The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
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.
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, 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 Malay [9] 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 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 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 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 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 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