The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
has any conscious knowledge in those ethereal spaces to which his soul
has been summoned, will summon the youth of his beloved country to dare
all, to endure all, and, if needs be, to suffer all that he himself had
dared, endured, or suffered in order that science may not perish from
the face of the earth.
APPENDIX C
REPRESENTATIVE COOPER’S TRIBUTE
Delivered in the House of Representatives, Washington, June 19, 1902
It has been said that if American institutions had done nothing else
than furnish to the world the character of George Washington, that
alone would entitle them to the respect of mankind. So, sir, I say to
all those that denounce the Filipinos indiscriminately as barbarians
and savages, without possibility of a civilized future, that this
despised race proved itself entitled to their respect and to the
respect of mankind when it furnished to the world the character of José
Rizal.
[Mr. Cooper then recited to the House Rizal’s “Last Farewell” as
described on a foregoing page. The profound silence that fell upon the
chamber at the end of this recital he broke by saying:]
Pirates! Barbarians! Savages! Incapable of civilization! How many of
the civilized Caucasian slanderers of his race could ever be capable of
thoughts like these, which on that awful night, as he sat alone amidst
silence unbroken save by the rustling of the black plumes of the death
angel at his side, poured from the soul of the martyred Filipino?
Search the long and bloody roll of the world’s heroic dead, and where,
on what soil, under what sky, did Tyranny ever claim a nobler victim?
Sir, the future is not without hope for a people that, from the midst
of such an environment, has furnished to the world a character so lofty
and so pure as that of José Rizal.
APPENDIX D
RIZAL’S VIEWS ON THE RACE PROBLEM
From an Article on Rizal in the “International Archiv für
Ethnographie,” by Ferdinand Blumentritt, in part translated and
abridged by R. L. Packard in the “Popular Science Monthly,” July, 1902.
Rizal devoted himself particularly to the analysis of the sentiments
with which the white and the colored races mutually regard each other.
No one was so well qualified as he to study this question, which is of
such importance to folk-psychology, for he was of himself of a colored
race, had lived among his fellow-countrymen at his own home as well as
among the whites, those of mixed bloods, and other classes at Manila,
and had besides come to know Hong-Kong, Japan, Europe, and the United
States and that in a thorough way and not as a mere tourist. His
extensive acquaintance with languages opened for him the ethnological
writings of all civilized nations, and his penetrating intellect
prevented him from remaining content with the surface of things. It
should be said, however, that Rizal concerned himself wholly with the
relations between the white and the colored peoples of the Pacific
because, as he explained, he knew nothing of the psychology of other
colored races.
He said that as a boy he was deeply sensible that the Spaniards treated
him with contemptuous disregard for the sole reason that he was a
Filipino. From the moment when he discovered this attitude of theirs he
endeavored to find out what right the Spaniards and the other whites
generally had to look down upon people who think as they think, study
the same things they study, and have the same mental capacity they
possess, simply because these people have a brown skin and stiff,
straight hair.
Europeans regard themselves as the sovereign masters of the earth, the
only supporters of progress and culture and the sole legitimate species
of the genus Homo sapiens, while they proclaim that all other races are
inferior by refusing to acknowledge their capability of acquiring
European culture, so that, according to the European view, the colored
races are varieties of the genus Homo brutus. Rizal then asked himself,
Are these views just? He began asking this question when he was a
school-boy and at the same time began to answer it by observing his
white fellow-students closely while he studied his own mental processes
and emotions in order to make comparisons.
He soon remarked that in school, at least, no difference could be
detected between the intellectual level of the whites and Filipinos.
There were lazy and industrious, moral and immoral, dull and
intelligent boys among the whites as well as among the Filipino
scholars. Soon this study of race spurred him to exert himself to the
utmost in his school studies, and a kind of race rivalry took
possession of him. He was overjoyed whenever he succeeded in solving a
difficult problem that baffled his white companions. But he did not
regard these events as personal successes so much as triumphs of his
own collective people. Thus it was in school that he first became
convinced that whites go through the same intellectual operations as
Filipinos and—ceteris paribus—progress in the same way and to the same
extent. From this observation he came to the conclusion that whites and
Filipinos have the same intellectual endowment.
In consequence of this conclusion there manifested itself in Rizal, as
he himself avowed, a sort of national self-exaltation. He began to
believe that the Tagalogs must stand higher intellectually than the
Spaniards (the only whites he had known up to that time) and he used to
like to tell how he came to this fallacious conclusion. In the first
place, he said, in his school the whites received instruction in their
own language while the Filipinos had to worry with strange idioms in
order to receive instruction which was given in it alone. The
Filipinos, therefore, must be better endowed intellectually than the
Spaniards, he inferred, since they not only kept up with the Spaniards
in their studies but even surpassed them, although handicapped by a
different language. Still another observation caused him to disbelieve
in the superiority of the European intelligence. He noticed that the
Spaniards believed that the Filipinos looked up to them as beings of a
superior nation and made of a finer clay than themselves. But Rizal
knew very well that the respectfulness the Filipinos manifested toward
the Spaniards did not proceed from self-depreciation but was simply
dictated by fear and self-interest.
