The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
clear. [12]
“Those that are wont to depreciate civilization and material
development to the point of being inexact,” he says, “cite the voyage
of Magellan as an enterprise motived only by religious ideals and by
sincerest and purest charity. They misrepresent or forget two
incontestible facts. First, the voyage of Magellan was proposed to and
accepted by the King of Spain, was approved by his ministers and was
carried out by Magellan and his companions for the mercantile purpose
of discovering, by sailing westward, a route to the Moluccas and thus
wresting from the hands of Portugal the rich commerce that pertained to
those, the Spice Islands. This and nothing else was the origin,
inspiration and object of that famous expedition. Second, such a
purpose could be realized precisely because the Spaniards had achieved
a material development that inspired the enterprise and made it
possible.”
The more honor, then, to the Spaniards, who, having in view only the
purposes of a bargain, still added much to the equipment of the
Islanders. They erected better buildings than the Filipinos had ever
known, made better roads, introduced, with whatsoever cruelties, a
better coördination, something like uniform laws, something like a
welded and coherent polity; they discouraged piracy when it could no
longer serve to subdue the natives; they gave money for schools,
whether these were efficient or otherwise; they made some connection,
however frail, between the culture of the Islands and that formerly
existing in the rest of the world. Yet, aside from the labors of the
missionaries, the other boons that followed their red trail are
doubtful. Accepting these at the Spanish valuation, the fact still
seems to protrude that Spain found an industrious population and
managed to leave it indifferent and indolent, [13] found one style of
civilization and left another.
Prejudice and racial hatreds have obscured about this one other fact
that never should be overlooked. The Filipinos would not have stood
still if the Spaniards had left them alone. True estimate, therefore,
is to be made, not on a comparison between what they were when the
Spaniards came and what they were when the Spaniards left them, but on
what they probably would have made of themselves. They were no backward
race; they had shown a remarkable aptitude to absorb the best of the
progress around them, taking on arts, inventions, manufactures, and
developing them. They made and used gunpowder before it was known in
Europe; they made and used cannon of a considerable size, built better
sea-going ships than the Spaniards, had developed more skilful
artificers in silver and gold, and had evidently a disposition to
improve methods and manners. [14] In those three hundred years,
supposing them to have been left to their own devices, they would never
have ceased to look forward. Yet when the line comes to be drawn below
the items of their progress under Spanish control and we glance across
even to the most dilatory countries of Europe, we are compelled to
admit that relatively the advance is small.
But because the natives writhed under the crude and savage oppression
that walked with this, we are not to suppose the Spaniards they hated
were all bad men. Goodness and badness hardly enter into the matter.
There came to the Philippines in these 325 years many a
governor-general with a worthy inspiration to overturn the tables of
the money-changers and bring in righteousness and justice. It appears
that what was going on in the Philippines was not always ignored at
home, and many a private citizen of good character started out to
support a reforming governor-general. The significant fact is that all
these efforts had one end. Nothing was ever changed. The best of the
governor-generals fell impotent against the same menacing wall of
System. Securely it had been based upon favoring conditions; it had
grown under generations of greedy maladministration; it extended to
every part of the Archipelago where Spain had authority; and it was
buttressed by the power that in all times has proved the most difficult
foe to the freedom and progress of the masses. For such is the power of
accumulated profits to breed more power to make more profits and still
more power. Here was indeed the appetite that grows by what it feeds
on. The invisible government had swallowed the visible.
Nevertheless, for a long time, nothing is to be subtracted from the
work of the fathers of the church. A noble zeal animated them; often
they added to it a fine tact, much practical wisdom, unlimited capacity
for self-denial, and even self-immolation. Years went by; the
missionary era came to an end; there was no longer the splendor of the
apostolic adventure into the jungle. A different spirit began to
possess a part of the clergy; not all of it, but a part. Marvelously
rich the country was that Spain had annexed in this fashion; hardly
anywhere else had nature bestowed a more fertile soil with a more
pleasing climate. For two hundred years the Government at Madrid, with
an excess of stupidity, restrained the natural development of this Eden
by narrowly limiting its trade. Only to Mexico and only by means of one
galleon a year could the struggling colony export its products; a
process of strangulation into which some bugaboo of competition had
harried the merchants of Barcelona and so the poor foolish Government.
After 1815, as liberalism and the beneficent results of the French
Revolution began to make their belated appearance in Spain, these
restrictions were cautiously relaxed, and at once the value of
Philippine lands began to increase.
