The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
unveiled to the world the realities of their social order; that had
ridiculed all their structure of rank and caste. He had died like a dog
before them.
The band played the national anthem. “Viva España!” shouted the crowd.
A photographer made pictures of the scene. It was a great day for
Spain. Her supremacy in the Philippines was approved and established
for ever. For whomsoever thereafter might venture to question its
righteousness, the same fate. Let him also die like a dog to the
applause and laughter of the existing order, rock-rooted and eternal.
“Viva España!” How poor are they that will not ponder history! From the
hanging of John Brown to the Emancipation Proclamation was three years
and twenty-nine days. From the murder of José Rizal to the surrender of
Manila was one year, eight months, and seventeen days.
The body was cast into an undesignated grave, and great care was taken
to obliterate all marks by which it might be identified; for this hated
enemy there should be nothing but loathing and contumely, alive or
dead. The perpetrators of this last outrage believed they had managed
with skill and success. Little they knew the people with whom they
dealt. Into the unmarked grave were covertly introduced objects that
would allow of a future identification, [227] and the dust that malice
and bigotry sought to dishonor was destined to a final burial with the
proud mourning of a nation and the respectful sympathy of the world.
Not even yet was satiated the hot thirst for blood that seemed to rage
in this abnormal community. The jails had been stuffed with other
members of the Liga Filipina, men that like Rizal had committed the
crime of desiring their country’s good. On January 11, 1897, two weeks
after the sacrifice of Rizal, fourteen of his companions were led forth
to Bagumbayan Field and shot, as he had been shot. Two of these were
priests of the church; among the laymen were members of ancient
Filipino families, and men of conspicuously blameless walk and notable
attainments. Father Inocencio Herrera and Father Prieto Gerónimo led
the procession of the condemned whose names were now to be added to the
long roll of those that had made that one field a shrine of liberty
hardly to be equaled in men’s acquaintance. Others whose blood was shed
with theirs that day on that sacred spot were Domingo Franco, Moisés
Salvador, Numeriano Adriano, Antonio Salazar, José Dizon, Luis Enciso
Villareal, Faustino Villareal, Ramón A. Padilla, Manuel Avella, Roman
Basa, Cristobal Medina, and Francisco Roxas. It was a flag dripping
with blood that Spain raised to the world that morning.
Of these some had endured such torturings that death must have come as
a relief. Neither age nor worth to be spared, was the ancestral precept
for all such butcheries. Moisés Salvador was more than seventy years
old. He had been tortured until he could no longer stand and must be
carried out and laid prone on the ground when his time came to be shot.
Francisco Roxas the thumb-screw, or whatever other deviltries, had made
insane. He knew nothing of what was going on about him but imagined
himself to be in church. When he knelt before the firing-squad he
spread his handkerchief upon the ground as he would upon the church
floor and began to say his ordinary prayers. [228]
“Viva España!” There never was a grimmer irony of fate. Even as the
crowds raised that cry above the blood of Rizal, in all the Far East
there was no more Spain. The band that played triumphant the national
anthem was in reality sounding a funeral dirge. The shots that struck
down Rizal to the cheers of “broadcloth ruffians” shattered the Spanish
empire. Until that December 30, 1896, there remained just basis for the
ancient boast about the flag whereon the sun never set; as Rizal
tottered and fell it passed among the curios of history. On the day the
murderous court martial pronounced Rizal’s death the Filipinos began to
slip from the city and join the forces of Bonifacio. Among them that
evening went Paciano, men said with pinched lips and clenched jaws, to
fight with conspicuous valor while the Spanish flag flew in his
country. [229] Silently they went and by thousands. The insurgent lines
swept up as close as Cavite, so strong had the uprising grown. There,
in the face of all the vigilance, all the spying, all the rules and
regulations, they stood in their trenches with arms in their hands.
Guns came from the thickets, the roofs, the carabao stalls. Soldiers
that enlisted without rifles fought with bolos until in the first
encounter they could wrest guns from the Spaniards. From the waterfront
of Manila one could see their flag flying. Inadequately armed, badly
fed, ragged and untrained, they went into battle and overwhelmed the
Spanish regulars, because they had been fired with a vision of freedom
and a holy wrath against the System that had struck down their
champion. Back went the Spanish regulars to the gates of Manila, as one
hundred years before the household troops of every king in Europe had
bent before the citizen soldiery of France, fighting for the republic.
In a short time there was left no last doubt of the seriousness of the
revolt; with reason this time the Spanish colony cowered. The
thirty-fourth since the beginning of Spanish dominion in the
Philippines, it threatened at last to sweep that vicious anomaly into
the sea. A man had arisen capable of verifying the most sanguine of
Bonifacio’s prophecies, a college-bred farmer, without military
training but with a strange gift of military prescience, able with an
equipment of native genius to outwit, outmanœuver, and outlast the best
of the Spanish commanders. Against the skill and restless energy of
Emilio Aguinaldo they seemed to make no permanent progress, and one
reading the records of those days is irresistibly reminded of Francis
Marion and the Carolinas. If the regulars drove him hence to-day, he
would attack them there to-morrow. A union of Filipino hearts such as
Rizal, living, had hardly dared to dream of had been cemented by his
death. For the first time the possibility of ridding all the Islands of
all Spanish power laid hold upon determined and reasoning men, and
there began a life and death struggle between light and darkness, the
nineteenth century and the sixteenth.
