The Reign of Greed
system by making use of its own defects, to make war on it by
flattering it. I need your help, your influence among the youth, to
combat these senseless desires for Hispanization, for assimilation, for
equal rights. By that road you will become only a poor copy, and the
people should look higher. It is madness to attempt to influence the
thoughts of the rulers—they have their plan outlined, the bandage
covers their eyes, and besides losing time uselessly, you are deceiving
the people with vain hopes and are helping to bend their necks before
the tyrant. What you should do is to take advantage of their prejudices
to serve your needs. Are they unwilling that you be assimilated with
the Spanish people? Good enough! Distinguish yourselves then by
revealing yourselves in your own character, try to lay the foundations
of the Philippine fatherland! Do they deny you hope? Good! Don’t depend
on them, depend upon yourselves and work! Do they deny you
representation in their Cortes? So much the better! Even should you
succeed in sending representatives of your own choice, what are you
going to accomplish there except to be overwhelmed among so many
voices, and sanction with your presence the abuses and wrongs that are
afterwards perpetrated? The fewer rights they allow you, the more
reason you will have later to throw off the yoke, and return evil for
evil. If they are unwilling to teach you their language, cultivate your
own, extend it, preserve to the people their own way of thinking, and
instead of aspiring to be a province, aspire to be a nation! Instead of
subordinate thoughts, think independently, to the end that neither by
right, nor custom, nor language, the Spaniard can be considered the
master here, nor even be looked upon as a part of the country, but ever
as an invader, a foreigner, and sooner or later you will have your
liberty! Here’s why I let you live!”
Basilio breathed freely, as though a great weight had been lifted from
him, and after a brief pause, replied: “Sir, the honor you do me in
confiding your plans to me is too great for me not to be frank with
you, and tell you that what you ask of me is beyond my power. I am no
politician, and if I have signed the petition for instruction in
Castilian it has been because I saw in it an advantage to our studies
and nothing more. My destiny is different; my aspiration reduces itself
to alleviating the physical sufferings of my fellow men.”
The jeweler smiled. “What are physical sufferings compared to moral
tortures? What is the death of a man in the presence of the death of a
society? Some day you will perhaps be a great physician, if they let
you go your way in peace, but greater yet will be he who can inject a
new idea into this anemic people! You, what are you doing for the land
that gave you existence, that supports your life, that affords you
knowledge? Don’t you realize that that is a useless life which is not
consecrated to a great idea? It is a stone wasted in the fields without
becoming a part of any edifice.”
“No, no, sir!” replied Basilio modestly, “I’m not folding my arms, I’m
working like all the rest to raise up from the ruins of the past a
people whose units will be bound together—that each one may feel in
himself the conscience and the life of the whole. But however
enthusiastic our generation may be, we understand that in this great
social fabric there must be a division of labor. I have chosen my task
and will devote myself to science.”
“Science is not the end of man,” declared Simoun.
“The most civilized nations are tending toward it.”
“Yes, but only as a means of seeking their welfare.”
“Science is more eternal, it’s more human, it’s more universal!”
exclaimed the youth in a transport of enthusiasm. “Within a few
centuries, when humanity has become redeemed and enlightened, when
there are no races, when all peoples are free, when there are neither
tyrants nor slaves, colonies nor mother countries, when justice rules
and man is a citizen of the world, the pursuit of science alone will
remain, the word patriotism will be equivalent to fanaticism, and he
who prides himself on patriotic ideas will doubtless be isolated as a
dangerous disease, as a menace to the social order.”
Simoun smiled sadly. “Yes, yes,” he said with a shake of his head, “yet
to reach that condition it is necessary that there be no tyrannical and
no enslaved peoples, it is necessary that man go about freely, that he
know how to respect the rights of others in their own individuality,
and for this there is yet much blood to be shed, the struggle forces
itself forward. To overcome the ancient fanaticism that bound
consciences it was necessary that many should perish in the holocausts,
so that the social conscience in horror declared the individual
conscience free. It is also necessary that all answer the question
which with each day the fatherland asks them, with its fettered hands
extended! Patriotism can only be a crime in a tyrannical people,
because then it is rapine under a beautiful name, but however perfect
humanity may become, patriotism will always be a virtue among oppressed
peoples, because it will at all times mean love of justice, of liberty,
of personal dignity—nothing of chimerical dreams, of effeminate idyls!
The greatness of a man is not in living before his time, a thing almost
impossible, but in understanding its desires, in responding to its
needs, and in guiding it on its forward way. The geniuses that are
commonly believed to have existed before their time, only appear so
because those who judge them see from a great distance, or take as
representative of the age the line of stragglers!”
Simoun fell silent. Seeing that he could awake no enthusiasm in that
unresponsive mind, he turned to another subject and asked with a change
of tone: “And what are you doing for the memory of your mother and your
brother? Is it enough that you come here every year, to weep like a
woman over a grave?” And he smiled sarcastically.
