passengers and not by the freight. When he was released, he went to the old Palace Hotel in San Francisco and spent several days observing the strange life of the city. Thence, by train over the mountains, noting with astonishment how great an area of the country through which he passed was uninhabited, and apparently being rather entertained than enraged by the horrors of the American sleeping-car. Two things of much greater moment [156]impressed him sadly. One was the race prejudice against the Chinese in San Francisco (then at its height), and the other the race prejudice against the Negro, manifested in some other parts of the country.

Afterward he wrote this summary of his swallow flight across the continent:

I visited the larger cities of America. They have splendid buildings and magnificent ideals. America is a home-land for the poor that are willing to work. I traveled across America, and saw the majestic cascade of Niagara. I was in New York, the great city, but there everything is new. I went to see some relics of Washington, that great man who, I fear, has not his equal in this century.

From Albany he had gone forward by the Hudson River, and was greatly impressed with its magnificent scenery, but thought that, in the way of commerce alone, the Pasig was busier. From New York he sailed on the steamer City of Rome, then esteemed a maritime masterpiece, and reached London, where he found lodgings with the organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral and settled himself for a season of work and study.

Part of this work became afterward an invaluable legacy to his countrymen and literature. In his youth he had heard of a wonderful book, of which only two or three copies existed in all the world, a book written in 160720 about the Philippine Islands and their people as they were then. A blunt, honest old Spaniard, Antonio de Morga, had written it, apparently with no purpose except to tell the truth, an impulse that in [157]itself for his times was enough to confer distinction. Other Spanish writers of that day had written to create desired impressions, to justify theories or to excuse the Spanish aggression, whereby the lies had dripped like oil from their pens. De Morga had as good a chance as anybody else to know the Islands; he had accompanied one of the earliest of the Spanish expeditions and for seven years had been a part of its exploits. One of the few copies of his book, “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas,” was in the British Museum. Rizal formed the ambitious design to rescue it from oblivion and republish it, annotated and clarified.

With some difficulty he ran the barrage so strangely erected around this institution and found the precious volume to be all that had been said in praise of it. De Morga’s observations, evidently unbiased, established what Rizal had long surmised and then asserted, that the Filipinos had been historically wronged. The sea-coast folk, at least, the bulk of the nation, had not been more truly savages when Magellan came than the Spaniards themselves. From de Morga’s accounts it was easy to show that the Filipino’s spirit, activities, and general welfare had been in no way bettered by Spanish rule. Arts, industries, products in the Islands, and even energy, seemed to have been more observable among the people in de Morga’s day than at the close of the nineteenth century.

This was a matter of grave importance to the Islanders and so remained long after Rizal’s labors had ceased. The Spanish excused to the world their presence and their cruelties alike on the one ground that the Indio was a savage. Suppose him without [158]European restraint and European inspiration, they said; he would revert to his caves, his raw meat, and his bows and arrows. To learn that he was heir to these centuries of dignity and worth was not only disconcerting but raised a question to which there was no answer. If he was as civilized as the Spaniard, why had he not the Spaniard’s right to be free?

De Morga described at length the arts and industries that flourished in the Philippines long before a Spanish flag had fluttered above their waters; the excellence in weaving, in metalwork, agriculture, government, domestic arts, commerce, navigation; how the natives lived and worked, what good ships they built, what busy marts they had erected.21 On this Rizal’s observations are shrewd and witty, but he sometimes allowed his joy over the vindication of his people and of his own theories about them to sweep him out of that coolly scientific attitude he usually maintained about such things. For this he may be forgiven. He was sensitive, he was proud; he had suffered for the unjust disparagement of his race; he was dealing with evidence that the Filipino stock was as good as any other, as much entitled to development in its own way.

While he was making these studies he found relaxation in athletics. He screwed together some of his regularly apportioned time to get into the fields and [159]play. He learned to box and to play cricket; he had long been an expert fencer.22 At cricket he was so good that it seems a pity baseball came so late into his country; it is a game that would have exactly suited his tastes and inclinings. In the combination of alert mentality and swift physical action that baseball requires must be something peculiarly attractive to the Filipino, for do but observe the astonishing records he has made at it, exciting the admiration of the most experienced judges. Rizal had never forgotten the training in physical exercise he had received from his uncle; he still loved to fence, to ride, to run, to take long, swift walks. His faith was all in the mental health that is fortified by physical well-being; when all his mental enginery had been working full tilt he found ease in the open air, in quick motion and the trees and flowers. His body was as supple as a wrestler’s, and in support of his theories of reciprocal mental and physical soundness it is to be remarked that in all his life he seems never to have been seriously ill.

In London he found congenial company in the household of Dr. Antonio Regidor, a Filipino that had suffered exile in the Cavite frenzy of 1872. Dr. Regidor had three charming daughters. Rizal’s ideas of life and conduct may be gathered from the fact that when, after a time, he discovered that one of these young ladies was forming an attachment for him, instead of being elated he was much troubled in his mind and concluded that in such circumstances the best thing he could do was to take himself out of the young lady’s [160]sight. For once the paths of duty and expediency fell together. By this time he had completed his work at the museum and he now departed for Paris.

There, Juan Luna,23 the Filipino painter, with whom Rizal had formed a close friendship while both were in Madrid, 1882 to 1885, had now made his home and Rizal seems to have rejoiced to renew his associations with his talented countryman. It is certain that the stupidity of race prejudice, which has so many other and blacker wrongs to answer for, has deprived this man of a certain part of his just reward. Yet he was a great painter, the winner of prizes in many European competitions, and an artist that Paris delighted to honor.24 A contemporary and fellow Filipino, Hidalgo, was hardly less successful; so seldom are their achievements counted in any summary of the Malay that most unjustly America is still unaware of them. Rizal usually spent his Sundays in Luna’s studio, sometimes fencing, sometimes talking art, of which he was still, for all his troubles, distractions, and complex activities, the steadfast worshiper. [161]

Though all this time out of the sight of his enemies in Manila, he seems never to have been out of their minds; authoritative evidence that in his novel he had told the truth about them. Theirs was a hatred not unmixed with reasonable fears of his popularity and of his powerful pen. They waited until he was at a safe distance before they moved against him, and then in a way that verified the ancient adage concerning the union of the essential qualities of bully and coward. They struck at him through his family, left now without defense.

WOOD CARVING BY RIZAL

His famous statue of the Holy Cross

His sister Lucia was married to Mariano Herbosa, who in Manila had been Rizal’s dear friend. Herbosa died soon after Rizal’s departure, and his death gave to the friars an opportunity for a revenge as uncouth and revolting as far-fetched. On the ground that Herbosa had not received final absolution before his death, they ordered his body to be dug up and cast out of the church where it had been buried.1 To the family of a sincere Catholic this involved an almost insupportable grief, an almost maddening wrong. That they might give to their action the semblance of legality the friars had telegraphed the archbishop at Manila [162]that Rizal’s brother-in-law had died after neglecting his church duties and abandoning the confessional.2 Then they hypocritically asked what they should do in the case, knowing full well that on such a presentation only one response was possible. Protests and appeals by the family won no mitigation of the harsh sentence; they are said to have been stifled or diverted on the way, so that the archbishop never saw them; and the wife and children must bear the taunts their impotence invited as well as the indignity to the memory of husband and father. It appears that the charges against Herbosa were mere inventions; he had with fidelity performed all his religious duties.

No one connected even remotely or nominally with the bold delineator of friar government was safe; through the persecution of his relatives he himself could be made to suffer. His brother Paciano was now banished to Mindoro on some blown-up charge of thinking sedition. The pretext was nothing; anything would serve, from barratry to simony. Another brother-in-law was still available, Manuel Hidalgo by name. Him the authorities caught on a charge of sacrilege. A child of his had died of cholera, and he had buried it without the ceremonies of the church. The civil law prescribed in cholera cases immediate burial, and the health-officers demanded it. A poor man in such an emergency might well have been distracted between conflicting decrees of church and state. It seems that in other such cases when the head of the family obeyed the civil precepts he heard nothing of sacrilege. But they were not brothers-in-law of Rizal. [163]Pounce, came the church upon the wretched offender. The next thing he knew he was deported.3

Next two of Rizal’s sisters fell into the same net. Sedition and sacrilege were handy offenses. They could be preferred against anybody for anything.

His father was the next victim. In his case the plain purpose was ruin, to be achieved by means suggested to ill minds through an out-cropping of one man’s childish malice. Mr. Mercado raised prize turkeys. The intendant, or manager, of the Dominican estate, which claimed ownership in all the land in the region of the Mercado homestead, had a nice taste in these birds when skilfully cooked, and it was his pleasing habit to demand from time to time gifts of the choicest of the Mercado turkeys to adorn his own table. The time came when it was no longer possible thus to propitiate the petty tyrant; disease had carried off the firstlings of the flock, and what were left were absolutely needed to replenish the breed.

From homely incidents like these we see the Philippines as they were and illuminate again the unforgettable pages of Rizal’s stories. The intendant made no secret of his purpose to revenge himself; they had at least the virtue of candor, these little satraps. He conceived that his immortal dignity had suffered because he had been refused turkeys when there were no turkeys, and nothing would ease the sting of that burning wrong but retribution. When the next rent-day came, Mr. Mercado found that his rent had been doubled. He paid the increase and made no complaint. The next rent-day he found that again the rate had [164]been doubled. This likewise he paid without protest. When the next rent-day came and he found the rate was again increased he made the fatal blunder of appealing to the courts.4

Aggrieved members of the governing class must have joyed to learn of so excellent an opportunity to salve their hurts, also, in this medicament of revenge. Here was the father of the hated José Rizal delivered into their hands. They took the case from the justice of the peace at Calamba, in whose jurisdiction it rightfully belonged, and sent it before a judge whose decision they must have felt sure they could control. There had now become involved in the case a question of broader moment. Mr. Mercado’s sturdy resistance had heartened the other tenants to revive the ancient and unsettled issue of the title to the lands. For many years careful men had held that the Dominicans, who assumed to own all this region and to collect all rents from it, had no right to any of it. The select judge before whom came these questions lost no time in deciding them against Mercado and the other tenants. Mercado appealed, and thereby precipitated one of the strangest incidents of the story.

Of a sudden appeared at Calamba a battery of artillery and a company of soldiers, who ostentatiously took possession of the town as if it had been in a state of armed revolt. At this the inhabitants blinked and gasped, for nowhere on earth lay a more peaceable community. They were not left long in doubt as to what was toward. The commandant of the troops [165]issued a curt order to Mercado and the other tenants involved in the litigation to remove within twenty-four hours all their buildings from the land they had occupied. An appeal was pending, a fact that in all civilized countries would have been sufficient to stay proceedings until the appeal could be decided. It was of no such validity here. To comply with the savage order was physically impossible; there were not hands enough in Calamba nor in all the country around. At the end of the next day the agents of the authorities set fire to all the houses, and among them perished from human sight and treasuring the house where José Rizal was born.5

Across this repulsive story glowers a face permanently evil in history. The governor-general that connived at these barbarities where he did not order them was Emiliano Weyler, immortal in the records of Cuba as “The Butcher,” accused of deeds there so horrible they can never be put into print, accused in the Philippines of huge peculations as well as stupid cruelties, a man that seemed to delight in cruelty as other men delight in kindness. It was he that thought, “in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things,” of the expedient of overawing Calamba and the courts with artillery and martial law upon the heads of the litigants; it was he that had made the most show of a violent hatred of Rizal and furnished the proof that the persecution of Francisco Mercado was revenge upon Francisco Mercado’s son. When Weyler transferred his rule of blood and iron to Cuba, he left in the official archives evidence of the real nature of the [166]proceedings. He can have had no suspicion that he was preparing evidence of his own iniquity to be given to the world through the nation he most hated. His papers were still in the archives August 13, 1898, when Manila surrendered to Dewey and Merritt. Among them was a copy of a letter he had sent at this time to certain of the friar landlords, expressing his full sympathy with them and (with a characteristic touch) the pleasure he had in serving them against the tenantry.6

In the spot from which it had been thus evicted the Mercado family had lived for many years. There could have come upon these kinsfolk of Rizal no sterner test of their fortitude. Before it they went their way undaunted. At Los Baños was a small house to which Mr. Mercado had title. There he led his family to a refuge and continued his fight against the friars.

Rizal was in London when the news reached him of the petty vengeance wreaked upon the body of his brother-in-law. There had been launched some months before by the Filipino colony in Madrid a semimonthly magazine called “La Solidaridad,” the object of which was to arouse and unify the Filipinos and wrest reforms from the Spanish Government. With impunity it could be published in Madrid but could not have lived a day in Manila, a fact sufficiently indicating the power and value of publicity. Spain, with the eyes of Europe upon her, did not dare to do at home the things she did daily in the Philippines; dared not to do them [167]or dared not to avow them. Distance, creating an impenetrable screen, created also in effect a transition from the modern to the antique world. There was much freedom of the press in Spain, a freedom, as we have remarked, partly sustained by the incessant threat of rebellion in Barcelona. Therefore, as a singular fact and almost comically incongruous, “La Solidaridad,”7 with its acrid criticism of the Spanish Government, circulated freely in Spain and was not allowed to enter the Philippines. One of its editors was Marcelo H. del Pilar, a resolute and restless man, type of the intransigent, the indomitable and professional revolutionist. Before long he and Rizal quarreled,8 for he was all for revolution by physical force and Rizal was always asserting its futility. A few years later del Pilar died on his way home to start his long meditated uprising. Untimely was his death if any man’s ever was. He would have reached the Philippines to find in full swing a revolution wherein his tireless energies and fiery spirit would have found an outlet at which men might have wondered.

But before they quarreled Rizal had written much for del Pilar and “La Solidaridad;” poems, articles, editorials, all directed toward Philippine reforms. When he heard of the indignity put for his sake upon the name and clay of Herbosa, he took up his pen and poured out for his journal an account of the incident and his feelings about it that scalded the church authorities [168]with a flood of the short, hot sentences he knew so well how to write—scoriæ and hot lava from the volcano. When the news of the attack upon his father came he was living in Ghent, whither he had retired to write his new novel “El Filibusterismo.” The effect upon him of the persecution of his family is to be observed in the work he was doing at the time; in one place he makes direct reference to it. He has been telling the story of Cabesang Tales, a peaceful Filipino farmer, driven to brigandage by the extortions of the friars and the savageries of the Civil Guards. Then he says, with mingled rage and sarcasm:

Calm yourselves, peaceful inhabitants of Calamba! None of you is named Tales, none of you has committed any crime.… You cleared your fields, on them you have spent the labor of your whole lives, your savings, your vigils and privations, and you have been despoiled of them, driven from your homes, with the rest forbidden to show you hospitality! Not content with outraging justice, they have trampled upon the sacred altars of your country! You have served Spain and the king, and when in their name you have asked for justice you were banished without trial, torn from your wives’ arms and your children’s caresses! Any one of you has suffered more than Cabesang Tales, and yet not one of you has received justice. Neither pity nor humanity has been shown to you—you have been persecuted even beyond the tomb, as was Mariano Herbosa. Weep, or laugh, there in those lonely isles, where you wander vaguely, uncertain of the future! Spain, the generous Spain, is watching over you and soon or late, you will have justice!9

[169]

It is the bitter sarcasm of a soul stung beyond endurance with the sense of great wrong.

As a work of fictional art, “El Filibusterismo” is not equal to “Noli Me Tangere.” It is likely that Rizal knew this and as likely that he cared not, having now another purpose than to tell a story powerfully. He is working with rather less of a connected story and rather less of the clear dramatic prevision. The fates of such characters as he left unrelated in “Noli Me Tangere” he follows to the end, but on the way stops to picture lives and conditions not vitally interwoven with the climacteric. Yet in one way this book is the superior in interest, for it reveals the change that had been coming over him in these two years. Slowly there had been erased in his creed the belief in the good intentions of Spain; slowly (and reluctantly, no doubt) he had come to face the thought that to appeal to Spain for reforms was useless and the Filipinos must achieve by their own efforts the changes that would lead to their redemption. That these efforts must be of a peaceful character was a sheet-anchor of faith to which he still clung, or tried to cling, and yet there is evidence that he felt it dragging as more and more the hopeless stupidity of Spain was revealed to him.10 [170]

Evidence of the change in his essential point of view may be found even in the dedication of the new book. It is boldly and uncompromisingly to the men that, perishing on Bagumbayan Field, in 1872, the gored victims of the System, made their names immortal.

To the memory of the priests [it reads], Don Mariano Gomez (85 years old), Don José Burgos (30 years old), and Don Jacinto Zamora (35 years old), executed in Bagumbayan Field, February 28, 1872.

The church, by refusing to degrade you, has placed in doubt the crime that has been imputed to you; the Government, by surrounding your trials with mystery and shadows, causes the belief that there was some error, committed in fatal moments; and all the Philippines, by worshiping your memory and calling you martyrs, in no sense recognizes your culpability. In so far, therefore, as your complicity in the Cavite mutiny is not clearly proved, as you may or may not have been patriots, and as you may or may not have cherished sentiments for justice and for liberty, I have the right to dedicate my work to you as victims of the evil that I undertake to combat. And while we await expectantly under Spain some day to restore your good name and cease to be answerable for your death, let these pages serve as a tardy wreath of dried leaves over your unknown tombs, and let it be understood that every one that without clear proof attacks your memory, stains his hands in your blood!

[171]

Here is a foretaste of the strange, new, and passionate bitterness that was coming upon him, not heretofore discernible in his writings nor in his life, the nettle smart of a growing disillusion. Something there is, too, that in another man would surely savor of cynicism. “You may or may not have been patriots,” “You may or may not have cherished sentiments for justice and for liberty,” are phrases not of a piece with his old-time faith. The wormwood that flavors these few lines is perceptible throughout the book. In “Noli Me Tangere” the stern arraignment of the friars and the Spanish officers is modulated with many good-natured pictures of Philippine life, with descriptions of the beautiful Philippine country-side, and with gentle fun-making of popular follies. In the sequel11 there are no relieving touches. It is hot metal always overflowing and burning whatever it touches. [172]

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.”1 [173]

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. [174]

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. [175]

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.2 Easily, then, we can [176]see her once more a lover of peace, a home of justice, and as of old merry, smiling, hospitable, audacious.

SCULPTURE BY RIZAL WHEN A MERE STUDENT, “THE POWER OF SCIENCE OVER DEATH”

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. [177]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. [178]

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 [179]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 [180]hand, from the accursed altars, the bloody and suicidal dagger of revolution!

Cæsar, we, who are about to die, salute thee!3

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. [181]

The Indio that had startled the Spanish colony in Manila by daring to call the Philippines “my fatherland” proved his loyalty to the country he adored by serving it with a discriminating zeal. He would have been more picturesque if he had been well galvanized by Chauvin, but less useful. His mind, though powerful, could work in only one way, which was in orderly motions. These prevented him from dwelling so much on his country’s wrongs that he forgot his country’s faults. For this reason, and because he could have no heated bearings in his mental processes, he was Filipinas’s greatest asset. In “Noli Me Tangere” he showed that he understood well the native defects (products of the System) and would spare them no more than he spared the friars. But it was for his countrymen’s good that he rebuked them, like a wise father correcting his children; and whatever might be his employments he never forgot two great vital visions, Filipinas fast bound in the prison-house and education tardily on its way to set her free.

With the same purpose of helping this good angel the sooner to smite the prison locks, he now set himself an unusual task. He was to master French; not after the fashion of the schools, for that he already had, nor for the mere pleasure of acquiring it, but to be able to write in it as if it were his native tongue. [182]He knew what he was about in this; if his novels should fail to arouse the Filipinos he was determined to appeal to Europe in behalf of his country, and he conceived that he could best do this in French. Therefore with indefatigable ardor he pursued the French verb and the other phenomena of Gallic speech into their remotest fastnesses. He took what might be called post-postgraduate work in these arid excursions, employing the help of unusual scholars and including colloquial French with French of the Academy. When we come upon the fact that at the end of these labors he was able to prepare as a text-book for French students a volume of French exercises1 we may perceive that his success was out of the ordinary.

In Paris when the exposition of 1889 came on he was struck with the fact that in that vast and imposing procession of the children of earth his own people, whom he felt and knew to be as worthy as the others, had no place. Therefore he organized an international league to make known to the world the facts about the Filipinos and to refute the slanders that Spanish writers had sown thickly in European literature. He called this society the “Association Internationale des Philippinistes.” Dr. Blumentritt was president, Dr. Rost vice-president, and Dr. Planchut of Paris one of the directors.2 If Rizal was a nationalist, he was also an internationalist; a fact that must be already apparent in these annals. No doubt, being wise about [183]other things, he was not deceived into thinking that internationalism could come by any other than the nationalist route. The first of the declared objects of his Association Internationale was to summon an international congress. Others were to study the Philippines historically and scientifically, to create a Philippine library and museum of Philippine objects, to publish books on Philippine topics, and to arouse public interest in these objects.