CHAPTER XVII
RESULTS AND INFLUENCES
In this long conflict character shone forth and latent ability,
refuting old slanders on the race. The Filipino disclosed himself. By
ancient repute the Malayan was cruel and treacherous; the test of
warfare showed him to be much more humane than the Spaniard and much
more sensible of honor and faith. He had been described as incapable of
combined and sustained activities; he revealed himself as organizing a
government out of chaos, coördinating the energies of peoples unused to
common effort, launching a democracy founded upon the most advanced
ideas of political philosophy, defending it with skill and tenacious
courage comparable to the best traditions of the Swiss mountaineers.
Men whose talents had never been suspected because they had never had a
chance to function arose in the Filipino ranks to astonish their
enemies and overwhelm prejudice. Great commanders appeared like Luna
and del Pilar; statesmen and thinkers like Felipe Calderon; and
profoundly philosophical and illuminating intellects like Apolinario
Mabini.
Next to Rizal himself, this was the greatest genius the Islands had
produced and one that would have deserved eminence in any country or
any time. He was come of poor people in the province of Batangas and
had won an education partly through the pathetic sacrifices of his
mother and partly through his own exertions, which in that time and
place amounted to heroism. He was first in a school at Tanauan and then
at the College of San Juan de Letran in Manila, where he earned his way
by teaching. His mother’s hope had been that he would take holy orders;
but his studies had made him skeptical instead of reverent; he revolted
at the priesthood, and chose the bar, to which he was admitted in 1894.
Like Bonifacio he was a great reader, but on different lines. The
warehouse porter, hanging by night over such books as he could lay
hands upon, was set aflame by the struggles of mankind against
oppression, particularly by that which is the epitome and symbol of
them all, the French Revolution. Mabini, cool and even-pulsed
philosopher, was concerned not so much with the physical aspects of
revolution as with its causes. If the human story told true,
revolutions were some rebound of the spirit of man against a privileged
class that held or sought to hold the rest as bondmen. As this conflict
between two main forces occupied so much of the history he was
analyzing with his keen sure mind, and as it seemed the only thing
there of enduring importance, he molded from its pages a philosophy of
human life and its import not unworthy of Jefferson and Mill. The basis
of everything good he conceived to be liberty; without liberty there
could be no light and no progress. With a coolly measuring eye, as an
architect looks at a building, he went over the system of government
erected by Spain in the Philippines and estimated its fatal defects as
a structure no longer tenable, knowing well that its fall was overdue.
Much more than Rizal he seems to have seized the fundamental facts
about man’s capacity for self-government and the only way to uncover
and develop that capacity. He, too, was of the cloister, and might have
slipped likewise into the darling errors of the schoolmen about the
magic keys to this wisdom believed to be buried in a classical
education. He made no such error. Not even Jefferson was of a clearer
faith. He accepted the whole democratic theory of government, not
sentimentally but as the ultimate fact in human existence. On
philosophical grounds, for unassailable reasons, popular rule was
right; in the end the only human wisdom was the general thought. In the
verdict of the majority he saw plainly the manifestation of the will of
God.
He was not influenced by Bonifacio, of whose existence he seems to have
been unaware until 1892. As one of the earliest members of La Líga
Filipina he may have been influenced at one time by Rizal; but there
was little chance and less need that he should be influenced by
anybody. His was a mind accustomed to independent action; it seems
always to have moved to its own conclusions in its own way.
He was an early recruit to the Katipunan, where, after a time, he
became one of Bonifacio’s chief advisers. A stroke of paralysis
crippled his body but left his mind clear and active. When the storm
burst and official lunacy raged in Manila, his physical infirmities
prevented his flight with his fellows. Trapped among other
unfortunates, a drum-head doomed him to be shot. It is likely the
Government knew little of his real connection with the Katipunan and
nothing of his capacity to cause trouble. The sentence of death upon
him was delayed. At last, homicidal mania spent itself even in Manila.
Then, because of his physical condition, he was set at liberty.
This was in 1897, when revolution had changed all the outlook in the
Philippines and the governing class was beginning to doubt its destiny.
For the next year he was undergoing medical treatment at the hot
springs of Los Baños. In the summer of 1898 he made his way to the
revolutionary forces and was thereafter their ablest counselor, the
shrewd adviser of the commanders in the field, the first voice in all
negotiations, and to the masses of people the endless source of
inspiration; for in all emergencies, however sudden or perplexing, here
was the heart indomitable.
In him as in Rizal, the mysteries of an unusual power resolve