The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
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 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 took for their own and presented to the
Government impressively signed by their local officers. [97]
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 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 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, [98] 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, 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; 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
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. [99] The Herrara family had maintained a back yard quarrel
with the Venturas. Mr. Ventura 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