That the world looked with some disdain upon his people, that under the spell of the Spanish pen it ignored the honorable record of Philippine culture and the stirring Philippine history, were thorns that gave his mind no rest. None knew so well as he that this misprision was rankly unjust. In the face of almost universal opinion in Europe, he knew that the Malay mind, though different, was not inferior; he knew that what it wanted was no more than the sunlight and free air. In all ways the general verdict was askew: the Filipinos were not even innately lazy, as hundreds of writers had asserted, hundreds still repeated, and doubtless other hundreds will continue to parrot for years to come. He knew that lazy people could never have made the progress the Filipino had made before the evil day of the Spanish flag. The respect he had for the latent powers of his countrymen sprang from research and not from prejudice. It was true enough, but not a truth that he could keep refrigerated in scientific abstractions. It burned and struggled in him like something fighting to get free, and he relieved himself of an intolerable protest by writing (for “La Solidaridad”) a brochure on the subject. [184]

“The Indolence of the Filipino”3 it is called, and, if he had written nothing else, thoughtful men would still admire him for the cool, masterly marshaling of his reasonings in this. He purposes to deal with the truth. “Let us calmly examine the facts,” he says in beginning, “using on our part all the impartiality of which a man is capable who is convinced that there is no redemption except upon solid bases of virtue.” Two pages later he says:

Examining well, then, all the scenes and all the men that we have known from childhood, and examining the life of our country, we believe that indolence does exist there. The Filipinos, who can measure up with the most active peoples in the world, will doubtless not repudiate this admission, for it is true that in the Philippines one works and struggles against the climate, against nature, and against man. But we must not take the exception for the general rule, and should rather seek the good of our country by stating what we believe to be true. We must confess that indolence does actually and positively exist there, only that, instead of holding it to be the cause of the backwardness and the troubles of the country, we regard it as the effect of the troubles and the backwardness, by the fostering of a lamentable predisposition.…4

The predisposition exists. Why should it not?

A hot climate requires of the individual quiet and rest, just as cold invites to labor and action. For this reason the Spaniard is more indolent than the Frenchman, the Frenchman more indolent than the German. The Europeans themselves that so liberally reproach the residents of the colonies (and I am not now speaking of the Spaniards but of the Germans [185]and English themselves), how do they live in tropical countries? Surrounded with a numerous train of servants, never going about but riding in a carriage, needing servants not only to take off their shoes for them but even to fan them! And yet they live and eat better, they work for themselves, they look for riches, they hope for a future, free and respected, while the poor colonist, the indolent colonist, is badly nourished, has no hope, toils for others, and works under force and compulsion!

Perhaps the reply to this will be that the white men are not made to stand the severity of the climate. A mistake! A man can live in any climate, if he will only adapt himself to its requirements and conditions.

What kills the Europeans in hot countries is the abuse of liquors, the attempt to live according to the nature of his own country under another sky and another sun. We inhabitants of hot countries live well in northern Europe whenever we take the precautions the people there take. Likewise Europeans can endure the torrid zone if they will but rid themselves of their prejudices.

The fact is that in tropical countries violent work is not a good thing as it is in cold countries. In tropical countries it is death, destruction, annihilation. Nature knows this and has therefore made the earth in tropical countries more fertile, more productive, as a compensation. An hour’s work under that burning sun, in the midst of the pernicious influence springing from nature in activity, is equal to a day’s work in a temperate climate. It is just, then, that the earth should yield a hundredfold!5

Moreover, do we not see the active European, who has gained strength during the winter, who feels the fresh blood of spring boil in his veins, do we not see him abandon his labors during the few days of his variable summer, close his [186]office—where the work is not, after all, violent, where, in many cases, it amounts to talking and gesticulating in the shade or near a luncheon stand—do we not see him flee to watering-places where he sits idle in the cafés or idly strolls about? What wonder then that the inhabitant of tropical countries, worn out and with his blood thinned by the continuous and excessive heat, is reduced to inaction! Who is the indolent one in the Manila offices? Is it the poor clerk who comes in at 8 in the morning and leaves at 4 in the afternoon with only his umbrella, who copies and writes and works for himself and for his chief, or is it the chief, who comes in a carriage at 10 o’clock, leaves before 12, reads his newspaper while smoking and, with his feet cocked up on a chair or a table, gossips about all his friends?

Man is not a brute; he is not a machine. His object is not merely to produce; in spite of the pretensions of some Christian whites who would make of the colored Christian a kind of motive-power somewhat more intelligent and less costly than steam.6

Rizal found that in regard to indolence the Philippines were like a patient with a long continued disease. The doctor attributes the failure of his medicines to the debility of the patient’s system, and the patient ascribes his debilitated condition to the doctor’s remedies. He followed his illustration by remarking that, as in the case of a desperate illness, so in the government of the Philippines, the attendants seemed to lose their heads and, instead of seeking the causes of the disease to remove them, devoted themselves to attacking the symptoms, with here blood-letting (taxation), there a plaster (forced labor), and there a sedative (trifling reform). [187]

Every new arrival proposes a new remedy: one, seasons of prayer, the relics of a saint, the viaticum, the friars; another, a shower-bath; still another, with pretensions to modern ideas, a transfusion of the blood [that is to say, an agricultural colony of Europeans]. It’s nothing, only the patient has eight million indolent red corpuscles [Filipinos]; some few white corpuscles in the form of an agricultural colony will get us out of the trouble.…7

Yes, transfusion of blood, transfusion of blood! New life, new vitality! Yes, the new white corpuscles that you are going to inject into its veins, the new white corpuscles that were a cancer in another organism, will withstand all the depravity of the system, will withstand the blood-letting that it suffers every day, will have more stamina than all the eight million red corpuscles, will cure all the disorders, all the degeneration, all troubles in the principal organs.

Be thankful if they do not become coagulations and produce gangrene; be thankful if they do not reproduce the cancer!

He comes then to the central fact he has undertaken to establish. Here it is in the teeth of the plausible assertions of prejudice and the selfish interests that depreciate the natives:

Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic, but not a hereditary malady.

The Filipinos have not always been what they are. Witnesses to this statement are all the historians of the first years after the discovery of the islands.8

Long before the coming of the Spaniards the Malayan Filipinos had an organized and outstretching commerce, foreign as well as domestic. A Chinese [188]writer of the thirteenth century has recorded their intimate commercial relations with China, the probity and zeal of the Filipino merchants, the great extent of the trade they carried on. They exported cotton, cloth, pearls, tortoise-shell, betel-nuts, and other commodities the making or preparing or gathering of which meant industry.

Pigafetta, a Spanish writer with Magellan, speaks of the great variety of the island products. The natives worked mines, produced and wrought in metals, made ingenious and effective weapons, wove silk into their artistic dresses, and even made false teeth of gold. Their agricultural products were of kinds not to be had without labor.

The early Spaniards reported the Filipinos to be daring and indefatigable sailors, whose fleets of merchantmen covered the waters of the Islands and made far voyages, even regularly to Siam. Filipino soldiers fought in the wars of other countries. In 1539 they took part in the wars of Sumatra, and it was their valor that overthrew there a renowned potentate, the sultan of Atchin.

Magellan’s people testified that industriously the Filipinos tilled the soil, each man having his own field. It was a wealthy country: food-stuffs were abundant, the natives were well fed. Legaspi’s expedition (about 1591) reported again on their large variety of products, including manufactures of iron, porcelain and cloth. Nowhere was to be noted poverty or savagery; business had attained to an excellent growth. The natives knew something about the rest [189]of the world; there were even among them, before a Spanish ship had ever anchored in Philippine waters, men that knew the Spanish language, having no doubt acquired it in their travels. When Cebu, a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants, was burned with all its food-supplies, its people did not suffer hunger, because the surrounding country quickly and intelligently organized to meet the emergency with abundant relief.

All the histories of those first years, in short, abound in long accounts about the industry and agriculture of the natives: mines, gold-washings, looms, farms, barter, naval construction, raising of poultry and stock, weaving of silk and cotton, distilleries, manufactures of arms, pearl fisheries, the civet industry, the horn and hide industry, etc., are things encountered at every step, and, considering the time and the conditions in the Islands, prove that there was life, there was activity, there was movement.9

He cites de Morga to show that indolence came upon the Filipinos after the Spanish domination and was not conspicuous before that time. De Morga’s seven years as lieutenant-governor of Manila should have instructed him about this, when he says that the natives under the Spaniards lost some of the trades in which they had been most successful. They had even forgotten much about farming, the raising of poultry, of live stock, of cotton, about the weaving of cloth as they used to weave it in their paganism and for a time after their country had been conquered.

Other Spaniards of that period bore witness to the same decline; and generations later a German traveler, [190]observing the differences between the habits of the natives under Spanish rule and of those that were still unsubdued, asked if the industrious free peoples would not in their turn become indolent when Christianity and Spain should be forced upon them. “The Filipinos,” Rizal justly concludes from these testimonies, “in spite of the climate, in spite of their few needs (they were less then than now), were not the indolent creatures of our time.”10

What, then, brought them down from their normal standards of activity and enterprise?

A fatal combination of causes, he finds.

First, the continual wars and the insurrections that were provoked by Spanish cruelty. When there was no civil strife abroad in the Philippines, able-bodied men were drafted to fight for Spain in Borneo or Indo-China; or there were huge expeditions, usually failures, that took away thousands of the best young men and never returned them. He quotes the Spanish writer, Gaspar de San Agustin, showing how one formerly populous town had been greatly shorn of inhabitants because, being noted as sailors and oarsmen, the Government took them for foreign service.11 In this way, the island of Panay, which had fifty thousand families when the Spaniards came, had been reduced to fifteen thousand.

Ten years after the Legaspi expedition, that is to say, in 1581, sixty years after Magellan’s “discovery,” the islands had lost one third of the total population.12 [191]

Of course, it was the young, the hardy, the capable, the industrious that went by this route to further the cold schemes of Spanish ambition.

Under such a drain faded the moral and material resources of the people.

Second, we are to remember the ravages of the pirates. Before the days of Magellan these audacious plunderers had with avidity pursued their calling in Philippine waters, but what is not generally known is that their activities greatly increased under the Spanish domination. The Spaniards encouraged the pirates, not to prey upon Spanish settlements, but to terrorize remote populations, to make them amenable to Spanish rule, in some instances to disclose what weapons the natives had that these might be snatched from them, and sometimes merely to be rid of objectionable communities. As the pirates did a thriving commerce in slaves, to eliminate, with their help, the undesirable was easy. De Morga says:

The boldness of these people of Mindanao [pirates] did great damage to the Visayan Islands, as much by what they did in them as by the fear and fright that the natives acquired; because the natives were in the power of the Spaniards, who held them subject and tributary and unarmed, in such manner that they did not protect them from their enemies nor leave them means with which to defend themselves as they did when there were no Spaniards in the country.13

Rizal lays the emphasis of capitals upon this last phrase, which indeed seems powerful evidence, coming from such a source. [192]

The pirates came every year, sometimes five times, sometimes ten, and an average visit cost the Islands more than eight hundred persons.

Gaspar de San Agustin tells of an Island near Cebu that by 1608 the pirates had almost depopulated and points to the fact that the natives had no defense.

Third, forced labor. This was a grievous matter: again and again it drove the Filipinos to revolt, but the Spaniards would learn nothing and to the last clung to a thing certain to wreck them. Its evils were first manifest in the ship-building enterprises the Spaniards undertook. They found the Filipinos among the best natural ship-builders in the world, having constructed, as before noted, some of the largest vessels then afloat. Other great vessels were planned by the Spaniards, and to get out quickly the needed timbers they compelled thousands of natives to work without pay and to provide their own food; a viler than ordinary form of slavery. To get out the masts for one galleon, six thousand natives were employed for three months, finding their own subsistence. Trees large enough to furnish these masts grew only in the interior; the labor of moving them through jungle and over mountains was enormous. Fernando de los Rios Coronel says that “the surrounding country had to be depopulated” in the ship-building work and that the natives furnished the timbers “with immense labor, damage, and cost to themselves.” San Agustin says that “the continual labor of cutting timber for his Majesty’s shipyards” was a great cause of the decline in population because it hindered people “from cultivating the very fertile plain they have.” [193]

Fourth, taxes and the cruelty of the Government. De los Rios Coronel cites “the natives that were executed, those that left their wives and children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those that were sold into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them,” among the elements disappearing from the population. There were also, it appears from San Agustin, to be added “those flogged to death, women crushed to death by their heavy burdens, those that sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many that are executed or left to die of hunger, those that eat poisonous herbs, and the mothers that kill their children in bearing them.”14 It is not an exhilarating picture; to believe it we must remind ourselves that it is limned by Spaniards: it can have no impulse to a hostile exaggeration.

The fields once cleared ceased to be cultivated; the towns once flourishing lost population and trade. The Filipino was launched on a backward career. Because,

Fifth, there was the psychological or spiritual fruitage of all this lethargy.

Worse than all the others and the culminating cause, this was. The Filipino’s spirit sank under the alien yoke. It appears that he no longer cared; what was there to care for? Spanish polity offered him in exchange for his lost liberty here only the prospect of salvation in another life. The bargain was not stimulating. Salvation depended in no degree upon terrestrial industry; the idle were saved equally with the active. We think, besides, that a racial spring was touched too fine to be suspected by the trampling soldiers [194]that Spain sent over to walk upon these bowed necks. The Malay responds to kindness; under blows, compulsion, or superior brute force he retires within himself into a sullen apathy. This now fell upon the native wherever the Spanish flag waved and to the extent that the Spanish methods prevailed. To go beyond Rizal’s able treatise and to record what even he could not have expected, the Americans, when their day came, noted with astonishment that the Filipinos of the South were more active, industrious, and resilient than their brothers in the North, although this was to reverse the usual order of nature. Some Americans ascribed the Southerner’s advantage to his religion and credited to Mohammedanism a virtue it hardly possessed. The real explanation, which abundantly confirms Rizal’s thesis, is that the Southerner had never gone under the lethal yoke of the Spanish conception of society.

Even when actual slavery was not enforced upon the native, the returns for his labor and efforts were so meager and uncertain he had no longer an incentive to work. There was a kind of padrone or contractor called the encomendero to whom the people of a district were virtually delivered over that he might extract from them all available profit and steer back to Spain with both pockets stuffed with the gold he had wrung from their toil. Usually this person had no other interest than to make his exit as early as possible and as heavily laden, to the which ends conscience should be no hindrance. He robbed the natives of produce where he could not steal labor; he used false measures in buying and selling. The unhappy Filipinos [195]had no appeal. In one town where a particularly brutal encomendero exacted additional tribute by using a steelyard twice as long as it should have been, they rose and tried to kill him—it appears, unfortunately, without success.15

De San Agustin gives these practices as the reason why the gold-mines of Panay, once “very rich,” had ceased to be worked; the natives preferred to live in poverty rather than to work under the conditions imposed upon them. Exploitation was the business of the Spaniard (from the governor down), and the only business that seems to have been attended to with diligence. To get rich quickly and to get home to spend the money was the real inspiration, an impulse not unknown in other parts of the earth where with his trusty rifle the white man has imposed his peculiar civilization upon his dark-skinned brother. In some places the dark brother under these ministrations lies down and dies; in the Philippines he ceased to work except under the lash or when he was fomenting an insurrection. Reviewing these facts the superior wisdom supposed to lurk mysteriously under the white skin seems to require much explanation.

Rizal points out that while in his time the pirates had ceased from troubling and the Dutch colonists were at rest, the other causes of the Filipino uneasiness went on undiminished to a loud chorus of denunciation from the elements responsible for these evils. As usual, names had shifted, the essentials of exploitation were unchanged. The encomendero was no longer the commanding figure in the process of extracting and [196]coining the toilers’ sweat; it was now the local governor, the friar, or both, but the machinery in use was the same. He quotes a French traveler of his own time that observed with astonishment the operations of a typical governor in whose hands “the high and noble functions he performs are nothing more than instruments of gain. He monopolizes all the business and instead of developing the love of work, instead of stimulating the natives to overcome the too natural indolence, he with the abuse of his powers thinks only of destroying all competition that may trouble him or attempt to participate in his profits. It matters little to him that the country is impoverished, without commerce, without industry, if only the governor is quickly enriched.”16

The whole story deserves the attention of mankind; the debacle and its causes. It is a simulacrum of exploitation and exploitation’s fatal results.

To do business in the Philippines, as we understand business, was almost impossible, year of grace 1890, so numerous were the obstacles, documents, papers, signatures, tangles of red tape to be unwound, officers to be bribed. If there is no commerce, how can there be industry? If there is no industry what shall the masses of people do but idle? “The most commercial and most industrious countries have been the freest,” says Rizal; “France, England, and the United States prove this. Hong-Kong, while it is not worth the most insignificant of the Philippines, has more commercial movement than all these Islands together because it is free and well governed.” [197]

The Spanish aristocrats in the Islands contributed to the general impulse to indolence. They posed as superior persons and exalted models, yet they did no work and despised all that labored. The vice of gambling, which the Spaniards deliberately encouraged in the natives, added to the general stagnation; not only cock-fighting (officially protected and a source of government revenue) but other gaming. It is a passion to which the Malay blood seems peculiarly susceptible, as the Chinese are to opium-smoking. Under government encouragement gambling became almost a native obsession wherever the Spanish rule was strongest. Having taught them to gamble, the Spaniards denounced the Filipinos as a race of gamblers; but this was again a species of injustice of which the Spaniard had no monopoly. It is easy to instance white communities that refuse to allow colored men to perform any but menial offices and then despise them as a race of menials. As to this practice in the United States of America, for example, reference may profitably be had to the pointed comments of Mr. George Bernard Shaw.

Agriculture is the natural business of the Islands. Hebetudinous government in Rizal’s time did nothing to encourage or even to defend it. The farmer went his way, preyed upon by the most villainous system of interest pillage so far disclosed in human affairs,17 and the Government gave him never so much as a friendly word. When crops failed, when typhoons wrought huge destruction, when the plague of locusts turned some great green valley to naked desolation, the Government [198]looked on indifferently and sent another tax collector.

It would not even seek a market for the insular products.

“Add to this lack of material inducement,” says Rizal, “the absence of moral stimulus, and you will see how he who is not indolent in that country must needs be a madman or at least a fool.”

The injustice with which the native was treated everywhere, merely because of his birth and his color, atrophied his energies; such were the windings and curlings of the vile snake of racial antipathy. Let the Filipino with whatsoever effort achieve whatsoever prize in fair competition with a white man, and the wreath he had won by worth would be snatched from him by trickery or plain theft. Why, then, should he strive?

But still worse were the evils of what was called by way of euphony the educational system maintained under this dispensation.

Take the best of these schools, or so-called schools, and at their best. “They amount,” says Rizal, “to five or ten years each of 150 days at most, in which the youth comes in contact with those very priests that boldly proclaim that it is an evil for the natives to know Castilian [Spanish], that the native should not be separated from his carabao,18 that he should not have any further aspirations, and so on; five to ten years in which the majority of the students have grasped nothing more than that no one understands what the books say, not even the professors themselves, perhaps; [199]and these five to ten years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole life, that preachment which lowers the dignity of man, which by degrees brutally deprives him of the sentiment of self-esteem, that eternal, stubborn, constant labor to bow the native’s neck, to make him accept the yoke, to place him on a level with the beast.

“Deprive a man, then, of his dignity, and you not only deprive him of his moral strength but you also make him useless even for those that wish to make use of him. Every creature has its stimulus, its main-spring. Man’s is his self-esteem. Take it away from him and he is a corpse, and he that seeks activity in a corpse will encounter only worms.”19

Finally there was the paralysis laid upon the Filipino because he was divested of the infinite sustaining and guiding strength of a national sentiment.

Without this no people can realize the good that is potential within them, no people can ever attain to the self-expression that is their due, and no people will ever manifest their normal activities. “A man in the Philippines is only an individual—he is not a member of a nation. He is forbidden and denied the right of association, and is therefore weak and sluggish. The Philippines is an organism whose cells seem to have no arterial system to irrigate it or nervous system to communicate its impressions.… The result of this is that if a prejudicial measure is ordered, no one protests: all goes well apparently until later the evils are felt. Another blood-letting and as the organism has neither nerves nor voice the physician proceeds in the [200]belief that the treatment is not injuring it. It needs a reform, but as it must not speak, it keeps silent and remains with the need.”20

Thus of the possible contribution of these people the world was deprived because a grotesquely unintelligent tyranny stifled the expression of their natural forces. It is the office of absolutism to try to make men think alike. This absolutism tried to keep them from thinking at all.

Once the Filipino was active, alert, industrious, prosperous. Now he had become inert, often inept, indifferent, poor. For these transformations, behold here the reasons. They are enough.

With more than one purpose we have dwelt at length upon this remarkable treatise. It shows Rizal’s mind, how clear and strong, and his thinking, how firm and sure. It shows how logically he arranged his ideas to a climax, a faculty that marks all his writings. It shows how well based upon reading and reason, no less than upon observation, was his faith in the Filipino people. Not from mere instinct nor from racial prejudice, he felt that here was a great and suppressed power. We dwell upon it also because it offers an unequaled picture of the Philippines after three hundred years of alien rule and indicates the appalling boundaries of the task that he had single-handed undertaken. Courage is the quality that mankind has elected most to honor. Surely the courage of battle-fields [201]is little compared with the supreme courage of a man that looking level-eyed upon such terrific difficulties as are outlined here sets himself to the one business of combating and overcoming them.