Four orders of European friars [15] had settled themselves in the
Philippines, obtaining in the early days from the insular Government
grants of estates that because of the lack of adequate surveying and
for other reasons were of shadowy boundaries. As trade increased it
multiplied the demand for Philippine products. Under this pressure,
forests once covering great areas of rich land were cleared away by
pioneers that settled upon the soil they had made tillable. In hundreds
of cases the friars laid claim to such lands and demanded of the
settlers possession or rents. If the settler resisted, the Civil Guard
or other military force ejected him. If he sought relief in the courts
he had only his heavy expenses for his pains.
Thus the monastic orders had become the System. Accumulated wealth had
wrought upon them the effects it ever achieves everywhere. Originally
they had come to the Philippines with a pure notion of doing good; now
they were caught in the soiled entanglements of gain. Through all the
sequel a gap widened between the four orders and the rest of the
church. Other clergy, notably the native priests, continued to serve,
according to their lights, the professed objects of religion; the four
orders were four great corporations, indurated with profits, playing
the callous landlord, extorting rents, harassing tenants, extending
their operations, and with every new peso of their hoards strengthening
their influence upon Malacañan, the seat of the administration. So
works the law that inevitably attends upon accretion. Gradually they
dispossessed the military, official, and merchant castes that at first
had been all in all. Such potency as in other countries belongs to
banks or great industrial companies lay now in their hands. Whatsoever
they wished, that, by one means or another, they won. It is not humanly
possible that under such conditions men should not deteriorate; the men
that sway so gross a rule, the men upon whom it is swayed.
It was so here. The friars of the orders became intolerable local
tyrants. In the rural regions, the word of the curate, if he was of the
dominant caste, outweighed the command of the provincial governor. As a
rule the governor-general himself dared not in any way oppose the
clerical domination; a few words lightly whispered at Madrid would be
enough to make sure his recall and ruin. One of these governors that
tried to assert his own authority had to fight a clerical mob in his
own palace, and fell dead, sword in hand, across the body of his son.
[16] The lesson did not need repetition; thenceforth the successors of
the Governor-General Bustamante of 1719 made haste to placate a power
so great and so malignant. Even the redoubtable Emiliano Weyler himself
was careful and obsequious to maintain good relations with the four
orders. Nay, he went to the length of supervising the ejection of
settlers from the lands the friars claimed, and in at least one
instance, as we shall see, accelerated the work with a battery of
artillery.
It is now reasonably certain that most of these claims were without
merit, but unlimited power had produced among the orders the effect it
has had in all ages and climes upon the men that have possessed it.
Over a certain genus of temperament the evil spell seems too great to
be abridged by religion or by anything else. Nothing in the so-called
civilizing adventures of Europe upon the fringes of the earth has been
more clearly proved than that the white man, removed from the
restraining influence of home and his neighbors and clothed with
irresponsible power over people whom he deems inferior, is capable of
reversion to an astonishing tyranny. The records of the Congo, of Dr.
Peters in South Africa, of the Germans in the South Seas, are easy
illustrations on a large scale of what happened here in little.
It has been the huge blunder of Europeans dealing with the Malay to
mistake his patience for weakness and his silence for acquiescence.
Aliens imposing themselves by force upon a remote people of another
color have seldom been at pains to pick up the keys to the psychology
of the governed. Great is the misery that would have been avoided for
the dark-skinned children of earth by the use of this simple process,
and nowhere was it simpler than in the Philippines.
All these influences and causes were at work to make trouble. Partly by
their own excesses, partly by becoming the symbols and visualized
representatives of the whole foreign domination, with all its
intolerable wrongs and oppressions, the friars were now the objects of
a deathless hatred. Hardly were the landlords of old more abhorred by
the Irish peasantry.
It was a people capable by nature of much hating as of much loving upon
whom fell this bitter inheritance. One can only suppose that the
average Spaniard in the Philippines stood sentinel against himself lest
he should understand the people he thought were under his boot-heel. In
point of fact, they were not stupid and inferior, as he always
described them, but of an excellent mentality, quick apprehension,
reasoning powers at least equal to his own, of a certain inheritance of
culture, different, cruder, but in its way not less. Particularly they
were a people in whom resentment against injustice might smolder long
but only in the end to blaze into perilous fires. Three centuries of
Spanish domination had not extirpated the Malayan instinct for liberty,
but, judging from the climax of all this, only intensified it. Spanish
officers watching with intent eyes for the least sign of revolt took
from these people every discoverable weapon, even to bolos (knives) of
blades longer than so many inches. The better organization, discipline,
equipment, and military skill that alone constituted Spanish supremacy
was for ever being paraded in the eyes of the Indios. At every turn
they were reminded in some way of their position, helpless, barehanded,
and kept from one another by enmities the Spaniards knew well how to
foster. In the face of all this sedulous care, behold in the story of
their possession of the Philippines a serial of insurrection! Between