The shot hit the mark. Basilio changed color and advanced a step.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked angrily.
“Without means, without social position, how may I bring their
murderers to justice? I would merely be another victim, shattered like
a piece of glass hurled against a rock. Ah, you do ill to recall this
to me, since it is wantonly reopening a wound!”
“But what if I should offer you my aid?”
Basilio shook his head and remained pensive. “All the tardy
vindications of justice, all the revenge in the world, will not restore
a single hair of my mother’s head, or recall a smile to my brother’s
lips. Let them rest in peace—what should I gain now by avenging them?”
“Prevent others from suffering what you have suffered, that in the
future there be no brothers murdered or mothers driven to madness.
Resignation is not always a virtue; it is a crime when it encourages
tyrants: there are no despots where there are no slaves! Man is in his
own nature so wicked that he always abuses complaisance. I thought as
you do, and you know what my fate was. Those who caused your
misfortunes are watching you day and night, they suspect that you are
only biding your time, they take your eagerness to learn, your love of
study, your very complaisance, for burning desires for revenge. The day
they can get rid of you they will do with you as they did with me, and
they will not let you grow to manhood, because they fear and hate you!”
“Hate me? Still hate me after the wrong they have done me?” asked the
youth in surprise.
Simoun burst into a laugh. “‘It is natural for man to hate those whom
he has wronged,’ said Tacitus, confirming the quos laeserunt et oderunt
of Seneca. When you wish to gauge the evil or the good that one people
has done to another, you have only to observe whether it hates or
loves. Thus is explained the reason why many who have enriched
themselves here in the high offices they have filled, on their return
to the Peninsula relieve themselves by slanders and insults against
those who have been their victims. Proprium humani ingenii est odisse
quern laeseris!”
“But if the world is large, if one leaves them to the peaceful
enjoyment of power, if I ask only to be allowed to work, to live—”
“And to rear meek-natured sons to send them afterwards to submit to the
yoke,” continued Simoun, cruelly mimicking Basilio’s tone. “A fine
future you prepare for them, and they have to thank you for a life of
humiliation and suffering! Good enough, young man! When a body is
inert, it is useless to galvanize it. Twenty years of continuous
slavery, of systematic humiliation, of constant prostration, finally
create in the mind a twist that cannot be straightened by the labor of
a day. Good and evil instincts are inherited and transmitted from
father to son. Then let your idylic ideas live, your dreams of a slave
who asks only for a bandage to wrap the chain so that it may rattle
less and not ulcerate his skin! You hope for a little home and some
ease, a wife and a handful of rice—here is your ideal man of the
Philippines! Well, if they give it to you, consider yourself
fortunate.”
Basilio, accustomed to obey and bear with the caprices and humors of
Capitan Tiago. was now dominated by Simoun, who appeared to him
terrible and sinister on a background bathed in tears and blood. He
tried to explain himself by saying that he did not consider himself fit
to mix in politics, that he had no political opinions because he had
never studied the question, but that he was always ready to lend his
services the day they might be needed, that for the moment he saw only
one need, the enlightenment of the people.
Simoun stopped him with a gesture, and, as the dawn was coming, said to
him: “Young man, I am not warning you to keep my secret, because I know
that discretion is one of your good qualities, and even though you
might wish to sell me, the jeweler Simoun, the friend of the
authorities and of the religious corporations, will always be given
more credit than the student Basilio, already suspected of
filibusterism, and, being a native, so much the more marked and
watched, and because in the profession you are entering upon you will
encounter powerful rivals. After all, even though you have not
corresponded to my hopes, the day on which you change your mind, look
me up at my house in the Escolta, and I’ll be glad to help you.”
Basilio thanked him briefly and went away.
“Have I really made a mistake?” mused Simoun, when he found himself
alone. “Is it that he doubts me and meditates his plan of revenge so
secretly that he fears to tell it even in the solitude of the night? Or
can it be that the years of servitude have extinguished in his heart
every human sentiment and there remain only the animal desires to live
and reproduce? In that case the type is deformed and will have to be
cast over again. Then the hecatomb is preparing: let the unfit perish
and only the strongest survive!”
Then he added sadly, as if apostrophizing some one: “Have patience, you
who left me a name and a home, have patience! I have lost all—country,
future, prosperity, your very tomb, but have patience! And thou, noble
spirit, great soul, generous heart, who didst live with only one
thought and didst sacrifice thy life without asking the gratitude or
applause of any one, have patience, have patience! The methods that I
use may perhaps not be thine, but they are the most direct. The day is
coming, and when it brightens I myself will come to announce it to you
who are now indifferent. Have patience!”
CHAPTER VIII
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
When Juli opened her sorrowing eyes, she saw that the house was still
dark, but the cocks were crowing. Her first thought was that perhaps