One other reflection pertains to this chapter, profoundly suggestive to any mind that will give heed to it. After all these generations of a system so elaborately designed to annihilate their spirits and chloroform their energies, the Malays of the Islands were still unerased. A few years after Rizal’s so able plea for them had been written they were in arms beating back the best troops of the oppressor. Thirty years later, under changed auspices, they were giving to the world a conspicuous example of intelligent and successful self-government. No sooner was applied to them the stimulus of a measure of freedom than the old reproach of indolence began to fail.

In thirty years they had demonstrated the truth of all this man had said of them. Sympathetic insight proved to be better than the solemn platitudes of wise men reasoning backward. As you see the Filipino now, said the wise men, so he must be always. Indolence—it is of the race and incurable! With a dash of his pen Rizal sent all this seven ways. He knew the heart of Filipinas; the wise men knew only what had been written by somebody who had read what somebody else had deduced about her. [202]

More than the persecutions launched against his family disturbed Rizal in the news he was receiving now from Manila. The fire of discontent was rising among the people of the Philippines; the letters of his friends foreshadowed an explosion. Not revolution by peaceful means was at hand but another civil war. He determined to go to Madrid that he might talk with the Filipinos there about these storm-signals and at the same time lodge with the Spanish Government a formal protest against the eviction of the family from its Calamba property.

At Madrid he found the situation much changed in the five years of his absence. In the Filipino colony the feeling had gained that from such a Government nothing was to be won by appeals and agitation. For an illustration men pointed to Cuba. Petitions, reasonings, arguments, beseechings wrought nothing. Whatever Cuba had gained was tribute to its sword. Against this Rizal still counseled. Even in such a crisis he could not rid his mind of the doctrine of fitness for self-government, and so long as he reasoned more than he allowed himself to feel, he could not compromise with his overmastering horror of war.

In this, again, he had outstripped the current thought of his age. A world without war was then the dream [203]of a few enthusiasts, looking to another generation or to some mystic transformation in the chemistry of human blood; what were called practical men went on devising new torpedoes and more powerful explosives for the next conflict. In his own way, different from theirs, he was himself as truly a practical man as ever lived, and a warless humanity was no dream to him; he thought he could see it close at hand. He thought he could see his fellow-men of all lands surrendering the lunacy of combat for a rational settlement of international troubles by agreement and arbitration. Out of the reflexes of his own thought and spirit he was instructed that the hour for this transformation had come.

Up to that time, certainly, the lessons of history, his favorite study, were against him. There can be no doubt that a condition of oppression or general injustice is in essence a condition of violence, and so far in the human story half-emancipated man has found no way to end one condition of violence except by means of another. “It will have blood, they say, blood will have blood,” might have been written across the gates of every house of tyranny. The hope that the frightful wrongs laid upon the Filipinos could be an exception to this primordial rule was alluring to a soul like Rizal’s. We can see now that in the existing stage of civilization it was no better founded than the other deceptive notion that the sufferings of the common people of France under the Ancient Régime could have had any result but retribution in kind. As a matter of strict fact, the Reign of Terror was established years before Dr. Guillotin thought of his device [204]of “a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history.” It was in reality assured by the fathers of many innocent and well meaning ladies and gentlemen whose heads it rolled into the Seine—a painful thought, but historically indisputable. The fierce philosophy of these records Rizal could not assimilate; the poet in him revolted at the ugliness of hatred; he had too genuine a love of his own kind to tolerate cruelty. Whether in the mass or toward individuals he could not endure it. These seem to constitute the only set of facts his mind was unable to absorb. He could in four weeks master a language and could not in a lifetime well comprehend the caveman’s logic of blows.

This amiable strabismus half blinded him to what was really impending in his own country. The truth was that the System was slowly forcing a revolt there; not intentionally, but after the manner of all drunken power. To lay bare the iniquities of that System was to send against it the torch and ax. Every page of “Noli Me Tangere” was in effect a call to battle. He never suspected this, but fact it was nevertheless. To imagine, as he at one time imagined, that intrenched greed would without a struggle surrender its privileges and lay by the cracking of its whips was to imagine that which never was nor shall be. The reversion to primitive standards was inaugurated, not by Filipino revolutionists, but by the System itself, which, denying justice, left to the harassed multitudes nothing but revolution.

At this crux of his story, when he appeared at Madrid [205]as the champion of an impossible peace, and the eyes and hearts of all his countrymen were turning to him, the time may be good to describe the man that had already wielded so tremendous a power.

He was then in his thirty-first year. The first impression one had of him was of wholesome vigor and physical well-being. He was of rather slender build, but all of muscle and sinew compact, for he never remitted his exercises. In height, he was five feet, four inches; coming of what seems to Occidental eyes an undersized people. From long hours at his desk he had contracted a slight stoop. His handsome face retained its fine boyish oval, but rugged character and unshakable firmness were now stamped upon it, and an expression of melancholy. His eyes were still remarked for their brightness. His hands were small and shapely, his feet noticeably small.1

His voice was low in pitch, of a noble tonality, and so strangely vibrant that one hearing it at its best never forgot it. One of his rules was never to raise it; he spoke always with an identical restraint. With such a voice and with his flow of apt and picturesque language he was equipped for public speaking, in which he had made on several occasions a rather marked success; yet he always thought lightly of the art of oratory and refused to pursue it.

Whether among his friends or in his writings he had ordinarily little to say about himself, and there is but one recorded instance when he seemed to give way to [206]the bitter recollections that must at times have assailed him. On this occasion he said to a friend in London with whom he was walking:

“I have traveled around the world. I have studied the important nations by personal and direct observation. I have noted well all the races that have contributed to human progress. I speak all their languages and others. And yet,” he added with a melancholy smile, “I am to the friars merely a vulgar half-breed.”

At Madrid, one of his intimates from the Islands was Teodoro Sandiko, later to be a leader among his people and an honored member of the Philippine Senate. In a letter recalling their association, Senator Sandiko once wrote:2

Rizal was fond of physical exercise and so was I. We practised fencing together and soon became good and close friends.

He was simple in his manners, but profound in his studies and researches, analytical in his mental processes, reflective rather than sentimental. He was extremely methodical and industrious; I never saw him idle. He had great confidence in himself, was firm in his faith, resourceful in the solving of a difficult situation, swift and sure in his decisions. His habit was to answer without hesitation and succinctly any question that might be put to him; he had never to hunt for an idea or a word. He was the most loyal of friends; anything he possessed was at his friend’s disposal. He was courteous, affectionate, affable, sincere, but rather serious. His mental state may be judged from the mass of material he contributed to “La Solidaridad,” so varied, so forceful and so carefully prepared.

[207]

Wherever he went, he seemed without effort to make friends of all men that came near him. Set down in a steamer full of strangers, he would be noted at once by every passenger and before dinner was served would be on good terms with most of the persons on board, crew included. Yet, strange to say, he seldom smiled, usually seemed distrait in the midst of others’ mirth, and was sometimes lost in gloomy musing, when he seemed all unaware of his surroundings. In the opinion of his friends, he had almost no self-consciousness; certainly, all his life he hated affectations and never lost a chance to scorch them with his terrible sarcasm; for this man of the world, ordinarily so suave and courteous that he won good will even among his enemies, had certain reserve funds of censuring speech he could make as bitter as gall. Whether he sat, walked, stood, talked, or listened he was always natural, always composed, and always the sure master of himself. When he went through the United States he noticed that the men there conversed without gesticulating, contrary to the practice of the Spaniards and most Europeans. On reflection he deemed the practice to lend strength to utterance and thereafter made it a rule to keep his hands still while he talked.

The image of a man that seldom smiled and yet so easily won his fellows to like him seems out of the drawing of nature and yet in this case is essentially true. There was in Rizal’s face something almost irresistibly winning. Good will looked out of it and warm human sympathy and a kind of downright sincerity that found a way to the notice of even the dullest. It seemed to one studying him attentively [208]that on the original lines of a being all love, gentleness, and meditation had been stamped later a great melancholy and a great and high resolve. Lowly men seemed to understand instinctively something in him they could never have formulated nor described, something friendly and good; and men of learning turned with a similar impulse to a mind that showed itself so wealthy and still so unpretending.

He loved music, was a good judge of it, and composed it readily and well. He loved flowers as all other things beautiful—of course, being an artist born and the instinct ineradicable in him! That charming poem of his, “The Flowers of Heidelberg”3 was written in the intervals between his pursuits of the most advanced discoveries and driest facts in ophthalmology, surgery, ethnology, entomology, anthropology, and the penning of some of the fiercest passages of condensed wrath to be found in any language. It is likely that he saw nothing grotesque in these abrupt transitions; perfectly sincere men have little time for such nice questionings. If we regard the making of poetry as the serious business of his soul, which it was, his chief intellectual relaxation was chess, of which, by the time of his second visit to Madrid, he had become a notable player.4

REMNANTS FROM RIZAL’S LIBRARY

He had as little vanity as any man conscious of his powers could reasonably have. Yet he was always careful of his appearance and took pains to dress well, after the most modest taste. Even when he was poverty-stricken in Berlin and living on a daily bowl of [209]coffee and piece of bread, he would allow himself no laxity in his attire.

Once he wrote of some pupils of his that he was teaching them to behave like men.5 It was a point of weight with him. His conception of a man was one that had at all times himself in full command. This virtue he had practised assiduously from those old days at the Ateneo when first he perceived its splendors; and now he was so truly captain of his own soul that, as we have seen, he could endure privations, subdue appetites, and urge himself along his road by the sheer force of his will. He was the greater part of his life desperately poor; yet if he had been willing to practise his profession for gain a great fortune was within his grasp. In whatsoever conditions he found himself he still tried to adhere to that plan he had adopted at the Ateneo of apportioning his day according to a schedule. He was more careful of his time than a miser of his gold; he would waste no hour. To his friends he admitted that when he sat silent in company and seemed to be moody he was composing his next article for “La Solidaridad” or a new chapter in one of his books. He was the least superstitious of men, but for years he had a presentiment that he would die by shooting. Once crossing Bagumbayan Field he pointed to the place of execution and said to a companion, “On that spot I shall some day be put to death by a firing-squad.” As a final light upon a singular character, it is to be noted that he was not oppressed by this foreboding. It was accompanied in his mind, as nearly as one can discern, with a conviction [210]that the cause for which he stood must have its victims, and to this extent and no farther showed in him the fatalism supposed to be a distinctive trait of the Malay.

He was ordinarily so calm, so self-contained, so much the example of the reasoning man and the like, that it seems highly incongruous to think of him as a duelist; yet twice he challenged to mortal combat. It appears that under his coolly borne exterior there was fire, and even his beautiful faith in the supremacy of reason had not eradicated all the Old Adam from his blood. He seems never to have thought that the violence he contemplated was nothing but a minute specimen of the war-making he denounced, nor that in sending challenges he reverted from his most cherished doctrines. Perhaps if the inconsistency had been pointed out to him then it would not have disturbed him, and certainly it is a hobgoblin that need not disturb us now. If the queer bundle of nerves that is called man never presented a greater irrelevancy, admiration for him need molt no feather. Both of the quarrels, if so they might be called, that brought out the fighting instinct in the gentle artist-student resulted from incidents in Madrid when he returned there in 1890. W. E. Retana, who had been press-agent in Manila for the friars, was now a Madrid journalist and printed in his newspaper a vicious and baseless attack upon Rizal wherein he sought, doubtless, to revenge the friars on the author of “Noli Me Tangere.” Without delay Rizal sent him a challenge. Mr. Retana seems to have had no appetite to go afield; he published a retraction and apology and the quarrel [211]ended.6 Rather oddly, Retana, who had been in Manila the bitter foe of the Filipino cause and of all its champions (though possibly on a commercial basis), became, after this incident, first the friend and then the biographer of Rizal.

The other altercation was with Antonio Luna,7 afterward a famous commander in the army of the Philippine Republic. About a woman of Rizal’s acquaintance Luna made an unworthy remark, and Rizal sent him a challenge. Having possibly regained sobriety meanwhile, Luna withdrew the remark and apologized for it, whereupon the quarrel was made up without mortal arbitrament. In his chivalrous and unsullied attitude toward women Rizal was true to the finest traditions of his race. Among the faults of the Filipinos, lechery is assuredly not included. Except the Irish, no other people on earth have a higher conception of chastity and sex morality, nor adhere to it with greater tenacity. Retana wrote that Rizal had “a truly upright moral sense.” It was but an inadequate tribute. He was a champion of righteousness; his religion was like Wendell Phillips’s, “a battle not a dream.” When he wrote, “The good of my country, that is all I pursue,” he was not making platform epigrams but telling what the records confirm.

We have spoken of the purity of his conduct; at least as wonderful is the fact that he left so little [212]trace of a selfish aim. Other men with great work to do have had all of his indifference to wealth; what classifies him as above all these is his far rarer indifference to the nobler ambitions for fame and power that have beset so many others in his position and wrecked so many good causes. He sought no place, looked for no honor, cared for applause as little as finite man could be expected to care, seemed to have no yearning for ease nor for pleasure. The lust of the eyes, and that fatal lure, the joy of warming oneself in the sun of one’s own glory tripped him not. We may admit that the balance to be drawn from these facts is not wholly a human figure; one looks for the faults that have disfigured so many other national heroes and the things that laurel-bearing biographers labor deftly to conceal. There seems to be nothing to conceal about this man. And if the tale of his virtues seems at times overwrought so that we might be relieved to find somewhere that he swore, was easily angered, or chewed tobacco or fought a cabman, we are to remember that as his ideals bore him to unusual heights, so it was an unusual condition that forced him early in life to surrender every purpose but the emancipation of his country. And when we have made all allowances for the power of this ambition that swept him along, the fact will remain and be inevitable in the records that here was a strange figure to walk in upon us in the nineteenth century from the ends of the earth.

There remains to be noted a singular fact about that leadership of his people, forced upon him as we have noted, and not of his designing or plotting. With his [213]prestige and the popularity that was the certain consequence of a success so gratifying to the hurt national pride, he had but to make a gesture to his countrymen and they would have followed him over the smoking ruins of Malacañan or any other place, fighting with bolos if they could come by no rifles. It was a temptation to dramatics on the world stage that few men could have resisted. What reality of stern virtue, worthier of a legendary age than of his own times, was in this man may be gaged from the fact that he not so much resisted the temptation as ignored it. Perhaps to him it was no temptation; at least he may be thought of as living in his inner and real self, where such things weighed nothing. The time demanded from a revolutionary leader a proclamation and loud cheers; he met it with a learned treatise on taxation and how taxation might be improved. Bitter are the penalties that attend a dark skin! But for his complexion the world would class him with its purest and best, with Washington and William the Silent, Phocion and Brutus, Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and the rest of the scanty band that, having great tasks thrust upon them, forgot themselves and their tenements of clay to think only of the Common Good.

As to how José Rizal would stand such a test applied to his career and all of it, take this testimony of Retana, who from antecedent probability at least would invent no extravagance of praise. Even in his youth, said Retana, every injustice, every crime, every wrong, struck home to his sensibilities. He walked with unsmirched garments through a world filled with the reek of a sordid time and the cruelty that man [214]works upon man, trying to make a protest against all oppressions and busy to the end with the troubles of his fellows but not with his own.

To this sketch of his moral self, not less engaging than his physical portraiture, remains to be added one line. Pursued indefatigably by bigotry and prejudice, he was himself of a singular tolerance. The wrongs of his people he resented with towering indignation, and his own he viewed with an astonishing calm. To the gibes and sneers and taunts of his foes he had but the one habitual response:

“To understand all is to forgive all!” [215]

For Spanish or Filipino ears, “filibuster” has nothing of the comic or disreputable suggestion that it bears to the American. In the Philippines of Rizal’s day it denoted a person opposed to the existing régime, an insurgent, whether advocating peaceful or violent means of separation from Spain. “El Filibusterismo” means a movement for Philippine independence.

In this novel again, the chief figure is Ibarra, the hero of “Noli Me Tangere.” It was Elias, not Ibarra, that was struck with the bullets of the Civil Guards when they were pursuing his banca; Ibarra escaped unhurt. He made his way out of the country and now returns after some years, disguised and under an assumed name, to seek the revenge upon which all this time his heart has been brooding. The difference between the Ibarra that refused Elias’ prayer to lead the people and this Ibarra become now hopeless of any peaceful remedy betrays once more the change we have already noted as coming over Rizal’s most cherished convictions and in spite of himself. A struggle was going on between what he still wished to believe and what his judgment told him was inevitable, and in the conflict he grew in hardihood. From the savage vengeance that pursued his sisters, brothers, [216]father, and mother when it had failed to reach him, he was beginning to learn how idle was the hope to win reform by merely ladylike appeals. Yet the book was not of purpose any signal to popular revolt. What he intended was solemn warning. So far the Filipino has stood and asked for justice, still patient, still holding out the friendly hand. Wronged hearts will not always accept scurvy affronts; men will not always put up with kicks when they ask fair play. This Filipino whom you despise and trample on nineteen years in twenty and who, in the twentieth, throws you into a panic, is not the human dish-cloth you are pleased now to imagine him. He has in him the capacity for a great and memorable revenge, and upon your heads he will pull down your structure if you do not hear him.

Other characters of the first book reappear in this. Father Salvi, the lascivious friar whose machinations brought about Ibarra’s downfall; Capitán Tiago, Doña Victorina, and Basilio, the son of Sisa. Ibarra calls himself Mr. Simoun. His pretended business is that of a traveling merchant of jewelry and laces; his real occupation is to spy out the land, to lay plots against the governing class that ruined him, and, if possible, to release Maria Clara from her convent prison. The narrative is chiefly concerned with these plots and their failure; but behind them always seems to show a grim figure telling Government that such plots will not always fail.

The book starts with a gibe at the people with whose tardiness to respond to progressive ideas Rizal was becoming impatient. [217]

One morning in December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer, almost round, like the taboo from which she derived her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretentious whiteness, majestic and grave from her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was held in great affection in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the fact that she bore the characteristic impress of things in the country, representing something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that was not a steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect, yet unimpeachable, which, when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the happy steamer was genuinely Filipino! If a person were only reasonably considerate, she might have been taken for the Ship of State, constructed, as she had been, under the inspection of Reverendos and Ilustrísimos.

As before, Rizal uses with photographic accuracy the materials of Philippine life that had passed under his own observation. The wanderings of Simoun the jeweler give him the needed occasions; he hangs upon them startling pictures of actual conditions, the power of the friars, the brutality and cowardice of the governing class, the terrible wrongs of the people; even the story of Maria Clara’s parentage he had from an incident in his own neighborhood. Poverty, chastity,1 and obedience were the oath of the degenerate successors to a noble race of Christianity’s pioneers. [218]How lightly they regarded the second item in this creed he had shown in “Noli Me Tangere.” As to poverty, their corporations had become the wealthiest institutions in the Islands. He is now about to show how they had obtained the wealth that made their power supreme and pervasive.

Tandang Selo is a native wood-cutter that by industry and self-denial has saved a little money. He has a son, Tales, industrious and thrifty like himself. Tales works for a rich landowner and saves enough to buy two carabaos, to marry, and to accumulate a capital of several hundred pesos. He has ambition; he wishes to rise in the world. There is the jungle, unclaimed, untilled, but fertile. With his father, his wife, and children he goes into it, clears away the forest, and makes tillable fields.

To cut for the first time the jungle turf is supposed to release a dangerous malaria. Of this, Tales’s wife and eldest child fall ill and die. The others continue to plant and to cultivate.

As they begin to harvest the first crop, an agent of the friars appears, notifies them that the land belongs to one of the orders, and levies on the crop for the rent.

Tales has every reason to believe that the claim is fraudulent, but he is only an Indio; the courts are organized against him and his people, and he pays tribute rather than risk a lawsuit.

The next year the crops are good and the friars double the rent.

Nevertheless the family works hard and saves a little money. The desire of the father’s heart is to send his eldest daughter, Juli, to school in Manila. [219]Next year the rent is again increased, and the hope of education begins to fail.

When the rent has risen from thirty to two hundred pesos, Tales refuses to pay the latest increase. Then the friars’ agent tells him to prepare to be evicted, for another tenant will come and till the fields Tales has won from the jungle.

Tales applies to the courts for relief and is at once despoiled of his savings to pay the fees; likewise to satisfy the cormorants that batten upon every court proceeding.

The farm is exposed to the raids of the tulisanes, or robbers. The invisible government has energy enough to play eavesdropper upon its own people, but makes scarcely an effort to restrain the banditti that hover in all the forests and often descend upon the towns, even large towns.

To protect his fields from these vultures, Tales patrols them with a shot-gun and so terrifies the friars’ agents and the new tenant that the benevolent intention of turning him into the road must be abandoned until the lawsuit shall be decided.