By fear because they saw in the Spaniard their lord and master who
oppressed them arbitrarily even with good intentions; by self-interest
because they had observed that his pride of race lays the European open
to flattery and that they could get large concessions from him by a
little subserviency. The Filipinos do not therefore have any real
respect for the European but cringe and bow to him from interested
motives alone. Behind his back they laugh at him, ridicule his
presumption, and regard themselves as in reality the shrewder of the
two races. Because the Spaniards never divined the real sentiment of
the Filipinos toward themselves, young Rizal felt justified in
regarding them as inferior in intelligence to his own countrymen. But
in later years he found it necessary to change this false impression of
his youth, especially as he had found by his own personal experience
how easy it is to draw mistaken conclusions about people of a different
race from one’s own. “Whenever,” he used to say, “I came upon
condemnation of my people by Europeans either in conversation or in
books I recalled these foolish ideas of my youth, my indignation
cooled, and I could smile and quote the French proverb, ‘Tout
comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.’”
Dr. Rizal’s sojourn in Spain opened to him a new world. His
intellectual horizon began to widen with his new experiences. New ideas
thronged in upon him. He came from a land which was the very home of
bigotry, where the Spanish friar, the Spanish official, and the Spanish
soldier governed with absolute sway. But in Madrid he found the exact
opposite of this repression. Free-thinkers and atheists spoke freely in
disparaging terms of religion and the church; the authority of the
Government he found to be at a minimum, while he not only saw Liberals
contending with the Clerical Party but he beheld with astonishment
Republicans and Carlists openly promoting the development of their
political ideas.
Still greater was the influence upon him of his residence in France,
Germany, and England. In those countries he enlarged his scientific
information, or it would be better, perhaps, to say that there the
spirit of modern philology was revealed to him and there he learned the
meaning of the word “ethnology.”
The personal influence of the late Dr. Rost of London was most marked
in the philological training of Dr. Rizal. His teachings and the study
of the works of W. von Humboldt, Jacquet, and Professor H. Kern opened
a new world for the Filipino scholar. He formed a plan to write a work
upon the Tagalog verb, which he afterward modified, and while an exile
in Dapitan in Mindanao he began to write a Tagalog grammar in English
and at the same time prepared an essay upon the allied elements in the
Tagalog and Visayan languages. The former work he intended to dedicate
to Professor Kern, in the name of the Malay race; the latter he wished
to inscribe to the memory of Dr. Rost. It was not granted to him to
complete the manuscript of either, for he was interrupted in the midst
of his work to be dragged about from tribunal to tribunal until his
final sentence and death by public execution.
Fortunately, his work upon the transcription of Tagalog remains to us,
a translation having appeared in the “Bijdragen” of the Indian
Institute. Unfortunately, this work only increased the hatred of his
political opponents, for the Spaniards were very much opposed to any
independent work on the part of the Filipinos, being convinced that
everything of the kind was merely a cloak for separatist views, and
whatever was suspected of separatism in the Philippines was certain of
meeting an unhappy fate.
Rizal, brought up among the Spaniards, was no better instructed than
they themselves in modern ethnology, and, indeed, it was through
Professor Blumentritt’s instrumentality that his attention was first
directed to the defects in his education in that direction, whereupon
he began with ardor to enlarge his knowledge in comparative ethnology.
The works upon general ethnography by Perschel, F. Müller, Waitz,
Gerland, and Ratzel, the ethnographical parallels of André, Wilkins’s
work, the culture-historical publications of Lippert and Helwald became
at once the subject of his industrious and thorough study, a study,
furthermore, that not only enlarged his knowledge but afforded him the
consolation of the assurance that his people were not an anthropoid
race as the Spanish asserted, for he found that the faults and virtues
of the Tagal are entirely human, and, moreover, he became convinced
that the virtues and vices of any people are not mere peculiarities of
a race but inherited qualities, qualities that become affected by
climate and history.
At the same time he continued what he called his “course in practical
ethnology”; that is to say, he studied the life of the French and
German peasants, because he thought that a peasantry preserves national
and race peculiarities longer than the other classes of a people, and
also because he believed he ought to compare only the peasantry of
Europe with his own countrymen, because the latter were nearly all
peasants. With this object in view he withdrew for weeks to some quiet
village where he observed closely the daily life of the country people.
He summed up the results of his scientific and “practical” studies in
the following propositions:
1. The races of man differ in outward appearance and in the