The hero of the Filipinos The story of José Rizal, poet, patriot and martyr
caning or injuring some unarmed and inoffensive villager. The only
fault would be that while at a distance he had not taken off his hat
and made his bow. The alcalde did the same thing whenever he visited
us.”
We saw no restraint put upon brutality. Those whose duty it was to
look out for the public peace committed acts of violence and other
excesses. They were the real outlaws, and against such lawbreakers
our authorities were powerless.
His father looked carefully to the beginnings of José’s education.
There was daily drilling in all the elementary studies; an old man came
and lived in the house to teach the boy Latin.
When he was nine years old he was sent to the boys’ school at Biñan,
where his uncle José Alberto lived, and where he acquired knowledge in
the traditional manner and under a liberal application of the rod. Dr.
Justiniano Cruz, his teacher, seems to have had no modern illusions
about the sparing of this implement; to have it hang by the side of the
Bible and be more frequently used was his notion of thorough
instruction.
José wrote of his experiences there:
My brother left me after he had presented me to the schoolmaster,
who, it seemed, had been his own teacher. He was a tall, thin man,
with a long neck and a sharp nose. His body leaned slightly
forward. His shirt was of sinamay, [28] woven by the deft fingers
of Batangas women. He knew Latin and Spanish grammar by heart. And
his severity, I believe now, was too great. This is all I can
remember of him. His class-room was in his own house and only some
thirty meters away from my aunt’s house [where José was lodged].
When I entered the class-room for the first time, he said to me:
“You, do you speak Spanish?”
“A little, sir,” I answered.
“Do you know Latin?”
“A little, sir,” I again answered.
Because of these answers, the teacher’s son, who was the worst boy
in the class, began to make fun of me. He was some years my elder
and had an advantage in height, yet we had a tussle. Somehow or
other, I don’t know how, I got the better of him. I bent him down
over the class benches. Then I let him loose, having hurt only his
pride.
From this feat, the other boys thought he was a clever wrestler. One of
them challenged him. His pride had an early fall. The challenger threw
him and came near to break his head on the sidewalk.
I do not wish to take up the time with telling of the beatings I
got, nor shall I attempt to say how it hurt when I received the
first ruler-blow on my hand. I used to win in the competitions, for
no one happened to be better than I. Of these successes I made the
most. In spite of the reputation I had of being a good boy, rare
were the days in which my teacher did not call me up to receive
five or six blows on the hand.
There was near-by an aged painter. José used to haunt his studio and
learned much there about the secrets of pictorial art. He continues:
My manner of life was simple. I heard mass at four if there was a
service so early, or studied my lesson at that hour and went to
mass afterward. Then I went into the yard and looked for mabolos.
[29] Then came breakfast, which generally consisted of a plate of
rice and two dried sardines. There was class-work till ten o’clock,
and after luncheon a study period. In the afternoon there was
school from two o’clock until five. Next, there would be play with
my cousins for a while. Study and perhaps painting took up the
remainder of the afternoon. By and by came supper, one or two
plates of rice with a fish called ayungin. In the evening we had
prayers and then, if there was moonlight, a cousin and I would play
in the street with the others. Fortunately, I was never ill while
away from home. From time to time, I went to my own village. How
long the trip seemed going and how short coming back!
The tenderer plants of knowledge would hardly be expected to flower in
this harsh air, but the boy acquitted himself well. In two years he had
gathered into his little head all the wisdom Dr. Cruz could supply,
even with the conscientious use of the birch, and his parents had
decided to send him to Manila and the famous Ateneo Municipal of the
Jesuits. [30]
In Manila, though not at the Ateneo, he had been preceded by his elder
brother Paciano, long a student at the College of San José, where that
Father Burgos, whose death at the hands of the terrified governing
class in 1872 we have recounted, was an instructor. Paciano lived at
Father Burgos’s house and was his intimate friend. What ideas and
ideals dominated the Mercado household at Calamba we may surmise from
incidents of Paciano’s own school life. He was pilloried at San José as
a notorious patriot; because he spoke with some freedom against the
tyranny that blasted his country the authorities refused to allow him
to pass his examinations. [31] It appears that Father Burgos, although
unjustly accused of complicity in the Cavite affair, was likewise a
sturdy Filipino and convinced that the iniquities of the existing
System could not long be maintained. In all probability he was
sentenced for holding these views. No one will ever know this, because
the trial was in secret, no testimony (if any was taken) was afterward
to be found, and he that was called the witness for the Government was
garroted by that same Government before the public could learn the
nature of his inventions. [32] A belief that Father Burgos was a
general-principles victim is justified by the habitual proceedings of
the Government. He was not the only man that perished in those days for
what he thought and not for what he did.