Under the code his case is unassailable. Even by their own charter the friars cannot own land. The judges know that this is so, but one of their number loses his place for giving a decision in favor of a native; the rest have no desire to share his fate and so to go back to Spain humiliated as well as impoverished. They advise Tales to surrender and pay what is demanded of him. The fighting blood of the Malay is up within him: he stands in his place and demands that the friars produce some evidence of ownership—[220]title-deeds, documents, papers, anything. None of these have the friars to show; their claim here, as so often in such cases, rests upon the tradition of a concession. Nowhere else would such a plea, unsupported and unwitnessed, be seriously considered in a court of justice. In the Philippines it outweighs everything else, and the judges decide in favor of the friars.

Tales with his gun continues to patrol his land. The friars obtain a decree from the governor-general ordering all arms to be surrendered, and so they take away the shot-gun. Tales patrols his fields with a bolo.

The bolo is taken from him on the pretext that it is too long and therefore comes within the prohibition of the decree about arms. Tales patrols his fields with an ax.

Then the tulisanes come and capture him and hold him for five hundred pesos ransom.

To get the money, Juli sells herself into slavery in the neighboring town. It is not called by that name, her servitude; but that is what it amounts to.

She is engaged to a young man whom she dearly loves. The sale of herself is likely to end her chance of marriage.

With the money so raised, her father is ransomed. He comes home to find the friars’ agent and the new tenant walking over the fields that with so much labor the Tales family has cleared.

Tales steals a revolver and joins the tulisanes. That night the friars’ agent and the new tenant and the new tenant’s wife are murdered.2 [221]

The substance of this story, as you perceive, is taken from the experiences of the tenants of Calamba, among them Rizal’s own folk.

There is terrible irony in a description of how the governor-general governs; how he transacts business and promotes the welfare of the Islands. He has been on a hunting expedition in which he has shot nothing and returns ill tempered to Los Baños, where he has his bath, drinks his cocoanut milk, and sits down to a game of cards with three friars. From this reasonable occupation his chief secretary tries to divert his attention to matters of public business. This annoys the governor-general.

“The petition about sporting arms,” suggests the secretary.

“Forbidden!” says the governor-general and goes on playing. The secretary tries to intimate that this is not wise. He only arouses the wrath of the executive.

The schoolmaster at Tiani has petitioned for a better location for his school. The old store-room he is using has no roof: he has bought with his own funds books and pictures, and he wishes them not to be ruined.

“I’ve heard several complaints against this schoolmaster,” says his Excellency. “I think the best thing would be to suspend him.”

“Suspended!”3 says the secretary.

“In the future,” says the governor-general, “all that complain will be suspended.” [222]

The well known fact is developed that there are not nearly enough school-houses. Somebody suggests that the cockpits might be used for schools when not needed for the more exalted purpose to which they are dedicated. Horror meets the proposal to interfere, for the sake of mere education, with reasonable sport and with the Government’s revenue.

It is probably the worst Government in the world.

At the end of the card game the secretary whispers to his Excellency that that woman is around again, the daughter of Cabesang Tales, with her petition. When Tales fled to the tulisanes the authorities, true to form, arrested his aged father in his stead and now hold him in prison.

His Excellency looked at him with an expression of impatience and rubbed his hand across his broad forehead. “Carambas! Can’t one be left to eat one’s breakfast in peace?”

“This is the third day she has come. She’s a poor girl——”

The governor-general scratched the back of his ear and said, “Oh, go along! Have the secretary make out an order to the lieutenant of the Civil Guard for the old man’s release. They sha’n’t say that we’re not clement and merciful.”

He looked at Ben-Zayb. The journalist winked.4

You can see that it is cartoon-making with a vengeance. The mirth is savage. It gives one the shivers. This man taught the methods of peace and rejected every suggestion that reform could be won by physical violence. Yet the way he was walking is clear. In ten [223]years if he had kept on he would himself have been leading an insurrection. It has always been so; in the cloister the sweet gentle spirit dreaming of oppression overcome by reason, and in the streets rude weapons beating off the shackles.

As Simoun the jeweler, Ibarra brings dramatic vengeance upon the head of Father Salvi. In Manila is an American prestidigitator who is exhibiting the trick known as the talking head. In this instance the head is supposed to be that of an ancient Egyptian. In the midst of gruesome settings to enhance the effect, it tells to an audience in which Salvi is seated the story of Maria Clara, disguised as an event of four thousand years ago. Salvi, conscience-stricken, falls in a fit.5

Simoun’s purpose from the beginning has been to excite the people to an uprising by which he hopes to win his revenge on friars and Government alike and to free Maria Clara from the nunnery where she has been virtually a prisoner since Ibarra’s arrest, as told in “Noli Me Tangere.” The actual situation in the Islands is illuminated by picturing Simoun as telling some persons that the insurrection is desired by the governor-general to free himself from the friars, and telling others that the friars are planning it to rid themselves of the governor-general. In the chaos through which the social order was drifting, either story was plausible. Simoun in his ceaseless intriguing has manœuvered within his power Quiroga, an influential Chinaman, also a type in those days, who has secret and unseemly dealings with the Government. [224]Through this connection Simoun is able to have his rifles passed through the custom-house as some of Quiroga’s illicit importations. He spreads his nets and lays his plans, tutors his accomplices, distributes his arms, and when all is ready for his explosion he is stunned with the news that so far as Maria Clara is concerned it is too late. She is dead in the convent.

There are two other love-stories in the book, both unhappy, both reflexes of Rizal’s own great unhappiness.

One is of Basilio and Juli. Basilio is the son of Sisa, the native woman in “Noli Me Tangere,” driven insane by misfortunes and persecutions; Juli is the daughter of Cabesang Tales, driven into brigandage by the exactions of the friars.

So slight a thing as a frolic of students brings Basilio and Juli to their tragedy. Some of the students have a supper. It is innocent and insignificant, but the spies watch it. That night pasquinades are pasted upon the doors of the university, pasquinades that the nervous authorities deem seditious. To overwrought minds the bad verses and cheap jocularity of these compositions indicate that the treason must be connected with the students’ supper. Therefore, arrest all the students. The order includes Basilio, who had not attended the fiesta, and whose rooms when searched yield nothing but text-books on medicine.

In the rural region where Juli is living, terrible reports are current as to the fate of these students. At one moment they are condemned to be shot; at another the sentence has already been carried out. Then comes news that with the help of influential and [225]wealthy relatives they hope to escape the death-penalty; all except Basilio, who has no wealthy friends nor influence of any kind.

There is in the town where Juli lives a friar, Father Camorra, of great power in the Government. An old woman urges Juli to go to the convento6 and beg the intercession of Father Camorra. A word from him will be enough to save Basilio’s life. Juli knows well enough what is the real nature of the sacrifice demanded of her; so many a Filipino girl has walked or been dragged along that road to destruction. The reports about the students grow worse. At last it appears that Basilio has been condemned to death and in twenty-four hours will stand before the firing-squad. Not a hope remains except through the intercession of Father Camorra. The old woman beseeches; still Juli refuses. At last she is forced to the door of the convento. That night a woman, screaming wildly, throws herself from an upper window of the house. When help comes to her she is dead. The body is recognized as that of Juli.7

Basilio escapes the executioner. When he learns of the fate of Juli he joins Simoun, the disguised Ibarra, who has tried in vain to interest him in the plans for a revolution.

The other story concerns Isagani, type of the educated and ambitious young Filipino, and Paulita, type of the exquisite native beauty. Isagani is deeply in love. Nevertheless, he puts fidelity to his country above even the idol of his heart. He is a leader among [226]the discontented students. They do not think of sedition but only of reforms peacefully achieved, the Rizal idea of progress. An opportunity arising, Isagani speaks with the greatest frankness to Father Fernandez, a Dominican friar, and one of the instructors at the university. Their conversation gives the author a chance to expose the defects in the system of higher education—so called. He does more than expose it; he blasts and withers it.8 Isagani never hesitates to speak his opinions about these things, though always professing perfect loyalty. He is arrested with the other students in the dog-day fit that has seized upon the authorities. At the news the relatives of Paulita insist that she shall cast over a lover so notorious and so dangerous. It is Rizal and Leonora again. Paulita yields to them; she allows herself to be engaged to Isagani’s rival and the date is fixed for her wedding. It is the date that Simoun selects for the consummation of his plot. Basilio agrees to help him.

Paulita’s relatives are rich; they have invited the most eminent persons in the colony, including the governor-general himself. Simoun, the wealthy jeweler, will be there. He has arranged with bands of tulisanes and certain discontented peasants to gather on that date to attack the city. An explosion like the firing of a cannon is to be their signal.

The guests come bearing or sending beautiful gifts. Simoun presents a lamp of strange and beautiful design—burning. In it is a charge of dynamite sufficient to blow up the house and all in it. This will furnish the signal for the attack. He has told this to Basilio. [227]Outside the house of festival, Isagani lingers, hoping to catch one farewell glimpse of the sweetheart he has lost. Basilio sees him and tries to lead him away before the explosion. Isagani refuses to move. In despair Basilio tells him what is afoot about the lamp. Isagani, overwhelmed with horror at the thought that the woman he loves is about to perish, runs into the house, seizes the lighted lamp, throws it into the river, and follows it there before any one has a chance to stop him.9

Great excitement follows, in which something of the plot is revealed; and Simoun is unmasked, but not until he has had a chance to escape. He is pursued and wounded. He dies in the house of a Filipino family where he has found refuge. On his death-bed he confesses to a priest his real name and story.10

“God will forgive you, Señor Simoun,” says the priest. “He knows that we are fallible. He has seen that you have suffered, and in ordaining that the chastisement of your faults should come as death from the very ones you have instigated to crime, we can see His infinite mercy. He has frustrated your plans one by one, the best conceived, first by the death of Maria Clara, then by a lack of preparation, then in some mysterious way. Let us bow to His will and render Him thanks!”

“According to you, then,” feebly responded the sick man, “His will is that these Islands——”

“Should continue in the condition in which they suffer?” continued the priest, seeing that the other hesitated. “I [228]don’t know, sir, I can’t read the thought of the Inscrutable. I know that he has not abandoned those peoples who in their supreme moments have trusted in Him and made Him the judge of their cause. I know His arm has never failed when, justice long trampled upon and every recourse gone, the oppressed have taken up the sword to fight for home and wife and children, for their inalienable rights, which, as the German poet says, shine ever there above, unextinguished and inextinguishable, like the eternal stars themselves. No, God is justice; He cannot abandon His cause, the cause of liberty, without which no justice is possible.”

Nothing could be plainer: Rizal is enforcing with a final warning the lesson of his book.

“Why, then, has He denied me His aid?” asked the sick man in a voice charged with bitter complaint.

“Because you chose means that He could not sanction,” was the severe reply. “The glory of saving a country is not for him that has contributed to its ruin. You have believed that what crime and iniquity have defiled and deformed another crime and another iniquity can purify and redeem. Wrong! Hate never produces anything but monsters; crime never produces anything but criminals. Love alone realizes wonderful works; virtue alone can save! No, if our country is ever to be free it will not be through vice and crime; it will not be so by corrupting its sons, deceiving some and bribing others; no! Redemption presupposes virtue, virtue sacrifice, and sacrifice love!”

“Well, I accept your explanation,” rejoined the sick man, after a pause. “I have been mistaken, but, because I have been mistaken, will that God deny liberty to a people and yet save many who are much worse criminals than I am? What is my mistake compared to the crimes of our rulers? Why has that God to give more heed to my iniquity than to the cries [229]of so many innocents? Why has He not stricken me down and then made the people triumph? Why does He let so many worthy and just ones suffer and look complacently upon their tortures?”

“The just and the worthy must suffer in order that their ideas may be known and extended! You must shake or shatter the vase to spread its perfume; you must smite the rock to get the spark! There is something providential in the persecutions of tyrants, Señor Simoun!”

“I knew it,” murmured the sick man, “and therefore I encouraged the tyranny.”

“Yes, my friend, but more corrupt influences than anything else were spread. You fostered the social rottenness without sowing an idea. From this fermentation of vices loathing alone could spring, and if anything were born overnight it would be at best a mushroom, for mushrooms only can spring spontaneously from filth. True it is that the vices of the government are fatal to it; they cause its death, but they kill also the society in whose bosom they are developed. An immoral government presupposes a demoralized people, a conscienceless administration, greedy and servile citizens in the settled parts, outlaws and brigands in the mountains. Like master, like slave! Like government, like country!”

A brief pause ensued, broken at length by the sick man’s voice. “Then, what can be done?”

“Suffer and work!”

“Suffer—work!” echoed the sick man bitterly. “Ah, it’s easy to say that, when you are not suffering, when the work is rewarded. If your God demands such sacrifices from man, man who can scarcely count upon the present and doubts the future, if you had seen what I have, the miserable, the wretched, suffering unspeakable tortures for crimes they have not committed, murdered to cover up the faults and incapacity of others, poor fathers of families torn from their [230]homes to work to no purpose upon highways that are destroyed each day and seem only to serve for sinking families into want. Ah, to suffer, to work, is the will of God! Convince them that their murder is their salvation, that their work is the prosperity of the home! To suffer, to work! What God is that?”

“A very just God, Señor Simoun,” replied the priest. “A God who chastises our lack of faith, our vices, the little esteem in which we hold dignity and the civic virtues. We tolerate vice, we make ourselves its accomplices, at times we applaud it; and it is just, very just that we suffer the consequences, that our children suffer them. It is the God of liberty, Señor Simoun, who obliges us to love it, by making the yoke heavy for us—a God of mercy, of equity, who while He chastises us betters us and only grants prosperity to him who has merited it through his efforts. The school of suffering tempers, the arena of combat strengthens the soul.

“I do not mean to say that our liberty will be secured at the sword’s point, for the sword plays but little part in modern affairs, but that we must secure it by making ourselves worthy of it, by exalting the intelligence and the dignity of the individual, by loving justice, right, and greatness, even to the extent of dying for them; and when a people reaches that height God will provide a weapon, the idols will be shattered, the tyranny will crumble like a house of cards, and liberty will shine out like the first dawn.

“Our ills we owe to ourselves alone, so let us blame no one. If Spain should see that we were less complaisant with tyranny and more disposed to struggle and suffer for our rights, Spain would be the first to grant us liberty, because when the fruit of the womb reaches maturity woe unto the mother who would stifle it! So, while the Filipino people has not sufficient energy to proclaim, with head erect and bosom bared its rights to social life, and to guarantee it with its sacrifices, [231]with its own blood; while we see our countrymen in private life ashamed within themselves, hear the voice of conscience roar in rebellion and protest, yet in public life keep silence or even echo the words of him who abuses them in order to mock the abused; while we see them wrap themselves up in their egotism and with a forced smile praise the most iniquitous actions, begging with their eyes a portion of the booty—why grant them liberty? With Spain or without Spain they would always be the same, and perhaps worse! Why independence, if the slaves of to-day will be the tyrants of to-morrow? And that they will be such is not to be doubted, for he who submits to tyranny loves it.

“Señor Simoun, when our people is unprepared, when it enters the fight through fraud and force, without a clear understanding of what it is doing, the wisest attempts will fail, and better that they do fail, since why commit the wife to the husband if he does not sufficiently love her, if he is not ready to die for her?”

Padre Florentino felt the sick man catch and press his hand; so he became silent, hoping that the other might speak, but he merely felt a stronger pressure of the hand, heard a sigh, and then profound silence reigned in the room. Only the sea, whose waves were rippled by the night breeze, as though awaking from the heat of the day, sent its hoarse roar, its eternal chant, as it rolled against the jagged rocks. The moon, now free from the sun’s rivalry, peacefully commanded the sky, and the trees of the forest bent down toward one another, telling their ancient legends in mysterious murmurs borne on the wings of the wind.

The sick man said nothing; so Padre Florentino, deeply thoughtful, murmured: “Where are the youth who will consecrate their golden hours, their illusions, and their enthusiasm to the welfare of their native land? Where are the youth who will generously pour out their blood to wash away [232]so much shame, so much crime, so much abomination? Pure and spotless must the victim be that the sacrifice may be acceptable! Where are you, youth, who will embody in yourselves the vigor of life that has left our veins, the purity of ideas that has been contaminated in our brains, the fire of enthusiasm that has been quenched in our hearts? We await you, O youth! Come, for we await you!”

Feeling his eyes moisten, he withdrew his hand from that of the sick man, arose, and went to the window to gaze out upon the wide surface of the sea. He was drawn from his meditation by gentle raps at the door. It was the servant asking if he should bring a light.

When the priest returned to the sick man and looked at him in the light of the lamp, motionless, his eyes closed, the hand that had pressed his lying open and extended along the edge of the bed, he thought for a moment that he was sleeping, but noticing that he was not breathing touched him gently, and then realized that he was dead. His body had already commenced to turn cold. The priest fell upon his knees and prayed.

So Ibarra dies with his revenge unaccomplished, and the priest takes the box in which the dead man’s great wealth is supposed to be contained and without opening it throws it into the sea.

Only an artist would have thought of such an ending. [233]

Failure was all he reaped at Madrid in his efforts to win some measure of justice for his family, a fact that hardly could have astonished him then and seems but normal now. In the seats of authority was no man that loved justice so much as he feared the huge political machine set up by the friars and administered (through particularly appropriate selection) by the ruffian Weyler. Early in 1891, Rizal returned to Paris, where he revisited his former friends, and so passed to Ghent. There he settled himself to the finishing of “El Filibusterismo” and worked without further interruption until the book was done and on its way to the publisher.

Powerful influences now seemed to draw him again to the East; it is likely that but for his book he would have gone thither direct from Madrid when he learned how little help he might expect from the gross and inert government. The situation of his family caused him a harrowing anxiety.1 It was for his sake that they were subjected to the abominable persecutions of the petty tyrants of the existing System. His soul revolted at the idea that they should be thus tormented while he was safely out of the range of his enemies’ venom. After his consultations with the Filipinos in Madrid the gloomy outlook in the Philippines was [234]more than before a burden on his thought. He must have known that this time, as he had forecasted in his writings, revolt would be more than local. He could hardly hope to be allowed to land in the Islands, but Hong-Kong was a convenient point from which to watch developments and to put forth his influence; and as to his family he began to have a purpose that if carried out would take them beyond the power of Spanish officers to hector and to wound. In October, 1891, he sailed for Hong-Kong, where he hoped to establish himself in his profession, to gather his family, and to be ready to help his countrymen with the cautionary wisdom of which he held them to be most in need.

His hopes of professional success were better founded than he knew. Almost at once he stepped into a large practice. This is not the usual experience of new physicians in a new field, but his fame as an oculist had gone before him. For the first time in his life he had unpledged money in his purse. He sent to the Philippines for his sister Lucia, who happened then not to be in jail nor exiled nor pinioned to the miseries of procrastinating law-courts, and in her company he tasted something of the novelty of ease. The project he had half formed about the rescue of his harassed relatives took him in the following spring to Borneo. As it seemed to him virtually certain that his enemies would continue to pursue any one known to be near or dear to him, and there was no career for them in Hong-Kong, he purposed to found a new homestead for them under another flag. They were [235]a numerous family, and inasmuch as the peculiar ideas of revenge we have found to be current in the Spanish colony made his second cousin or his great-grandmother a quite feasible substitute for himself in the way of vicarious atonement, it was necessary to remove them all. In North Borneo the British authorities offered him on attractive terms an area of fertile land adapted to his purposes. He went to look at it, found it in all respects suitable, and resolved to carry out his plan of a Rizal family refuge.2

From his happy country of those days not a soul could depart without the sanction of the Government. To secure this for anybody connected with him would be hard enough; even for an individual and a temporary absence like Lucia’s it was hard. How much harder it would be to rescue a whole tribe, and all so hated! Revenge was not so to be cheated, nor the account of “Noli Me Tangere” left unsettled. If passports were to be had at all, a personal explanation and appeal offered the best chance. This he determined to attempt, if he could have some reasonable promise of safety, being more inclined to go because thereby he might again see his father and mother.

It was the Philippines in one of the recurrent spasms of reform that he must now approach—sure sign in itself that a storm was brewing. A new governor-general, one Eulogio Despujol, expert, as was afterward proved, in the unctuous shaking of hands and the agile escape from promises, had arrived with much éclat and promulgated a liberal program. Rizal wrote [236]to him, asking for permission and a safe-conduct to visit Manila.

In reply he received through the Spanish consul at Hong-Kong a passport and an unequivocal assurance of his safety in the Philippine Islands. So equipped, he sailed with his sister Lucia, June 26, 1892.3

For this he has been much criticized on the ground that to return to Manila was inconsistent with his former experiences there and virtual deportation thence. If any one had been furnished with convincing knowledge of the duplicity of the Philippine Government, surely it was Rizal. By the same token, it was said, he knew well the murderous attitude of the governing class toward him, and to go deliberately to the thrusting of his head into those jaws was madness. These, again, are but the strictures of ignorance. Rizal returned to the Philippines under a compelling sense of duty. At whatsoever cost to himself he must try to rescue his family from the tireless pursuit of the Interests he had offended, and the North Borneo project was clearly the way to achieve this. But it was a plan about which the Government would be certain to object. If nothing else were handy, there was always the argument that it would draw inhabitants of the Islands into an alien territory, and this reasoning could be met only by face to face encounter with the governor-general.

