The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
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! [126]
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 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. [127]
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).
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.... [128]
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. [129]
Long before the coming of the Spaniards the Malayan Filipinos had an
organized and outstretching commerce, foreign as well as domestic. A
Chinese 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 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. [130]
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, 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.” [131]
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. [132] 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. [133]
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. [134]
Rizal lays the emphasis of capitals upon this last phrase, which indeed
seems powerful evidence, coming from such a source.
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