The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
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.
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. [108] 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 that Rizal’s brother-in-law had died after neglecting his church
duties and abandoning the confessional. [109] 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. Pounce, came the church upon the wretched
offender. The next thing he knew he was deported. [110]
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 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. [111]
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 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. [112]
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 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. [113]
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 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,” [114] 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, [115] 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 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