But Rizal was never deceived as to the nature of the trap into which he was walking. Weighing all the chances he knew he was not likely to emerge alive. Therefore, he prepared and left with a friend two [237]documents4 to be made public if his enemies should succeed in killing him.

The first of these was addressed “To the Filipinos” and constituted his farewell to the people he had served so loyally, and a last confession of his faith. Men still study it for other reasons than he imagined. It is not only an expression of his professed creed but a revelation of his soul and inmost thinkings on life and death. He shows here that in his mind he had made no stranger of the great mystery but had looked upon it and without misgivings. There is no bravado in his attitude toward it; he is unafraid because he has come to the logical conclusion that there is nothing about death to be afraid of. When he shall go and how do not concern a man, but only that his death shall mean something for the general cause. In this spirit he begins his letter:5

The step I am about to take is undoubtedly attended with peril, and I need not say to you that I take it after long deliberation. I understand that nearly all my friends are opposed to it; but I know also that hardly any one else comprehends what is in my heart. I cannot live on and see so many persons suffer injustice and persecution on my account; I cannot bear longer the fact that my sisters and their families are treated like criminals. I prefer death and cheerfully relinquish my life to free so many innocent persons from such great wrong.

I am aware that at present the future of our country pivots in some degree around me, that at my death many of its enemies will feel triumph, and consequently many of them are now wishing for my fall. What of it? [238]

I hold duties of conscience above all else. I have obligations to the families that suffer, to my aged parents whose sighs strike me to the heart. If with my death I can secure for them happiness and a peaceful home in their native land, I am ready. So far as the country is concerned, I am all my parents have, but the country has many, many more sons that can take my place and do my work better than I.

Besides, I wish to show those that deny us patriotism that we know how to die for duty and principle.

What matters death, if one dies for what one loves, for native land and those dear to one?

If I thought that I were the only resource of the policy of progress in the Philippines, and were I convinced that my countrymen were about to make use of my services, perhaps I should hesitate about this step; but there are others that can take my place, and take it with advantage. Furthermore, there are probably those that hold that I am not needed, and this is why I am not utilized, but find myself reduced to inactivity.

Always I have loved our unhappy land, and I am sure I shall continue to love it until my last moment, in case men prove unjust to me. Life, career, happiness, I am ready to sacrifice for it. Whatever my fate, I shall die blessing it and longing for the dawn of its redemption.

The other document was a letter addressed to his parents, brothers, and sisters. In it he said:

The affection I have ever professed for you suggests this step, and time alone can tell whether it was wise. The wisdom of acts is decided by their results, but whether these be favorable or unfavorable, it may always be said that duty urged me; so if I die in doing my duty it will not matter.

I realize how much suffering I have caused you; still I do not regret what I have done. Rather, if I had to begin again [239]I should follow the same course, for it has been only duty. Gladly I go to expose myself to peril. Not as an expiation for misdeeds (in this matter I believe myself guiltless of any) but to complete my work I offer myself an example of the doctrine I have preached.

A man ought to be ready to die for duty and his principles.

I hold fast to every idea I have advanced as to the condition and future of our country. I shall willingly die for it and even more willingly die to secure for you justice and peace.6

It was his destiny to be betrayed and lied to. He went forth with the faith of the Government pledged to his safety. No sooner had the ship that bore him from Hong-Kong hoisted her anchors than the Spanish consul cabled to Governor-General Despujol that the victim was in the trap;7 whereupon in Manila an accusation was filed against him of treason and sacrilege. It appeared that Rizal’s forebodings about his fate were not fanciful; he was going into a den of wolves. When he and his sister landed at Manila, a customs officer searched their baggage and pretended to find among Lucia’s possessions a package of treasonable documents. The device is as old as tyranny and must have suggested to La Fontaine one of his most famous fables. Here is the officer showing certain papers and saying he found them in this trunk or that valise. Who is to gainsay him? The victim protests that she never saw the documents before. What is her statement worth against the skilled vociferations of the officer? Rizal was right. In a country operated [240]as Spain operated the Philippines every man’s life was at the mercy of any power that was able and wished to take it.8

THE OUTLINE OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE “LIGA FILIPINA”

Photograph of the original. Note the erasures and the abbreviations intended to be used instead of the real names in Rizal’s handwriting.

In this instance the treasonable stuff was found, official superservice asserted, in certain pillow-cases that Lucia had in her trunk. When all was done, it consisted of a brief circular or tract entitled “The Poor Friars.” Among reasoning men and enlightened systems of society, treason is held to be a crime directed against Government; other offenses may be committed by individuals against individuals, but for these the police and the ordinary criminal code are enough. The incendiary document Lucia was alleged to have brought in said nothing against the Government. This is the fact that will strike the modern reader as strangest of all. How can there be other treason or other sedition than against Government? Yet in all this document is not a word against anybody or thing except the friars and even as to the friars speaks of but one order, and that in terms adults might smile at but assuredly would never care to reread. Lest it should be thought that any part of the description of the Insular Government attempted in these pages is extravagant, here is the whole of this ferocious document:

POOR FRIARS

A bank has just suspended payment; the New Oriental has just become bankrupt.

Great losses in India. In the Island of Mauritius, to the South of Africa [sic], cyclones and tempests have laid waste [241]its riches, swallowing more than 36,000,000 pesos. These 36,000,000 represented the hopes, the savings, the well-being, and the future of numerous individuals and families.

Among those that have suffered most we are able to mention the Reverend Corporation of the Dominicans, which lost in this catastrophe many hundreds of thousands. The exact amount is not known because they handle so much money and have so many accounts that it would be necessary to employ many accountants to calculate the immense sums in transit.

But, neither should the friends of these sainted monks that hide behind the cloak of poverty be downhearted nor should their enemies feel triumphant.

To one and all we can say that they can be tranquil. The Corporation still has many millions on deposit in the banks of Hong-Kong, and even if all of those should fail, and even if all of their many thousands of rented houses should be destroyed, still there would be left the curates and the haciendas, there would still remain the Filipinos always ready to answer their call for alms. What are four or five hundred thousands? Why take the trouble to run about the towns and ask alms to replace these losses? A year ago, through the bad business administration of the cardinals, the Pope lost 14,000,000 pesos of the money of St. Peter; the Pope, in order to cover this deficit, called upon us and we took from our “tampipis” the very last cent, because we knew that the Pope has many worries; about five years ago he married off his niece bestowing upon her a palace and 300,000 francs besides. Therefore, generous Filipinos, make a brave effort and likewise help the Dominicans.

However, these hundreds of thousands lost are not theirs, they claim. How can they have this when they take a vow of poverty? They are to be believed then, when, to protect themselves, they say this money belongs to widows and orphans. [242]Very likely some of it belongs to the widows and orphans of Calamba, and who knows if not to their murdered husbands? And the virtuous priests handle this money solely as depositories to return it to them afterward righteously with all interest when the day to render accounts arrives! Who knows? Who better than they can take charge of collecting the few household goods while the houses burn, the orphans and widows flee without meeting hospitality, since others are prohibited from offering them shelter, while the men are made prisoners and prosecuted? Who has more bravery, more audacity, and more love for humanity than the Dominicans?

But now the devil has carried off the money of the widows and the orphans, and it is to be feared that he will carry away everything, because when the devil begins the devil has to finish. Does not that money set up a bad precedent?

If things are thus, we should recommend to the Dominicans that they should exclaim as Job: “Naked I came from the womb of my mother (Spain), and naked will I return to her; the devil gave, the devil took away; blessed be the name of the Lord”!

Fr[aile] Jacinto.

Manila: Press of the Friends of the Country.9

Government in the Philippines had sunk so low that this could be deemed seditious.

Nevertheless, for some days thereafter the trap was not sprung upon the victims. Rizal with his sister went about the city, visiting old friends. More than once he called upon Governor-General Despujol and was rather astonished to find that his footing seemed to be secure upon the dark and slippery precincts of [243]Malacañan. In his usual frank way he discussed with the governor-general the brand-new program of reforms, commending most of their features and hoping for the best, as was likewise his habit. Despujol, responding to all this, seemed equally ingenuous. No one would have suspected that while he stressed so much gracious hospitality he was but waiting for the most convenient season to strike to death the man before him. Rizal pleaded in behalf of his persecuted relatives. Despujol promised immunity for the father, but not for the brother or sisters. Afterward he was willing to concede even these favors. They discussed Rizal’s project of a settlement in North Borneo, and the governor-general applied his veto. For this he gave the expected reasons but never once the real one. He objected to taking people out of the colony but said nothing about the wrath of the friars if he should let their victims escape unhurt.

Rizal had long known well enough that the lack of unity among the Filipinos was chief reason why they were enslaved and to keep up this condition chief point in Spanish policy. “Divide and rule”—the good old formula of the exploiter in all ages. To combat this he proposed an organization that would bring together the most promising elements among his people; a plan for it he had with him when he landed. It included the full working constitution of a society to be called La Liga Filipina, or Philippine League, of which the objects were declared to be to better economic conditions, to spread education, to advance the Philippine youth, and to defend by legal means [244]persons oppressed, wronged, or unjustly accused. He now called together his friends,10 explained the purposes of the league, and began to enroll members.

The real nature and front-parlor origin of this association11 were of a nature to occasion in these days only a mild surprise that anybody could object to it, as may be observed from the following precepts Rizal prepared for his fellow-members:

• Don’t gamble.
• Don’t be a drunkard.
• Don’t break the laws.
• Don’t be cruel in any way.
• Don’t be a rabid partisan.
• Don’t be merely a fault-finding critic.
• Don’t put yourself in the way of humiliation.
• Don’t treat any one with haughtiness or contempt.
• Don’t condemn any man without first hearing his side.
• Don’t abandon the poor man that has right on his side.
• Don’t forget those that although worthy have come to want.
• Don’t fail those without means that show application and ability. [245]
• Don’t associate with immoral persons or with persons of bad habits.
• Don’t overlook the value to your country of new machinery and industries.
• Don’t cease at any time to work for the prosperity and welfare of our native land.

[246]

About this was nothing sinister, illegal, revolutionary, affrighting, or incendiary, but the Spanish colony chose to view it with alarm. If Rizal had organized a prayer meeting or a branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association these nervous folk would have seen in it only treason, stratagems, and spoils. On the Filipinos the effect was different. To the deliberate judgment of the intelligentsia the plan of the league appealed as the first practical suggestion of relief through peaceful agitation. With a novel sensation of hope, they took it to their bosoms.1 Rapidly the membership increased; at last there was a promise of union and directed effort. And then the powers that stood behind the puppet governor-general and manipulated his movements decided that the ripe time had come to spring the trap; before this dangerous man should have back of him an organization able to realize his dreams he must be put to silence. Despujol sent for Rizal, leaped upon him as if from a machine with the leaflet, “The Poor Friars,” that men said had been found in Lucia’s baggage, and without trial or hearing ordered him to prison. From the spot where he stood in the governor-general’s office a guard [247]took him to Fort Santiago and thrust him into a cell. Another generation will not believe that this was done; and even in our own era, in which invasions of personal rights at times of great public excitement are not unknown, an act of such rank and impudent despotism seems improbable. There was not even a pretense of any legal proceeding, no warrant, no magistrate, no commitment. “Take this man to jail!” commands the governor-general. With an obedient start the guard sweeps away the prisoner, helpless in a square of rifles. It is enough to cause us to wonder if democracy and liberty are or can be more than veneer upon any old frame of European monarchy and whether time, in this conception of human society, must not necessarily stand stock-still.

At Santiago guard was mounted2 upon the mild reformer and man of peace as if he had been some ferocious bandit captured red-handed and likely to burst his bars. Sentinels stood day and night over his cell door; no communication was allowed with his friends; and grown men in the official service went through the theatrics of pretending that there was danger of an attempt to rescue him.

The next day a decree was issued ordering his exile to Dapitan, a town on the northeastern coast of the island of Mindanao. Upon what charge? The charge of sacrilege and sedition made against him the day he sailed from Hong-Kong, reinforced with Lucia’s damnable pillow-cases. On these he had been adjudged guilty offhand, as one would drown cats or blind puppies. He was not even allowed to know who [248]were his accusers; for that matter, he did not even know that he was accused. “This fellow has committed sacrilege and sedition,” says some one in the ear of the governor-general. “Exile him,” replies the governor-general, and signs the order committing him to a living death. It is like the scene between the governor-general and his secretary in “El Filibusterismo”; if a man may have foreknowledge of his fate, Rizal had glimpsed this in his novel.

There was the matter of the safe-conduct, the promise of protection, given by this same governor-general, under which Rizal had left Hong-Kong. It seems to have been not a feather-weight against the Interests that cried for his blood. There need be no mystery as to the source of these perfidies. Exile was the price Rizal paid for writing “Noli Me Tangere”; the powers that now pushed him upon the savage coast of Mindanao as an outcast sent there to die was the power of the friars, enraged by these pictures of themselves. They demanded Rizal’s blood; Despujol seems to have been incapable of the firing-squad and only wicked enough to consent to exile.

A chorus of protest rose from the civilized world as soon as men learned of this latest assault by a stupidly malignant Government upon the foundation principles of modern liberty. In hugger-mugger Rizal might be snatched away to banishment, but the time had gone by when such things could continue to be hid. It was speedily known throughout Europe that he had been decoyed from Hong-Kong by promises now shown to have been deliberate inventions; that the governor-general had violated his own safe-conduct; that, even [249]if Lucia had possessed a seditious document, proceedings should have lain against her and not against Rizal; that in any society above that of the jungle he would have had a hearing or some form of trial. Some such storm of resentment seems to have been foreseen by Despujol. For the issue of the “Official Gazette” that announced Rizal’s banishment he had prepared a long article defending the Government’s course and describing Rizal as a dangerous person. But he sufficiently betrayed himself by writing to the governor of Santiago prison a personal letter instructing him to take every precaution that Rizal should not see this number of the “Gazette,” and beyond this in cowardice and infamy it seemed hardly possible to go.3

For three days the victim of the aroused wrath of the governing class lay in prison, being still denied any communication with friend or relative. Then at night he was hustled aboard a steamer and started for Dapitan.

So far as we can determine now, even in these conditions he lost nothing of that serenity that has made him so admirable to some investigators and so inexplicable to others. “Sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust” seems to have been literally the state of this brown man from the ends of the earth. Many a white man far less tried might have envied his self-possession. Dwell with some patience and care, if you will, upon this his own record of his arrest and deportation and see if you do not deem this remarkable that in such conditions not a complaint, not a suggestion [250]of resentment or of bitterness, not a hint of fear occurs in his narrative. It is a plain, blunt story written only for his friends. Here if anywhere he would have exhibited wrath; and the story reads with a kind of chill, so perfect is the unconcern. You can hardly say it reads as if it were written about the sufferings of somebody else. For anybody else in the like conditions this man would have made protest. Concerning himself he had nothing to say except to record the facts. Here is what his memorandum says of all this:

Wednesday he [the governor-general] asked me if I persisted in my intention of returning to Hong-Kong. I told him “yes.” After some conversation he said that I had brought political circulars in my baggage. I replied that I had not. He asked me who was the owner of the roll of pillows and petates4 with my baggage. I said that they belonged to my sister. He told me that because of them he was going to send me to Fort Santiago. Don Ramón Despujol, his nephew and aide, took me in one of the palace carriages. At Fort Santiago, Don Enrique Villamor, the commander, received me. The room assigned to me was an ordinary chamber. It had a bed, a dozen chairs, a table, a wash-stand, and a mirror. There were three windows. One, without bars, looked out on a court; another had bars, and overlooked the wall and beach; the third served also as a door and had a padlock. Two artillerymen were on guard as sentinels. These had orders to fire on any one that tried to make signs from the beach. I could neither write nor converse with the officer of the guard.

Don Enrique Villamor, the commander of the fort, gave me books from the library. [251]

Each day the corporal of the guard proved to be a sergeant. They cleaned the room every morning. For breakfast, I had coffee with milk, a roll, and coffee-cake. Luncheon at 12:30 was of four courses. Dinner was at 8:30 and similar to the luncheon. Commander Villamor’s orderly waited on me.

On Thursday, the 14th, about 5:30 or 6 P.M., the nephew notified me that at 10 that night I should sail for Dapitan. I prepared my baggage, and at 10 was ready, but as no one came to get me, I went to sleep.

At 12:15, the aide arrived with the same carriage that had brought me there. By way of Santa Lucia Gate, they took me to the Malecon, where there were General Ahumada and some other people. Another aide and two of the Guardia Veterana were awaiting me in a boat.

The Cebu sailed in the morning at 9. They gave me a good state-room, on the upper deck. Above the doors could be read, “Chief.” Next my cabin was that of Captain Delgras, who had charge of the party.

Ten soldiers from each branch of the military service comprised the expedition. There were artillery, infantry of five regiments, carbineers, cavalry, and engineers, and the Civil Guard.

We were carrying prisoners, loaded with chains, among whom were a sergeant and a corporal, both Europeans. The former was to be shot for having ordered the tying up of his superior officer who had misbehaved while in Mindanao. The officer, for having let himself be tied, was dismissed from the service. The soldiers who obeyed orders, were sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment.

It appears that the misbehavior noted here by Rizal consisted of the seduction of the sergeant’s wife by [252]the officer, and the tying up of the officer was the sergeant’s revenge. It is an interesting side-light on the prevailing code that the officer was dismissed from the service for allowing himself to be tied but not for dishonoring the poor sergeant, whose recompense was to be shot. The privates were to be punished for laying hands upon an officer, although they were but obeying orders.5

I ate in my state-room, the food being the same as the officers had. I always had a sentinel and a corporal on guard. Every night Captain Delgras took me for a promenade till 9 o’clock. We passed along the east coast of Mindanao and the west coast of Panay. We came to Dapitan on Sunday at 7 in the evening.

Captain Delgras and three artillerymen accompanied me in a boat rowed by eight sailors. There was a heavy sea.

The beach seemed very gloomy. We were in the dark, except for our lantern, which showed a roadway grown with weeds.

In the town we met the governor or commandant, Captain Ricardo Carnicero. There was also a Spanish exile, and the practicante,6 Don Cosme. We went to the town hall, which was a large building.

That is all there is of this laconic narrative. Under the conditions it can hardly be equaled for philosophical phlegm. “The beach seemed very gloomy”; “As no one came to get me, I went to sleep.” It sounds like casual notes on a holiday jaunt. In point of fact, he was in danger at all times of assassination and knew it well. He must have rather wondered at his fortune [253]when he saw the beach at Dapitan and realized that he had arrived without being murdered.7

It was a little town on the border of a savage country, known to be unhealthful, and at that time so difficult of access from Manila that he might have been nearer at Yokohama. It is charitable but hardly necessary to believe that the men that consigned him to such a place were unaware of its repute. With so little concealment they had sought in other ways for his life, we have no reason to think now of a sudden they had acquired mercy. To a thousand places more salubrious he might as easily have been sent; none would satisfy them but this.

At Dapitan were a military station, a convento, and several priests. Rizal was informed that if he would make a declaration of sympathy and admiration for Spain he could reside at the convento with the priests. Even for that privilege, dear to an intellectual man, hungry for the company of his educated fellows, he would not lay perjury on his soul.8 Strange as the temptation seems to us in these days, the tempters knew well what they had in view. With such a declaration they could nullify much of Rizal’s influence upon his countrymen and possibly allay something of the spirit of revolt that on all sides was rising in the colony.

To the commandant’s house, accordingly, he was assigned. It was but rude commons and a primitive environment. The sudden and cold plunge from the place of respect he had held in Europe and his profitable [254]position in Hong-Kong would have overwhelmed a weaker spirit. Rizal accepted the stern mutations with the unruffled composure that was always his strong anchor in whatsoever difficulties. “No man bears sorrow better,” says the antique Roman of himself; but you would not look for a recrudescence of Marcus Brutus in a Malay of the nineteenth century.

In the same spirit he now arranged his time upon a schedule after his invariable custom, and resumed cheerfully a life of study and work. Under the parole he had given that he would make no attempt to escape, he was allowed to go about as he pleased and without observation, for it is singular that this traitor and dangerous character was implicitly trusted even by his enemies so far as any question of personal honor was concerned. He had never a guard in Dapitan. Not only so, but the commandants, one after another, and all the soldiery, from private to highest officers, fell under the potent charm of his manner and became his friends and admirers. The commandants were frequently changed. Each in turn came to Dapitan warned against the perilous prisoner there and therefore bristling with dislike; each went away swearing he was the prince of good fellows and sorry for his fate.

At all times he was the most industrious of exiles; he must have had a spirit akin to the genius of perpetual motion. Day after day he plunged into the woods to study the animal life of the region, collect specimens and write elaborate notes about shells, bugs, crawling things, trees, and flowers. He explored the coasts of Mindanao and visited the native villages. [255]With evident enthusiasm he revived his ethnological pleasures and collected native implements, weapons and manufactures, many of which from his hands are now in the museum of Dresden, for instance.9 True to his natural inclinings, one of his first employments had been to look about him at the chances the children of that region had to gain even the rudiments of education. Finding they had next to nothing, he gathered them about him and began to teach. He was also busy at times with his professional ministrations. Patients began to seek him from Manila, from Hong-Kong, and even from more distant places, so great was his reputation as an oculist. With the fees they paid him he embarked upon beneficent enterprises that revealed another reserve in his resourceful mind.

