The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
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.”
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.” [135] 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 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 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. [136]
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 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.” [137]
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.”
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, [138] 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 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, [139] 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; 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.” [140]
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