The slayings of Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora took place a few
months before José Rizal went to Manila. Almost before Paciano’s face
his friend and teacher had been dragged to death. What communication
about these things Paciano made to his brother, or how Paciano was
moved by the tragedy, we can gather only from what happened afterward;
but what it meant to José we know well, for as to that he has left
eloquent testimony. Sixteen years afterward he compressed into
twenty-two lines of bitter irony the scorn he had of Spain for that
day’s work. The tragedy on Bagumbayan Field came at the time when his
mother’s persecution was beginning; his departure from home had been
delayed by her arrest. He was already burning under the sense of an
intolerable wrong; this sharp and gratuitous access of injustice must
have pierced him with another wound to brood over. [33] All the rest of
his life he seemed a lonely and rather melancholy figure. It was here
at the Ateneo that his aloofness began. A feeling grew upon him that he
was alone in the midst of crowds. It was the counterpart of a sense
equally developing in him that the misfortunes of his people were to be
the business of his life.
He found much at the Ateneo that sharpened his observations of the
source of the national disease. All things considered, the school
professed unusual virtues; its wise conductors made something of a
vaunt of equal treatment for all their pupils. Yet even so it was
impossible to shut out or to mitigate the contempt and hatred the
Spaniards had for the Filipinos. Before the faculty, Spanish boys and
Filipino boys might have an equal chance to pass their examinations;
outside of the class-rooms, the Spanish boys sedulously imitated the
arrogance and brutalities of their elders. One of the first remarks
made by José Rizal in his new academe was that the Spanish boys always
bore themselves with aggressive insolence toward their schoolmates of
darker skin; the “miserable Indio” attitude over again. The next was
that while the Filipino boys seemed as a rule to accept a situation
they were powerless to end, they were one and all insubmissive in their
hearts. Next he made note that the Filipino boys were so little
impressed with Spanish superiority that in secret they laughed at their
white tyrants, mocking them and well aware of their faults and
weaknesses. Finally, he satisfied himself many times in many ways, that
the Filipino mind was not in any respect inferior to the Spanish; for
the pretense of Spanish superiority there was no other basis but the
accident of the overawing military.
In cannon and not in mind, spirit, or genius lay all of Spain’s
prestige.
Before this discovery all the theory upon which Europe dominated any
part of the Orient crumbled and vanished. There was no such thing, it
did not exist, it was only fabrication and device. The brown man was
not inferior; he was not deliberately shaped by the Creator to be the
white man’s patient drudge. Put down side by side with an equal course
before them, footing the same starting-line, the brown boy in school
won to the goal as quickly and surely as the white. And only as quickly
and surely? It seemed to Rizal, after a time, taking careful note, that
the brown boy was in every trial heat the nimbler and wiser. [34] As,
for example, here was all the instruction in this school given in
Spanish, the white boy’s native tongue, but all alien to the brown boy.
So, then, the brown boy must needs compass the language in which the
instruction was conveyed as well as the instruction given therein. Yet,
even so, handicapped by this and no less by universal contempt and
disparagement, behold him winning at least as many prizes as the
Spaniard, at least as proficient, diligent, capable.
Here was a revelation to shake the towers of accepted doctrine. In the
light of it how great (and how hideous!) was the wrong done to the
people of the Philippines! The pretense upon which Spain ruled in this
iron fashion, with so much cruelty and dishonesty, was (in effect) that
in the cells of the brains and in the corpuscles of the blood of these
people some undefined and mysterious essence was lacking, and for want
of this they were incapable of ruling themselves or even of taking a
place among the other children of earth. Being put to the test, no such
lack appeared, but only aptitude, mental health, mental vigor, equal at
least to those of the white man. The European ruled, then, because he
had a larger share of the brute in him, because he had a sensual
ambition to rule, because his taste found pleasure in humiliating and
exploiting others, because he had a tougher conscience, and because
luck had been on his side. Of any essential, irradicable, structural
difference between race and race there was not an indication. What the
Asiatic really lacked was opportunity, not intellect; and liberty, not
character.
He came to these conclusions without haste, because his was a mind that
worked deliberately and over stretched-out periods of observation. He
has left a record of them: of the time when they caused him to believe
that the Malayan mind must really be better than the Caucasian; of his
final conviction that between mind and mind there is no racial
distinction with which reasoning men will bother themselves; that all
the children of mother earth under the same conditions will average
about the same results. In the end he came to discard the whole theory
of races; to his mind it was nothing but the manufacture of prejudice,
ignorance, or profit-mongering. Mankind he saw not separated by
perpendicular lines into races but by horizontal lines into strata.
[35] Everywhere some groups of men, favored by conditions, by liberty
first of all, by institutions, by opportunity, had climbed to higher
strata; everywhere other groups of men less fortunate as to conditions,
having less liberty, worse institutions, and narrower opportunity,
remained still in the lower strata. But everywhere it was, first of