The first of these was a lighting system for Dapitan; the next, waterworks, which he devised, planned, and superintended in person, going back to the engineering lore he had learned at the Ateneo and then laid aside. Much of the construction was difficult, and engineers still wonder at the skill and courage he showed in meeting its problems. He and his workmen were without the proper tools; they must improvise their own materials, and bring the water a long distance over valleys and around hills; but they conquered every obstacle.10 [256]

When this task was done he bought him a tract of land close by the town, built a house on it, and established there adequate quarters for his school.

This may be a good place to say what this singular person was in some of the sciences to which he gave so much of himself. As a physician, while still a student at Madrid University, he had made commentaries of remarkable merit, “Apuntes de Obstetricia” and “Apuntes Clinicos.” As an ophthalmologist he seemed to win at once to distinction as soon as he left the university. This Dr. de Weckert of Paris, to whom he went first, was of too great repute and too well supplied with candidates to have selected him for chief laboratory assistant if he had not been of unusual attainments. It appears that de Weckert was so much impressed with this brown man from Malaya that they began a warm friendship that lasted until Rizal’s death, and so long as he remained in Paris he was the great oculist’s favorite companion and collaborateur. In Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Berlin he was the associate and assistant of men like Galezowsky and Schulzer. In the few months that elapsed between his first return to the Philippines and his departure thence at the veiled order of Terrero, he received in fees more than five thousand pesos, a sum equivalent to about fifteen thousand pesos of the present day. At Hong-Kong, for the short time he was there, his office [257]was overrun with patients from all that part of the world. As we have seen, they followed him even to far Dapitan. One of them was an Englishman that made him a present of five hundred pesos, brown man and Malay as he was.

RIZAL’S CELL AT FORT SANTIAGO

As an ethnologist, he was an honored member of the leading ethnological societies of Europe, and his close friendship with Blumentritt we have noted. Dr. Meyer, director of the Royal Saxony Ethnographical Institute of Dresden, regarded him with admiration as a great scholar and great investigator. With Meyer and with Virchow he was on terms of confidential intimacy. These were men in whom ordinarily confidence was a plant of slow growth. They were drawn to and believed in Rizal because he had mastered their specialty and could meet them in it on their own footing. All those rare and abstruse works of Müller, Perschel, Ratzel, and the other great leaders in ethnological research he knew well11 and, what was better, he had ideas of his own about them. Not only then but long before; he had been mulling over ethnological principles while he was teaching Filipino boys at the Ateneo the best way to land on the solar plexus of a young Spanish bully.

As a naturalist he enriched the museums of Europe and Manila with hundreds of specimens of his gathering and preparing. Flowers, plants, crustaceans and all forms of animal life attracted his study. The German museums were so well pleased with his work [258]that they offered him, while he was in Dapitan, a remunerative salary to devote himself entirely to gathering specimens for them, and they still exhibit his collections among their most valued possessions. Three creatures, previously unknown to science, now bear his name because he discovered them. One is a frog called the Rhacoperus Rizali; the second is a coleopter called the Apogonis Rizali; and the third, a dragon called the Draco Rizali.

In philology, Rizal won the friendship and esteem of Dr. Reinhold Rost, said to have been the greatest philologist of the nineteenth century, and was himself one of its most wonderful polyglots. While he was at Dapitan, to baffle the censor, he wrote a letter to his sister that he began in colloquial German, carried on in colloquial English, and concluded in colloquial French.12 But this was for him a most trifling exploit and hardly worth noticing. Besides these and Spanish, of which he was a master, he spoke Latin, Greek, Arab, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Swedish, Dutch, Catalan, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Tagalog, Visayan, and the Moro dialects of Dapitan. One of his papers, a scientific treatise on the Visayan language, was read before the Ethnographical Society of Berlin. He was associated with Dr. Meyer and Dr. Blumentritt in the annotation of a Chinese codicil of the Middle Ages. While at Dapitan he began to write a scientific Tagalog grammar and a treatise on the resemblances between Tagalog and Visayan speech. To amuse himself he would [259]sometimes adorn a title-page or drawing with quotations in Hebrew, Sanskrit, Japanese, Spanish, and English.

As to other sciences, for example, he excelled in chemistry. Before he was twenty-one he had obtained degrees as surveyor and agricultural expert. He was an excellent engineer and so scientific an educator that when the Philippine Republic came to be erected the plan of the educational department and work was taken from his writings. In Leipzig he went deeply into psychology, in which he was fellow-student with Hugo Münsterberg. While he was at Dapitan he learned how to sail a ship, and taught their trade to the fishermen, because he showed them how to make and how to handle a better kind of net.

Incidentally, he had the makings of a great journalist.

Concerning his place as a poet, most of his poetry was written in Spanish and after the approved Spanish manner. Like other poetry it is virtually incapable of translation. The thought may be indicated but not the melodic significance, so important in Spanish, and of which he was a facile master. How impossible it is to reproduce this in translation is apparent to one that will compare the five-line Spanish stanza as Rizal left it and the best English version of the same stanza. A poem that he wrote at Dapitan, “My Retreat,”13 dedicated to his mother, is an adequate expression of the reverent attitude toward nature that he managed to carry with him unimpaired in so many vicissitudes [260]and long inhumations in the sordid dust of cities. This is the first stanza in Mr. Derbyshire’s version:14

From poetry, we pass to sociology, a transition that might seem violent enough in one of less versatility. The commandants, of course, must be parts of the general machinery of espionage and report to Manila what they observed in this evil sprite that might show dangerous machinations against the peace and dignity of our lord the king. Some of the reports they made are still extant. One of them sent about this time by a commandant, the Captain Ricardo Carnicero, to Governor-General Despujol contains this account of a conversation:

Carnicero. Tell me, Rizal, what reforms seem to you most vital for this country?

Rizal. First of all, to secure representation for it in the Cortes [Spanish parliament] that there may be an end to the despotisms now committed upon it.

Next to secularize the priesthood,15 abolishing the power the friars now exercise over the Government and the country. To distribute the parishes as they become vacant, among the body of the clergy, so that the clergy may be both Spanish and Philippine. [261]

To reform the administration in all its branches.

To promote primary instruction, to end the interference of the friars in the control of education, to give better salaries to both men and women teachers.

To divide civil appointments equally between the Spaniards and the Filipinos.

To cleanse the administration of justice.

To establish in capitals of more than 16,000 inhabitants schools of arts and crafts.

These are my chief reforms. Once established in the right spirit, the Philippines would be the happiest country in the world.

Carnicero. Friend Rizal, these reforms of yours do not seem to me at all bad; but you seem to forget that the friars have as much influence in Madrid as in Manila, and for this reason it would be practically impossible at this time to put these changes into effect.

Rizal. Do not think so. The influence of the friars is waning in all parts of the world. I am bold enough to assure you that wherever a government, even a little advanced, would give a free hand to five or six honest and patriotic men, the power of the friars would disappear. In Madrid it is perfectly well known what the friars are doing here. So true is this that in the first interview I had with Pi y Linares Rivas, when he was a member of the Liberal party of Spain, he told me of things in this country of which, although I was born here, I had been in ignorance. I can cite to you many other instances of men in Spain that have exact data on the lives and characters of the friars in the Philippines. These gentlemen said to me: “The bad governments that in Spain are following one another are blamed for many abuses that in reality are wrought by the religious corporations. On the day when things change we shall not forget the real offenders.” Excuse me for saying this to you, but the friars are not wanted [262]in the Philippines. Always they become more repugnant and hateful as always they interfere the more in conditions and affairs that do not belong to them.16

Where lay the sedition that Rizal plotted is evident from this report, and equally evident what power pulled the strings behind puppet king and manikin premier.

He must have had reason, even in far Dapitan, to wonder if there were any place out of range of the malicious or the dull. Persons that thought they had a call to reform him and other persons that believed they had been appointed to torture him would not leave him alone even here. It was a place with what was called a mail service; in the course of time almost any letter that had passed the censor would come limping in. Among such freight arrived one day a laborious effort from the superior of the Jesuits in the Philippines, the Rev. Father Pastells, in which he took occasion to offer disagreeable remarks. Rizal might have responded in kind, if he had pleased; as to which, take note of some of the sarcastic passages in “Noli Me Tangere.” Instead of flouting his reverend critic, he chose to favor him with a serious letter in which the faith that guided his course was set forth with the eloquence of honesty. He wrote:

You exclaim: “What a pity that so gifted a youth should not have used his talents in a better cause.” Possibly there are other causes better than mine. But my cause is good, and that is enough for me.

Others, perhaps, may gain more honors and greater glory. But I am like the bamboo, which is also a native of this soil. It is used for cottages of light material and not for heavy [263]European buildings. So I regret neither my humble cause nor its small rewards. I only regret the little talent that God has given me to use in its service. If instead of being weak bamboo I had been solid hardwood, I should have been able to give better aid. But He that made me what I am never makes mistakes in any of His acts. He knows very well how useful are even the smallest cottages.

As to any fame, honor, or profit that I might have gained, I admit all that to sound attractive, for I am a young man of flesh and blood with a full share of human weaknesses. But no one chooses the nationality or race into which he is born. With his birth he profits by the privileges or suffers the disadvantages that race and nationality bring. So I accept the cause of my country.

I have confidence that He that created me a Filipino will know how to pardon in me mistakes due to our hard position and the poor education we receive from our birth.

I am not working for fame or glory. I have no ambition to rival others that are born into conditions very different from my own.

My only desire is to do all I can within the limits of my powers. I wish most to do what is needed most. I have received a little learning and I think I ought to teach it to my countrymen. Others more fortunate than I may work for the great things.17

He had letters of a different tenor from members of his family, toward whom he yearned all his life with an almost singular devotion; but for his strong sense of family duty he might then be receipting for great fees and living sweetly in Hong-Kong instead of facing the miseries of Dapitan. Of this fact he never made a mention to any one, if he thought of it himself. [264]Among the letters from these relatives that he held so dear came one from a nephew in Luzon to which he made the following characteristic reply:

I think I ought to mention to you a slight fault that you have committed in your letter. It is a little error that many in society make.

One does not say, “I and my sister greet you,” but “my sister and I greet you.” Always you have to put yourself last. You should say, “Emilio and I,” “you and I,” and so on. For the rest, your letter leaves nothing to be desired in clearness, conciseness, and spelling. Then keep on advancing. Learn, learn, and think much about what you learn. Life is a very serious matter. It only goes well for those that have intelligence and heart. To live is to be among men, and to be among men is to strive.

But this strife is not a brute-like, selfish struggle, nor with men alone. It is a strife with them, and at the same time with one’s own passions. It is a struggle with the proprieties, with errors, with prejudices. It is a never ending striving, with a smile on the lips and the tears in the heart.

On this battle-field man has no better weapon than his intelligence. He possesses no more force than he has heart. Bring it out, then. Improve it, keep it prepared, and strengthen and educate yourself for this.

Upon such a spirit the horrors of exile must have weighed little. In a region strange, at that time uncouth and, compared with many in “your Oriental Eden Isles,” unattractive, he offers to the world an unaccustomed figure of the outcast. He went without repining to regular and useful work while he understood well enough that he was a sacrificial offering and fated to be so; the hatred and contempt of the reactionary [265]Interests were concentrated upon him; he was victimized for his countrymen. Only two privations seemed poignant to him. He longed for his family; he missed his books. With these, it appears, he would have been content, eying cheerfully the fate that seemed to have at last defined his career; for he had little doubt he should end his days on this lonely shore. For consolation in his spiritual lack, he turned to his arts and modeled assiduously; some of the most marvelous of his sculptures belong to this period. Among them the bust of Father Guerrico18 that was exhibited years afterward at the St. Louis Exposition, and won a gold medal there.19 He was the spontaneous artist that without conscious effort descries beauty in commonplace things. Opposite his dwelling a native woman, bent upon one knee, was cleaning the street for a coming festival. Something in her pose and garmenture struck him as a graceful characteristic; he modeled her as she labored.20 From memory he modeled busts and medallions of men he had known in Europe and Asia; in his sketch-book he preserved effects he noticed in sky, sea, and woods. He returned to poetic composition and produced now some of the most beautiful of his works. More than this in armor of patience the Stoics themselves could demand nothing. How many Highland Scotch have stood upon the sands of France and sighed away their souls northward? And how often have the sympathetic thought with compassion of the English pioneers in early [266]America, of the Pilgrim fathers that first bleak winter, of Hugo in Jersey and Napoleon chained to his rock? This man hunted out the beauties of exile, made them his friends and companions, taught his pupils, made poetry, carved statues, loved his fellows, and thanked God.

SPECIMENS OF RIZAL’S MODELING WHEN AN EXILE AT DAPITAN, BOTH SELF-EXPLANATORY

[267]

To his father and mother he wrote urging them to come to Dapitan and make their home on the land that he had bought. In this he must have lightly estimated the rancor or the vigilance of his enemies, or have been imperfectly informed about what was going on in Manila—or both. It was a time when all suspected persons were to be watched with unusual diligence, and of these the Rizal family came first. Meantime, the exile’s fate, of which he was wont to take a somber view, shifted somewhat its familiar aspect of misfortune and sent him one gleam of happiness. In the midst of his lonely state and Promethean miseries adroitly prepared for him, he met a woman that attracted him, and ended by marrying her.

This came about after a strange fashion. All this time he had been faithful to the memory of Leonora.1 A few months after he had taken up his residence in Dapitan there came thither a patient from Hong-Kong named Taufer, an American engineer, blind, and drawn to Dapitan by the fame of the great oculist.2 He had with him his adopted daughter Josefina, who promptly fell in love with Rizal. Her real name was Josephine Bracken; her parentage was Irish. Her [268]father had been a non-commissioned officer in the British army and stationed at Hong-Kong. When he died he left a large family in extreme poverty. Taufer, who was a kindly man of some means, adopted the youngest child as a matter of charity and then grew to love her as if she had been his own daughter. For seventeen years she had been his daily companion; in the long night of his blindness she was his guide and comforter.

If her portraits do her justice, Josephine must have had unusual beauty, but her letters do not reveal in her the intellectual gifts that would have made her an ideal companion for José Rizal. Yet she must have been sympathetic, and he, solitary at the world’s outpost, seems to have been fond of her. When he came to ask her hand in marriage of her guardian, Mr. Taufer was overcome with grief. An hour later, he attempted suicide. He was blind; the examinations of Rizal had shown no chance that his eyesight could be restored; a daughter of his had but lately left him to be married; he had lost his first wife; his second marriage had not been happy; and he felt that without Josephine there was nothing to live for. Rizal came upon him razor in hand about to carry out his threat and narrowly rescued him from himself.3

After this, a marriage seemed impossible, and Josephine returned to Hong-Kong with Taufer.

But the affair had gone so far that already Rizal had made overtures to the parish priest to perform the ceremony. The priest shook his head: there were Rizal’s well known heresies in the way; he could not [269]marry a heretic. Rizal said that if by heresies his political opinions were meant, nothing could induce him to profess any change in them; but if the priest meant religious views, he was ready to declare that he was and had been at all times a faithful son of the Catholic religion and purposed so to remain. The priest thought a declaration to this effect might win past the bishop, who now appeared as the chief obstacle; at least he would send to Cebu to find out. The letter of inquiry he had written and was about to despatch when news came that the engagement had been broken. The letter was never sent.

None the less, Rizal and Josephine continued to regard themselves as plighted, and after a time in Hong-Kong Mr. Taufer was won over to consent to their union. Josephine went to Manila, where she made the acquaintance of Rizal’s mother and sisters. She was about to start for Dapitan to renew the attempt to gain the sanction of the church when in a conversation Mrs. Mercado reminded her that there were two views of this proceeding. It was doubtful if the bishop could be induced to think well of the marriage; but even if he could his permission would then be regarded as evidence of compromise on Rizal’s part. In the opinion of many of his countrymen he enlisted against the church when he enrolled against the friars; since the religious orders had come to control the ecclesiastic as well as the political administration, the distinction between church and friar was to some minds fairly vague. Mrs. Mercado desired that nothing should weaken her son’s influence; a constancy from which we may surmise of what fighting stock she came. She [270]knew that anything that looked like compromise would hearten his enemies and dismay his friends. Therefore, she suggested a civil marriage, the church to be ignored. Civil marriages and even common-law marriages were now authorized by the laws of Spain, and, if not yet decreed in the islands, were legally binding there.4

This advice the lovers deemed good when Josephine reached Dapitan and reported it; there was no more talk of a dispensation from the bishop of Cebu. A marriage ceremony was performed by the simple device of the taking of hands before witnesses and the registering of their mutual vows.

Rizal’s stout-hearted mother succeeded about this time in winning permission to visit her son; later came two of his sisters. Their presence revived in him the hope he had once cherished of uniting his family in a spot where, after so much of strife and grief, they might begin life afresh and be free from the friars that were the landlords and rulers of Biñan and Calamba. He could see no reason why Mindanao should not be well adapted to their needs. Government could not urge against such a plan the objection it used against the North Borneo project; Mindanao was Philippine territory. He wrote to Despujol asking for the necessary permits and received a chilly answer reminding him that he was an exile and an outcast and in no position to seek favors of his Government. Steady persistence in the face of whatever rebuff was one of Rizal’s strongest traits; the man seemed as incapable of discouragement as George [271]Washington was; and the philosophical reader of history may well consider the appearance of this quality in three men that founded three nations, William the Silent, Washington, and Rizal, and inquire whether in value to the world this possession did not overtop all others. With one cherished hope crushed, he turned to another. He set himself to improve agriculture in the region where he had been marooned; he showed the farmers how they could raise better crops and get better prices for them. From the United States, where in his travels he had observed with interest the latest agricultural inventions, he imported modern farm machinery, using it upon his own place and teaching its use to others. It has been the lot of few men to lead lives of such varied use to their fellows. He seemed to go through the world with eyes observing whatever was done around him and mind considering how it could be done better.

Meantime, in Manila great changes had been at work, of which he knew nothing. The discontent of the people, always growing, had begun to find a new expression. Another leader had arisen, in all ways different from Rizal except in this that he, too, was an inevitable product of the attempt to force upon a people a distasteful sovereignty. It has been much the fashion, particularly with writers of a scholastic bent or reactionary sympathy (which is probably the same thing), to speak ill of Andrés Bonifacio. If we desire a just estimate of the forces that worked in diverse ways for Philippine freedom, we are not to dismiss this man lightly5 nor to speak of him with disrespect. [272]Successful revolutions demand the man that thinks and the man that acts, Mazzinis and Garibaldis, Jeffersons and Washingtons. Rizal was the Mazzini of the Philippine struggle; Bonifacio was its Garibaldi.

He was born in the working-class, was almost wholly self-educated, and at the time he began to be powerful in Philippine destiny was a porter in a maritime warehouse of Manila. In his youth he developed a passion for reading; he read when other persons slept, ate, or idled. By diligent study in the night-time he acquired a knowledge of history and its philosophy that in a man of his handicaps and employment was not less than marvelous and alone would have indicated a phenomenal capacity.6 He studied deeply the stories of other peoples oppressed, the Israelites in Egypt, the Dutch under Spain, the American colonies under England, the French under their monarchical system, and formulated from these a church militant of democratic faith and principles of which he was first the acolyte and then the devout minister. In the end it mastered all his thought and waking hours and became essentially his life. Something of the great truth he saw clearly that the substance of all real progress in civilization has been progress in democracy, and for the most part this has been won by hard blows, rude encounters, and illimitable sacrifices. He caught a glimpse of the magical stimulus that came to the world from the successive emancipations of the American and the French peoples and another glimpse of the probable effect of a similar emancipation on his own. Upon the condition of those countrymen of his, dragging [273]at a chain that stifled in them all mental vitality with all self-respect, he stared with growing impatience while he burned and fretted for another Bunker Hill and another Yorktown.

He was of somewhat violent passions and such deficiencies in self-control as were to have been expected from his experiences and inadequate training. Nevertheless, he had great sincerity, a mind of extraordinary fertility, and a readiness for swift decision and action. He showed himself to be indomitable when wholly concentered upon the one cause; and his contribution to it is not now to be disparaged because he happened to come no nearer the academic walk than Lincoln came.

When Rizal, lured from Hong-Kong by false promises of safety, landed in Manila, Bonifacio was twenty-nine years old. He had long revolved in his mind the fact so patent to all observing Filipinos that the first step to their freedom must be unity. About the time Rizal was founding his Liga Filipina, Bonifacio was formulating another and much more portentous union. The two were launched about the same time; one in the open, the other in the dark and with the utmost secrecy. Bonifacio called his society the Kataastaasang Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng̃ mg̃a Anak ng̃ Bayan, which being interpreted means Supreme Most Respected Association of the Sons of the People. For brevity’s sake the long unwieldy name soon came to be shortened into K.K.K. or the Katipunan, and so remains in history. Bonifacio shaped it like a masonic lodge, with a ritual, passwords, grips, and the swearing of fealty and silence. Its avowed object was the overthrowing [274]by force of the Spanish power and the establishing of the Philippine nation, free and independent.

It appears now that the name of Rizal was used as an honorary president of this society,7 but wholly without his authority or even knowledge. For this unwarranted use Bonifacio was much to blame. It is likely that he found at first some difficulty in securing recruits and took advantage of Rizal’s great popularity. Either so, or what seems more probable to us, he expected to have Rizal’s support for the Katipunan when it should have grown to formidable size. In either case, the course was inexcusable. But we are to remember that Bonifacio, warring against the most unprincipled and ruthless of powers, believed he was justified in using any weapons that came to his hand.

Month after month the Katipunan spread among the disgusted and restless Filipinos—secretly, always; and we are to surmise that the care with which the movement was to be concealed until the instant of the blow recommended it to people smarting under a Government so obese and still so viciously protected. How long this Government was ignorant of what was going on nobody knows. If the vast network of spies and agents provocateurs, with which Spanish, like Russian, rule was maintained, brought in no hint of the mine that was being driven beneath the feet of the governing class, the spies must have made their first recorded failure, and that concerning the one thing most important to their employers. Filipinos, one may say, had not so known these ever busy birds of ill omen. [275]

The deportation of Rizal gave to the Katipunan a great impetus; the masses of people bitterly resented the cowardice and perfidy that had contrived at last to drag down the popular champion. At first they knew no way to voice their protest. The Katipunan relieved them of their uncertainty; it was the weapon thrust into their hands. A year went by under this slowly darkening sky; then two years. Rizal was at Dapitan; it seemed likely he would remain there until his last day, for nothing would soften the hatred with which the friars and patricians regarded him, and their word was the country’s law. Yet if he could be brought back in the character of a revolutionary leader the whole country would rise behind him. Ingenious minds brooded upon the ease with which he could be rescued. Only a small force of troops guarded Dapitan; it could be overpowered by a handful of resolute men. Rizal’s habit was to take long canoe journeys alone around the coast, pursuing his scientific inquiries; of his own will he would never violate his parole, but suppose he should be seized and carried off by force? He could then be picked up by a British mail-steamer, be landed at Singapore, and be free. Intimations of these plans were conveyed to him: he vetoed all of them. It was his word of honor that he had given never to attempt to escape; not even with the least connivance at a rescue would he taint his word; not even by allowing other men to entertain a thought that his faith could be tainted; and not even in dealing with a Government that had dealt perfidiously with him.

Bonifacio, looking into the faces of his people, believed [276]more strongly every day that the time to strike was near at hand, and every day he longed the more for the active assistance of Rizal.8 He knew well enough the danger his movement stood in and how that danger increased hour by hour as knowledge of what was afoot spread and could be therefore the less easily controlled. At last he went to the length of sending an emissary to see Rizal, to lay before him the plans for the revolution and to ask his help. The messenger chosen was Pio Valenzuela, a name afterwards famous and honored among his countrymen. To disguise the real object of his visit he took with him a blind man upon whom, it was pretended, Rizal was to perform an operation. Helped by this ruse, the messenger had a fair chance to talk freely with the exile.

What took place at their meeting was long in dispute. Enemies of Philippine independence have asserted that in wrathfully rejecting Bonifacio’s appeal Rizal declared himself against any effort for national freedom. This is in accordance with a common process of over-emphasizing (for propaganda effect) Rizal’s dislike of force and doubt of the present readiness of his people for self-government. It is certain that he declined Valenzuela’s proposal and with some heat;9 we may also believe that with all his might he strove to dissuade his countrymen from violence. Yet there is testimony extant that when he found all his pleadings were useless and the violence he feared was but too likely he admitted that he could not in any event [277]separate his sympathies from his struggling countrymen.

The disputed versions of his reply are not worth the attention they have had, because, as has been pointed out here and more than once, Rizal’s convictions on these matters are clear. One obvious reflection is enough to illustrate them. If he had lived through such strenuous days as followed 1896 he would have been found in the front ranks of those that fought for freedom and yet would never have ceased to mourn that freedom could not be won in another way. As to this, “El Filibusterismo,” if there were nothing else, would be testimony enough; and if Philippine independence involved only sentimental and not commercial interests there would be no attempt to distort or to obscure it.

When Bonifacio received Valenzuela’s report of Rizal’s decision, he swore, after his fashion, and determined to press on with his own plans and forget the exile. Against the notion that the Philippines were unready for revolution or unfitted for self-government he set himself like a man in a battle that has thrown away fear with his scabbard. He recalled that, weighing duly the relative strengths of the antagonists, the American colonists were not worse prepared for the struggle that set them free. Most revolutions, history had taught him, had been begun by people that fought with broken weapons or bare hands; witness Camille Desmoulins and the ragged crowd he led from the café in the courtyard of the Palais Royal that fateful night in July. Hardly a weapon among them all more [278]deadly than a hammer, and yet to the echo of their feet fell absolute government in every corner of Europe. All the world now honors those empty hands; on the very spot where Desmoulins addressed the crowd, behold now his statue! Are revolutions ever wrought by well ordered ranks of daintily uniformed guards? Are they ever launched when every condition is fitted, like joiner-work, to their success? And, in fact, are they ever made to any man’s volition or by anything but blind destiny that sits behind the whirlwind?

Bonifacio, at least, had no idea of waiting until the Philippines should be populated with university graduates able to demonstrate in scholarly phrases the philosophical sweetness of liberty. Desiring freedom, he desired it then and there. Month by month, the Katipunan spread and carried with it, as a flood carries a straw, the catastrophe of this story.

At Dapitan life went on unchangingly. It is likely that Rizal had there a happiness and a serenity he had not known since childhood. He says as much in one of his letters:

My life now is quiet, peaceful, retired, and without glory; but I think it is useful, too. I teach here the poor but intelligent boys reading, Spanish, English, mathematics, and geometry. Moreover, I teach them to behave like men. I taught the men here how to get a better way of earning their living, and they think I am right. We have begun, and already success has crowned our trials.

He tells how even in that out-of-the-way place there were lessons for him to learn; how he was taught there [279]to steer and reef, to manage a canoe, to speak Visayan, and the better to know his own country. “God can send you your fortune,” he adds, “even amidst the persecutions of your friends!”

In this letter he dwells with a kind of delight on his exacting labors in philology, of his studies in Tagalog and his Tagalog grammar, which he had almost completed. It is plainly to be seen that his activities kept him from nostalgia, as his captivity from the turmoil of his years in the noisy and bitter world; and now he was happily married!

But man is not so easily separated from his Nemesis. Of a sudden all this house of content fell in ruins about him.

All this time he was maintaining his correspondence with his friends, the European scientists, and particularly with Dr. Blumentritt,10 the closest and most sympathetic of his intellectual allies. Early in 1896 a letter from Dr. Blumentritt told him of the sad condition of the hospitals in Cuba. Yellow fever was raging in the Island, and there were not nearly enough physicians to meet the emergency. No such report could be made to Rizal without awakening in him his sympathy and instinctive impulse to help whomsoever might be in distress. He wrote to the governor-general offering to go to Cuba as a volunteer physician in the government hospitals. There was a new governor-general now; Despujol had ended his clouded career and gone home. Governor-General Blanco accepted Rizal’s offer, and on August 1, 1896, the exile sailed [280]from Dapitan for Manila. With him went Mrs. Rizal and his little niece.

Even as a volunteer surgeon in the yellow fever hospitals he was nominally to be a prisoner always; hence he must go to Cuba by way of Spain and under the Spanish flag; otherwise Spanish sovereignty would lapse and he might escape from its power. He planned to reach Manila in time to take the next mail-boat, the Isla de Luzon, for Barcelona, where he was to transship for Cuba. Mrs. Rizal was to reside in his absence with his relatives at Biñan or in Manila. But the steamer that took him from Dapitan made but a slow voyage. He had time to attend en route a dinner in his honor at Dumaguete, and to perform an operation on the eyes of a patient at Cebu. He reached Manila a few hours after the Isla de Luzon had sailed. Nearly a month must elapse before another steamer would start for Barcelona. Meantime he was detained on the Spanish cruiser Castilla, a beautiful vessel that two years later lay at the bottom of Manila Bay riddled with American shells. But his confinement seems to have been easy. In a few days the officers were his friends. The captain repeatedly invited members of his family to dine with him on board. Mrs. Rizal came to see him, and so did former pupils of his that had drifted from Dapitan up to Manila. He wrote letters to his family, including one of great tenderness to his mother, in which he included loving messages to all the household at Los Baños.11

The captain of the Castilla was one of many Spaniards that counterpoised the grim tale of his usual [281]treatment under their flag. Governor-General Ramón Blanco, still remembered in the islands for his kindly, gentle ways, was another. He furnished Rizal with letters of recommendation to high Spanish officers in Spain and in Cuba. One of these to General Azcárraga, Spanish minister of war, was as follows:12

Manila, August 30, 1896.

Esteemed General and Distinguished Friend:

I recommend to you with genuine interest Dr. José Rizal, who is leaving for the Peninsula to place himself at the disposal of the government as volunteer army surgeon to Cuba. During the four years of his exile at Dapitan he has conducted himself in the most exemplary manner, and he is, in my opinion, the more worthy of praise and consideration in that he is in no way connected with the extravagant attempts we are now deploring, neither those of conspirators nor of the secret societies that have been formed.

I have the pleasure to reassure you of my high esteem, and remain

Your affectionate friend and comrade
Ramón Blanco.

On September 3, the next mail-steamer, the Isla de Panay, departed for Barcelona, with Rizal as a kind of self-watched prisoner, guarded by his parole and not otherwise; for here as before it is to be remarked as one of the curiosities of this story that however his enemies in the Government might hate him they seemed to have full confidence in his word of honor.

But while he was still waiting on the Castilla in the harbor disaster had begun to ripen for him. [282]

The whole Katipunan conspiracy was laid bare to the Government.

According to the accepted story, on the night of August 19, the mother superior of a convent-school at Tondo burst upon the parish priest at his house with information that she had discovered a terrible plot to massacre all the Spaniards in the Islands. A brother of one of her pupils was a member of the Katipunan. Assessments upon members of the order had now become frequent, as Bonifacio’s preparations drew to a head. It is an ancient Filipino custom for the woman in each household to keep the purse for the men. This young man’s treasurer was his sister. Of late he had been coming to her so often for funds that she insisted upon knowing what he wanted the money for. Then little by little she wormed his secret from him and fled with it to the mother superior, who took it to the padre.

Father Gil seems to have made one leap with the news to the Civil Guard, who arrested the girl’s brother, forced a confession from him (probably with tortures), and, taking the priest in tow, went to the place that the youth had said was the printing-office of the Katipunan. There they found, or said they found, incriminating documents that revealed the plot.13

Or some plot. At the best of times, as we have seen, hysteria in the governing class of Manila slept on a hair-trigger, and, being once awakened, offered a credulity more than childlike to the most grotesque creations of the most unhealthy imagination. On this occasion its manifestations were of the worst. [283]Such wild tales as flew about the city in those days, and had the approval of grave men that must have known better, were fit only for a group of children telling ghost-stories in the dark. That in the middle of the night armed bands of ferocious, horrible natives were to steal upon the innocent repose of every white person and slit his throat from ear to ear as he slept, was the least terrifying of these rumors, and the earliest fruitage of an aroused and exotic fancy. Curiously enough, it had no merit in originality, but was wan and hoary with age; for one hundred and fifty years, at every revolt of the overtaxed natives, it had been brought out and paraded. It even persisted to a later day and was used to frighten adult Americans that might have been deemed beyond such melodrama. Certain plans required American dislike of the Filipinos, and thus the dislike was to be engendered. In the present instance, it can hardly be necessary to say to any Filipino reader that wholesale murder was no part of Bonifacio’s plans, nor any other of the ogreish and blood-curdling designs that he was then said to have formed. That it seems needful to do him this justice before another public is only further evidence of the gross misrepresentation that interest and profits have made of all this chapter of history.

In the madness of panic for an hour or a day men may and doubtless will do strange things; the abject terror that shattered the reasoning faculties of the governing class in Manila seemed only to increase with time. There was first fear let loose on its wild charger and then its immediate reaction, the thirst for revenge. [284]A Spanish mob gathered at the gates of Malacañan clamoring for instant and sanguinary reprisals. Rizal in his flight across the American continent had commented sadly on the lynching-parties that disgraced the Southern States of the American Union. If he had been in Manila in those days he would have seen the same spirit displayed by the mob that demanded his own death. It was 1872 come again, but infinitely worse.14

At the first alarm, Bonifacio and some others had made their escape; he was now in the country proclaiming the republic and raising troops; but of Filipinos that still remained and could be accused of affiliation with his hated society there was naturally no lack, and in a few hours the jails were overflowing and the executioner overworked.

With almost the first breath of this midsummer madness, his enemies thought of Rizal. “Noli Me Tangere”! The time had come full cycle for revenge [285]for that flagrant insult. Days passed, and the object of their hatred lay there almost before their eyes, the broad yellow and red of Spain flapping over him, wholly at the mercy of the Government he had opposed. What hindered it that it did not seize him and thrust him into prison with the rest of the conspirators, and so to Bagumbayan and an end with him? After a time the impatient clerical party concluded that the real obstacle was Ramon Blanco. With him the friars had never been content; after the uncovering of the Katipunan they accused him of lack of energy in killing rebels, and a feud sprang up between him and Archbishop Nozaleda.15 By common report he was now at the crisis of the play giving to the world an illustration of the folly of nationalistic generalizations. All Spaniards were supposed to hate and fear Rizal; Blanco, a Spaniard, would not deliver Rizal to the torturers because he knew the man was innocent, and he was resolved at whatsoever cost to stand between innocence and the lynchers.16

But if this was a worthy exhibition of virtue in Spanish character it led in the end to only another demonstration of the power of the friars. They worked the cable to Madrid, and in two months they secured the recall of Blanco17 and the appointment of a man in his place that had no scruples about judicial murder and much thumb-screwing. Polavieja was his name. The Philippines were not likely soon to forget it.

But at the moment the victim the Interests Triumphant sought was slipping out of their hands. They [286]must have reflected with inexpressible rage that he would have been helpless if they had but allowed him to remain in Manila instead of marooning him on the shores of Dapitan. Yet there was a chance that he could be clutched and brought back and torn to pieces. Some news of the sirocco of rage and terror that had seized Manila reached the Isla de Panay. One of his Filipino fellow-passengers, Pedro P. Roxas, rich but a sturdy advocate of Philippine independence, foresaw what was at hand and quietly stepped ashore at Singapore, where he was under the protection of another flag. Fervently he had urged Rizal to go with him, pointing out that his enemies were certain to take advantage of the existing panic to kill him, and that as he was virtually a political fugitive he was justified in seeking a political asylum. He pleaded in vain: Rizal made answer that he had done no wrong; he would not flee.18 He held upon his way, and at Suez the great claw descended upon him. On a cabled order from Manila he was put under arrest, and thence to Barcelona he was a prisoner.19

The instructions were that he was to be returned as speedily as possible to Manila for trial. He arrived at Barcelona in the morning. A steamer was to sail for Manila that afternoon. Nevertheless, for the few hours he must stay in Barcelona he was thrust into prison, the sudden reversal of the confidence with which he had before been treated indicating plainly enough to the initiated which party was now in control at Manila. By a strange turn of fate, the Spanish [287]commandant at Barcelona was that same Despujol that had so basely decoyed him from Hong-Kong into Spanish power and but for whom he might have been at that moment safe beyond Spanish clutches. Despujol had the hardihood to call upon the man whose life he had sold. Rizal received him with the tolerant spirit that was so marked in his character, for it is not recorded of him anywhere that he uttered so much as one reproach against those that had wronged him; and Despujol seems to have felt something like contrition as he viewed the wreck he had made of a life so unusual.

That afternoon the steamer left for Manila with Rizal a prisoner on it.

It is like a story of overruling destiny. News of the arrest, by this device, of the most illustrious savant in all the Spanish dominions, one of the foremost scientists of the times, had been telegraphed about the world and stirred a general resentment. All men that understood colonial Spain looked with gloomiest forebodings upon his probable doom, now that he was fanged by that medieval dragon. A plan was formed to rescue him when the steamer should reach Singapore by suing out a writ of habeas corpus and so snatching him from Spanish authority.20 So slender are the chances of fate that a mere decoration on a flag brought to naught this benevolent design. The steamer was the ordinary packet-boat, but on this occasion she was carrying a few troops to the Philippines. Being deemed, therefore, on this voyage to [288]have the status of a transport, she hoisted the Spanish royal ensign, and against that emblem the kindly plotters felt they had no right to proceed. Government vessels are not subject to the authority of other nations whose ports they chance to enter. [289]

It was November 3, 1896, when Rizal, heavily guarded, passed again through the dark gateway of Fort Santiago, whence he had issued four years before to go to Dapitan. Now his enemies had him wholly in their power; he was dragged to earth at last. Yet for a time they were puzzled how to proceed with him. Dull as they were and remote from the highways of European thought, they were not unaware that the eyes of a scornful world were upon them. Therefore they could not, as in the cases of so many “unvalued men,” shoot him at sunrise on a dunghill. Some pretense of legality must be followed; there must be regard to decency.

But of anything civilized men could call evidence against him or of reason for anything such men could call a trial there was no trace nor suggestion. Say that the Katipunan was all that hysteria described it; not a scrap of paper connected Rizal with it. He was not a member; he had expressly disapproved of its aims; he had been an exile in Dapitan while it was being formed. How then? And what then? In all such dilemmas it had been the practice of the Government of the Philippines to resort to those medieval precedents that best befitted the theory upon which its authority was based. Where required testimony was [290]not to be stumbled upon it was usually to be produced with the thumb-screw and the lash; to torture somebody into perjury was the sovereign specific. Upon these promptings the authorities seized Paciano, Rizal’s brother, and exercised upon him their most recondite arts. To his left hand was fitted the terrible screw; at his right were pen and ink and a statement that his brother had part in the Katipunan conspiracy. Then the screw was applied until the victim fainted with the pain. But he would not sign; no, not for all the ingenious torments of their devising. There was iron in the Rizal blood; father and mother had shown it. When the mother had started to trudge around Laguna de Bay, when the father had refused to submit to the tyranny of the friar’s agent, when José had dared to write “Noli Me Tangere,” they had vindicated their tribal inheritance. Paciano was all of the same stern race. Day and night the horror continued; he was trussed up until he fainted again, and then was revived with stimulants for new sufferings, and still he would not sign. Then his mind began to wander; he was plainly unable to sign anything, and the torturers released him.1

Meantime José, though undeceived as to his probable fate, fought for his life with the resolute courage of his kin. He knew there was no evidence against him, that before no court with the least respect for justice could he be convicted. But he determined to make that conviction as difficult as possible and as shameful in the eyes of the world. From his prison-house he issued this address: [291]

My countrymen:

On my return from Spain I learned that my name had been in use, among some who were in arms, as a war-cry. The news came as a painful surprise, but, believing the incident to be closed, I kept silence over what seemed to be irremediable. I now notice indications that the disturbances are continuing, and lest any persons, in good faith or bad, should avail themselves of the use of my name, to stop such an abuse and to undeceive the unwary I hasten to address you these lines and make known the truth.

From the very beginning, when I first had notice of what was being planned, I opposed it, fought it, and demonstrated its absolute impossibility. This is the fact, and witnesses to my words are still living. I was convinced that the scheme was utterly absurd, and, what was worse, would bring great suffering.

I did even more. When later, against my advice, the movement materialized, of my own accord I offered not alone my good offices, but my very life, and even my name, to be used in whatever way might seem best, toward stifling the rebellion; for, convinced of the ills which it would bring, I considered myself fortunate if, at any sacrifice, I could prevent such useless misfortunes. This is equally of record. My countrymen, I have given proofs that I am one most anxious for liberties for our country, and I am still desirous of them. But I place as a prior condition the education of the people, that by means of instruction and industry our country may have an individuality of its own and make itself worthy of these liberties. I have recommended in my writings the study of the civic virtues, without which there is no redemption. I have written also (and I repeat my words) that reforms, to be beneficial, must come from above, that those which come from below are irregularly gained and uncertain.

Holding these ideas, I cannot do less than condemn, and I [292]do condemn this uprising—as absurd, savage, and plotted behind my back—which dishonors us Filipinos and discredits those that could plead our cause. I abhor its criminal methods and disclaim all part in it, pitying from the bottom of my heart the unwary that have been deceived into taking part in it.

Return then to your homes, and may God pardon those that have wrought in bad faith!2

José Rizal.

Fort Santiago, December 15, 1896.

Still remained for his enemies the necessity of a semblance of charges upon which might be based the semblance of a trial. As a move of obvious desperation they now fell back upon the fantasy that La Liga Filipina was an illegal body and upon the precarious assertion that even if he had no connection with the Katipunan it had been formed as a result of his teachings. Upon these grounds and only these his life was to be sought; the first wholly untrue, the other tenuous and fraught with grave danger to the existence of any system of justice. As for La Liga Filipina, that was as seditious as an average board of trade, and as secret; it had no purposes but economic improvement and Filipino union. But the other charge was a different matter. If it could be held that Rizal’s teachings were such that they instigated an uprising he had always opposed, then any but a paralyzed dumb man could be held responsible for anything that happened anywhere. Suppose, for instance, a British newspaper to criticize severely the British prime minister, and the next day a man attempt the assassination of [293]that minister. Who is to say, if this doctrine be sound, that the newspaper did not instigate the murderous attempt? It is apparent that if such a view were ever deemed valid an end would come to all free discussion or the pretense of a free press; no journal would dare to have an opinion about anything but the weather.

The inhibition would never stop with the press; the most ordinary and the most useful activities of organized society would be put into jeopardy. Suppose, for instance, Rizal had opposed and denounced vivisection, and a weak-minded man anywhere, maddened by the loss of his pet dog, should assault the physician that had cut it to pieces. Who could say that Rizal under this doctrine was not the guilty assailant? Even supposing the man that did the deed never to have read Rizal nor heard of him, Rizal’s influence might have been transmitted through many persons and still be his. It is evident that at once we plunge into limitless possibilities for oppression and wrong. Suppose an American reformer to denounce some official grafter and a fanatic to shoot that grafter. The reformer might be hanged, and the assassin go free.

Of all places in the civilized circuit the Philippine Islands were then the most perilous in which to introduce such a theory. In the Philippines an evil oligarchy maintained itself by terrorizing the population. Before its need and greed, justice was at best farcical. To admit that any man that criticized its methods might be held responsible for the acts of any revolutionist, murderer, or lunatic whatsoever was to place in the hands of the oligarchy the last and worst of weapons. It would need nothing else to render [294]unassailable and unlimited its already despotic power. The courts would be a hangman’s noose.

Yet on such preposterous grounds and none other the terrible travesty of justice was now urged along. It is likely that since the days of Caiaphas has been no such desperate hunting for testimony against innocence. “This man spake blasphemy,” cried the high priests, and, when they could find no confirmation of the charge, twisted to a desired meaning the most casual utterance, the cross being made ready in advance. The proceedings were as illegal as unjust. Supposing the offenses charged to have been committed, they were under the civil law of the Islands. The civil law and the civil courts were brushed aside lest even in the Philippines they might fail of legalized murder, or halt it; and the proceedings were held by court martial.

Before this tribunal, organized to slay, Rizal was brought bound, his elbows drawn back with cords so as almost to touch. Thus he must sit throughout each session, though the notion that he might try to escape or to assault any one was obviously fantastic, for he was heavily guarded and the room was filled with soldiery. To a gratuitous malice all this must be ascribed, the malice of immature or perverted minds. The torments he endured from aching muscles and constricted arteries as thus he sat grew almost intolerable while the long sessions dragged on, but it is not recorded that the victim made complaint. He was not allowed an attorney, but a list of army officers was spread before him from among whom he might select counsel—so called. He found in the list a name that [295]had a friendly sound in his ear. It was de Andrade, and proved to be borne by a brother of the young army officer that had been assigned to watch him and had ended by becoming his warm admirer and charmed companion on so many walks in 1887. But the choice of a counsel was mere formality. Luis de Andrade did all he could to win justice for the prisoner, but before such a court he might as well have used question with a wolf.3

There was no taking of testimony in any sense that civilized nations have of that term. A few terrified Filipinos were put upon the stand, and answers were extracted from their lips to carefully prepared questions; but cross-examination was not allowed, and the value of their admissions was nothing. The judge-advocate denounced Rizal as a traitor and an enemy to Spain. Extracts were read from his writings that it was pretended had encouraged the existing revolt. The Christmas holidays intervened while the ghastly processes of slaughter were still incomplete. On December 29 the court found him guilty and sentenced him to be shot within twenty-four hours.

To this and nothing else he had looked forward from the beginning of the hearing. Some nights before the verdict, knowing well what it would be, he had written in his cell by the light of his little alcohol lamp his farewell to his country, his family, and his friends. It is that poem now become the national classic of the Philippines, the beautiful and tender elegy that he called “My Last Farewell.” On the last night he folded the manuscript and hid it in the bowl of the lamp. [296]

Of this marvelous production, almost unequaled in literature for its pathetic sincerity and noble feeling, there exist in English two versions.4 That which seems the more adequately to express the thought of the original we offer here, and his must be a strangely indurated heart that can read it without emotion:

Before his murderers, before the jeers and savage exultations of the well dressed mob clamoring for his death, throughout the hearing, at the moment of the unjust verdict, he had maintained the same attitude of perfect serenity described as wonderful by all that observed it. Other condemned men have simulated this self-possession; this man had it in truth and not [299]in seeming. Calmly he heard his condemnation, calmly he reëntered the prison where for his last night on earth quarters had been made for him in the chapel. A newspaper reporter came to interview him. He was like a prosperous and well bred host entertaining a cultured friend;5 no eyes, however searching, could discover a joint in that perfect armor of the soul sustained and possessed, without a tremor and without a gloomy thought. To the reporter and to others that had watched him this bearing seemed not bravado but something mystical and inexplicable, but it seemed so only because the source of it was beyond their understanding. He was calm because he had long before in effect given his life to this cause and the shooting of the next day would be only the last incident in a sacrifice already made. Of this there is every indication. What men call the joy of living had since his youth meant to him the joy of serving Filipinas. He seems to have had since the day of his exile to Dapitan a feeling that in other ways his service6 was at an end, but there remained the service of his death. All the hard tests of life had left him unshaken and uncorrupted, a man truly without fear and without reproach. With the same faultless and unpretentious courage he walked forward to meet the end.

As was to have been expected in the conditions attending his fate, the power that had dragged him down with so much of trickery and deceit attempted to soil with other deceit the name he should leave to his countrymen. To the newspaper reporter he said that [300]“Noli Me Tangere” had been much misunderstood because the authorities had selected from it only passages that seemed to indicate sacrilegious or seditious purpose, whereas when read in their proper places with the context they had no such appearance. This statement was so distorted as to appear as an expression of regret that he had written the book. When he said that the Republicans in Spain had mistaken their strength and their opportunities, this was distorted into a petulant charge that the Spanish Republicans had been the cause of all his troubles. When he spoke with characteristic modesty of his own work as feeble and of small avail, the remark was twisted into a dubiety of his basic faith.

Attempts were made to wrest from him something that could be called a retraction of his political opinions; even the last solemn offices of the church were utilized toward an end so base. All his life he had remained a true Catholic,7 despite his sharp condemnation of the friars. He now desired to partake of the holy sacrament, and priests were sent to him. What took place when they gathered around him was so perverted that no man may feel sure he has the truth of the story. According to one account the priests [301]refused him the sacrament until they should satisfy themselves of his orthodoxy, and a long examination followed. They demanded a signed statement affirming his belief in revealed religion. He readily consented to give it; he could have given it truthfully at any time. Of this affirmation two irreconcilable versions were subsequently reported, a fact that dealing with a thing so simple must serve to discredit both. As to one, no other evidence is needed than its style and content to show that Rizal never wrote it. As to the other reputed statement, opinions differ; reasonably, one might say, since there is extant no original copy, and no one now pretends to have seen such a copy. The style in the second statement is Rizal’s or an imitation of his; the expressions in it are in line with his general convictions;8 and if throughout this phase of the story we met with less of manifest treachery and lying the probable authenticity of some such declaration might well be admitted.

On the basis of evidence so untrustworthy the tale was fabricated that he had retracted his political views. It was brazen impudence that put out this fable and simple credulity that believed it. Much that happened in the last scenes of his tragedy is and always will be uncertain, but the one thing about which is no doubt is that he went to his death unshaken in his loyalty to the great causes to which he had dedicated his life and labors, to the rights, emancipation, and progress of his country.

If from the tangled accounts now available to us we [302]wish to build a surmise, it is likely that Rizal affirmed his religious faith, renounced masonry,9 was reconciled to the church, received the sacrament, and then had10 performed the ecclesiastical marriage rites [303]between him and his wife that he had so desired in vain at Dapitan. Even as to this there is no record, but the correlative facts are strong. To his mother and sisters he now said the last farewell; said it with the calm and gentle resignation that from the first had marked his conduct. Even in that crux of his sufferings his command upon himself and all his faculties seems never to have wavered. He knew well that all his effects would be searched and any papers he might leave would be seized and destroyed; yet he desired to give to his countrymen the song of parting he had written for them. At the interview with his mother and sisters they were kept separated from him by a space of some feet under the pretended fear that poison might be passed to him and so might he cheat revenge of blood-drops for which it thirsted. To transmit the poem, therefore, was difficult, but the resourceful mind of Rizal did not fail him now. The little alcohol lamp by which he had written his song and read and studied in his cell had been the gift of a friend in Europe. In the Islands it was something of a curiosity. This he managed to bequeath to his sister Trinidad and when he told her about it he added quickly in English, “There is something inside.”11

Even in these last hours efforts were made by his friends to rescue him from the jaws that had opened to rend him. Relatives and friends besieged the governor-general; [304]he would not even admit them to his presence. In Spain fervent appeals were made to the National Government. All scientific and sympathetic Europe was horror-stricken at the impending murder of one of the most learned men of the age. There is a story that the Spanish prime minister wished to yield to these demands. It was the queen regent that he found implacable. Something in one of Rizal’s books had mortally offended her. She, too, was determined to have his blood.

All the hours of that night Rizal spent in prayer, in reading, and in cheerful conversation with his guards and the priests. He did not sleep and had no need of sleep. But his wakefulness was not of his nerves. None of the watchers could detect a troubled look in his eyes or a quaver in the smooth, even tones of his voice.12 Other men so counting out the last moments of their lives have been mercifully supplied with drugs and drink. The stimulus that sustained Rizal must have been from within. So have testified the witnesses.

PHOTOGRAPH OF THE ORIGINAL OF “MY LAST FAREWELL”

Note the handwriting

It was a beautiful morning, men still remember, calm, cool, and bright, “the bridal of the earth and sky,” typical of the sweet December weather in the Philippines; the air so clear the mountains on both sides stood out marvelously brown and rugged; so clear one could even make out far Corregidor on guard at the entrance of the bay.

As day broke the crowds began to gather in the Luneta. Spaniards of the ruling caste predominated, come to see the death of their enemy and gloat over him; but also there were Filipinos with drawn brows [305]and quivering lips, disquieting to look upon.13 In many Filipino houses that last night there had been no sleep. Men and women prayed all night for the man about to be slaughtered for their sake.

At seven o’clock the troopers came and tightly bound his arms behind his back. He wore a neat black suit with a sack-coat and a black hat.

Outside, the trumpets sounded and the drums beat. The troopers placed him in the center of a strong guard. Then they led him forth from the prison door.

With the drum always beating at the head of the band, thus he was marched almost a mile through scenes that had been familiar to him in his boyhood. Thirty-seven years and twenty-eight days before, another martyr had gone forth to his death with the same clear-souled, untroubled calm. “This is a beautiful country,” said John Brown, Osawatomie Brown, as with the sheriff he drove to the execution-place; “I never noticed it before.” With the same sense of drawing in for the last time the breath of God’s bounty to men, Rizal looked about him and spoke of the loveliness of the scene. “I used to walk here with my sweetheart,” said he, thinking of Leonora. Above the roofs he saw the Ateneo, where he had spent so many happy days. Since his time the buildings had been altered. “When were those two towers added?” he asked and observed the effect with a critical eye. All the way he went with head erect, unflushed cheek, unruffled mien, as one that goes forth to meet fair weather in the morning.

By his side marched the Jesuit priests, his comforters [306]and supporters, for he always remembered tenderly his days at the Ateneo.

“We are going to Calvary,” he said to them. “My sufferings are little. The Savior suffered much. He was nailed to the cross. In an instant the bullets will end all my pain.”14

A crowd lined the street, for the most part silent, but among the Spaniards were some exclamations of joy. One foreigner, a Scotchman, watching the scene, was moved to cry aloud a brief good-by. A little company of Rizal’s former students at Dapitan stood together and wept.

He looked out upon the bay and the ships.

“How beautiful is the morning, Father! How clear is the view of Corregidor and the Cavite Mountains! I walked here with my sweetheart, Leonora, on mornings like this.”

“The morning to be is still more beautiful, my son,” answered the priest.

“Why is that, Father?” asked Rizal, not quite understanding his confessor’s words.

The officer in charge of the squad stepped between them, and the father’s reply was not heard.

Thus they moved to the place of execution, the dreadful Bagumbayan Field, the spot where so many others had been slain for defying tyranny, where Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora had given up their lives. To their memory he had dedicated his protest against the beast that had torn them. Now in his own turn he was come to be torn.

A great troop of soldiers had formed a square to [307]hold the people back. Artillery was drawn up as if a rescue were feared, and at one side—strange and incongruous spectacle!—a band to sound the national anthem of triumph over this one man. To the governing class the occasion was all holiday. Hundreds of that class stood there, men and women, and uttered cries of animal pleasure when they saw their enemy come bound and helpless to be killed before their eyes.

Neither they nor the engines of death they had evoked seemed to pierce the serenity that wrapped him around. As they reached the field, he stopped before the captain in command and said quietly:

“Will you shoot me in the front, please?”

“It cannot be,” said the captain. “I have orders to shoot you in the back.”

“But I was never traitor to my own country nor to Spain.”

“My duty is to comply with the orders I have received.”

“Very well, then; shoot me as you please.”15

He asked that the soldiers be instructed to aim not at his head but his heart, and that he should not be compelled to kneel but might receive his death standing. These requests the captain granted.

Into the square he marched, between two batteries of artillery, a company of cavalry in front, another behind. With him still went the priests, Fathers Estanislao March and José Villaclara, and behind them the man that had been his counsel in the mock trial, Luis de Andrade. Rizal stepped to the place [308]where he was to die and looked out over the blue sea, bright in the sunlight. And then for the first time the iron composure seemed shaken. It may have been some thought of his lost youth, or the terror of the scene that reached out at him like something coldly palpable. A shiver seemed to go over him; the mortal man that he had so long suppressed in him reasserted itself; and one great sigh seemed to burst from his heart.

“O Father, how terrible it is to die! How one suffers! Father, I forgive every one from the bottom of my heart; I have no resentment against any one: believe me, your reverence!”

The next instant the spasm had passed. The will with which he had ruled himself so long came back to its accustomed empire. He was himself again and stood erect, with no twitching of his lips and no fear in his eyes.

The executioners marched upon the field.

Rizal shook hands firmly with the priests and with his counsel. Father March held to him the cross for him to kiss.

He now turned his face to the east and stood with his back to the firing-squad. Eight native soldiers had been told off to slay their fellow-countryman. Behind them were eight Spanish soldiers with leveled rifles. They were to shoot the executioners if these failed to obey orders.

Rizal stood with his eyes open and turned toward the sky. In his face, it is said, was neither ecstasy nor fear, but only the calm of a perfect resignation. Often [309]he had said: “What is death to me? I have sown the seed; others are left to reap.”16 The testing of that word had come. It found him ready and undismayed.

At that instant a military doctor, amazed by such a show of fortitude, ran out from the line of officers.

“Colleague,” he cried, “may I feel your pulse?”

Rizal said nothing but thrust his right hand as far as he could from the bands that held it.

The pulse was hardly a beat above normal.

“You are well, colleague,” said the doctor, “very well!” and stepped back to his place.

Rizal made no response and resumed his former attitude. He now twisted his right hand and indicated the spot in his back at which the soldiers should aim.

The captain gave the signal. The eight soldiers fired together.

The body of Rizal was seen to waver and fall. With a last effort of his indomitable will, even in falling he turned so that he should lie with face upward.17

In the thirty-sixth year of his age and the twenty-fourth year of his service—poet, patriot, and martyr.

Cheers and laughter arose from the crowd as his blood was seen to be pouring upon the field. Women waved their handkerchiefs and clapped their hands; men shouted with delight. This was the end of him that had unveiled to the world the realities of their social order; that had ridiculed all their structure of rank and caste. He had died like a dog before them. [310]

The band played the national anthem. “Viva España!” shouted the crowd. A photographer made pictures of the scene. It was a great day for Spain. Her supremacy in the Philippines was approved and established for ever. For whomsoever thereafter might venture to question its righteousness, the same fate. Let him also die like a dog to the applause and laughter of the existing order, rock-rooted and eternal.

“Viva España!” How poor are they that will not ponder history! From the hanging of John Brown to the Emancipation Proclamation was three years and twenty-nine days. From the murder of José Rizal to the surrender of Manila was one year, eight months, and seventeen days.

The body was cast into an undesignated grave, and great care was taken to obliterate all marks by which it might be identified; for this hated enemy there should be nothing but loathing and contumely, alive or dead. The perpetrators of this last outrage believed they had managed with skill and success. Little they knew the people with whom they dealt. Into the unmarked grave were covertly introduced objects that would allow of a future identification,18 and the dust that malice and bigotry sought to dishonor was destined to a final burial with the proud mourning of a nation and the respectful sympathy of the world.

Not even yet was satiated the hot thirst for blood that seemed to rage in this abnormal community. The jails had been stuffed with other members of the Liga Filipina, men that like Rizal had committed the crime of desiring their country’s good. On January 11, 1897, [311]two weeks after the sacrifice of Rizal, fourteen of his companions were led forth to Bagumbayan Field and shot, as he had been shot. Two of these were priests of the church; among the laymen were members of ancient Filipino families, and men of conspicuously blameless walk and notable attainments. Father Inocencio Herrera and Father Prieto Gerónimo led the procession of the condemned whose names were now to be added to the long roll of those that had made that one field a shrine of liberty hardly to be equaled in men’s acquaintance. Others whose blood was shed with theirs that day on that sacred spot were Domingo Franco, Moisés Salvador, Numeriano Adriano, Antonio Salazar, José Dizon, Luis Enciso Villareal, Faustino Villareal, Ramón A. Padilla, Manuel Avella, Roman Basa, Cristobal Medina, and Francisco Roxas. It was a flag dripping with blood that Spain raised to the world that morning.

Of these some had endured such torturings that death must have come as a relief. Neither age nor worth to be spared, was the ancestral precept for all such butcheries. Moisés Salvador was more than seventy years old. He had been tortured until he could no longer stand and must be carried out and laid prone on the ground when his time came to be shot. Francisco Roxas the thumb-screw, or whatever other deviltries, had made insane. He knew nothing of what was going on about him but imagined himself to be in church. When he knelt before the firing-squad he spread his handkerchief upon the ground as he would upon the church floor and began to say his ordinary prayers.19 [312]

“Viva España!” There never was a grimmer irony of fate. Even as the crowds raised that cry above the blood of Rizal, in all the Far East there was no more Spain. The band that played triumphant the national anthem was in reality sounding a funeral dirge. The shots that struck down Rizal to the cheers of “broadcloth ruffians” shattered the Spanish empire. Until that December 30, 1896, there remained just basis for the ancient boast about the flag whereon the sun never set; as Rizal tottered and fell it passed among the curios of history. On the day the murderous court martial pronounced Rizal’s death the Filipinos began to slip from the city and join the forces of Bonifacio. Among them that evening went Paciano, men said with pinched lips and clenched jaws, to fight with conspicuous valor while the Spanish flag flew in his country.20 Silently they went and by thousands. The insurgent lines swept up as close as Cavite, so strong had the uprising grown. There, in the face of all the vigilance, all the spying, all the rules and regulations, they stood in their trenches with arms in their hands. Guns came from the thickets, the roofs, the carabao stalls. Soldiers that enlisted without rifles fought with bolos until in the first encounter they could wrest guns from the Spaniards. From the waterfront of Manila one could see their flag flying. Inadequately armed, badly fed, ragged and untrained, they went into battle and overwhelmed the Spanish regulars, because they had been fired with a vision of freedom and a holy wrath against the System that had struck down their champion. Back went the Spanish regulars to [313]the gates of Manila, as one hundred years before the household troops of every king in Europe had bent before the citizen soldiery of France, fighting for the republic.

In a short time there was left no last doubt of the seriousness of the revolt; with reason this time the Spanish colony cowered. The thirty-fourth since the beginning of Spanish dominion in the Philippines, it threatened at last to sweep that vicious anomaly into the sea. A man had arisen capable of verifying the most sanguine of Bonifacio’s prophecies, a college-bred farmer, without military training but with a strange gift of military prescience, able with an equipment of native genius to outwit, outmanœuver, and outlast the best of the Spanish commanders. Against the skill and restless energy of Emilio Aguinaldo they seemed to make no permanent progress, and one reading the records of those days is irresistibly reminded of Francis Marion and the Carolinas. If the regulars drove him hence to-day, he would attack them there to-morrow. A union of Filipino hearts such as Rizal, living, had hardly dared to dream of had been cemented by his death. For the first time the possibility of ridding all the Islands of all Spanish power laid hold upon determined and reasoning men, and there began a life and death struggle between light and darkness, the nineteenth century and the sixteenth. [314]