The Social Cancer: A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere
dissatisfaction with the existing order. To them was assigned the
missionary field of Mindanao, which meant the displacement of the
Recollect Fathers in the missions there, and for these other berths
had to be found. Again the native clergy were the losers in that they
had to give up their best parishes in Luzon, especially around Manila
and Cavite, so the breach was further widened and the soil sown with
discontent. But more far-reaching than this immediate result was
the educational movement inaugurated by the Jesuits. The native,
already feeling the vague impulses from without and stirred by the
growing restlessness of the times, here saw a new world open before
him. A considerable portion of the native population in the larger
centers, who had shared in the economic progress of the colony, were
enabled to look beyond their daily needs and to afford their children
an opportunity for study and advancement--a condition and a need met
by the Jesuits for a time.
With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 communication with the
mother country became cheaper, quicker, surer, so that large numbers
of Spaniards, many of them in sympathy with the republican movements
at home, came to the Philippines in search of fortunes and generally
left half-caste families who had imbibed their ideas. Native boys
who had already felt the intoxication of such learning as the schools
of Manila afforded them began to dream of greater wonders in Spain,
now that the journey was possible for them. So began the definite
movements that led directly to the disintegration of the friar régime.
In the same year occurred the revolution in the mother country,
which had tired of the old corrupt despotism. Isabella II was driven
into exile and the country left to waver about uncertainly for several
years, passing through all the stages of government from red radicalism
to absolute conservatism, finally adjusting itself to the middle course
of constitutional monarchism. During the effervescent and ephemeral
republic there was sent to the Philippines a governor who set to work
to modify the old system and establish a government more in harmony
with modern ideas and more democratic in form. His changes were hailed
with delight by the growing class of Filipinos who were striving for
more consideration in their own country, and who, in their enthusiasm
and the intoxication of the moment, perhaps became more radical than
was safe under the conditions--surely too radical for their religious
guides watching and waiting behind the veil of the temple.
In January, 1872, an uprising occurred in the naval arsenal at Cavite,
with a Spanish non-commissioned officer as one of the leaders. From
the meager evidence now obtainable, this would seem to have been
purely a local mutiny over the service questions of pay and treatment,
but in it the friars saw their opportunity. It was blazoned forth,
with all the wild panic that was to characterize the actions of the
governing powers from that time on, as the premature outbreak of
a general insurrection under the leadership of the native clergy,
and rigorous repressive measures were demanded. Three native
priests, notable for their popularity among their own people, one an
octogenarian and the other two young canons of the Manila Cathedral,
were summarily garroted, along with the renegade Spanish officer
who had participated in the mutiny. No record of any trial of these
priests has ever been brought to light. The Archbishop, himself a
secular [5] clergyman, stoutly refused to degrade them from their
holy office, and they wore their sacerdotal robes at the execution,
which was conducted in a hurried, fearful manner. At the same time
a number of young Manilans who had taken conspicuous part in the
"liberal" demonstrations were deported to the Ladrone Islands or to
remote islands of the Philippine group itself.
This was the beginning of the end. Yet there immediately followed
the delusive calm which ever precedes the fatal outburst, lulling
those marked for destruction to a delusive security. The two decades
following were years of quiet, unobtrusive growth, during which
the Philippine Islands made the greatest economic progress in their
history. But this in itself was preparing the final catastrophe, for
if there be any fact well established in human experience it is that
with economic development the power of organized religion begins to
wane--the rise of the merchant spells the decline of the priest. A
sordid change, from masses and mysteries to sugar and shoes, this is
often said to be, but it should be noted that the epochs of greatest
economic activity have been those during which the generality of
mankind have lived fuller and freer lives, and above all that in such
eras the finest intellects and the grandest souls have been developed.
Nor does an institution that has been slowly growing for three
centuries, molding the very life and fiber of the people, disintegrate
without a violent struggle, either in its own constitution or in the
life of the people trained under it. Not only the ecclesiastical but
also the social and political system of the country was controlled by
the religious orders, often silently and secretly, but none the less
effectively. This is evident from the ceaseless conflict that went on
between the religious orders and the Spanish political administrators,
who were at every turn thwarted in their efforts to keep the government
abreast of the times.
The shock of the affair of 1872 had apparently stunned the Filipinos,
but it had at the same time brought them to the parting of the ways and
induced a vague feeling that there was something radically wrong, which
could only be righted by a closer union among themselves. They began
to consider that their interests and those of the governing powers were
not the same. In these feelings of distrust toward the friars they were
stimulated by the great numbers of immigrant Spaniards who were then
entering the country, many of whom had taken part in the republican
movements at home and who, upon the restoration of the monarchy,
no doubt thought it safer for them to be at as great a distance as
possible from the throne. The young Filipinos studying in Spain came
from different parts of the islands, and by their association there
in a foreign land were learning to forget their narrow sectionalism;
hence the way was being prepared for some concerted action. Thus,
aided and encouraged by the anti-clerical Spaniards in the mother
country, there was growing up a new generation of native leaders,
who looked toward something better than the old system.
It is with this period in the history of the country--the author's
boyhood--that the story of _Noli Me Tangere_ deals. Typical scenes and
characters are sketched from life with wonderful accuracy, and the
picture presented is that of a master-mind, who knew and loved his
subject. Terror and repression were the order of the day, with ever
a growing unrest in the higher circles, while the native population
at large seemed to be completely _cowed_--"brutalized" is the term
repeatedly used by Rizal in his political essays. Spanish writers of
the period, observing only the superficial movements,--some of which
were indeed fantastical enough, for
"they,
Who in oppression's darkness caved have dwelt,
They are not eagles, nourished with the day;
What marvel, then, at times, if they mistake their way?"
--and not heeding the currents at work below, take great delight in
ridiculing the pretensions of the young men seeking advancement,
while they indulge in coarse ribaldry over the wretched condition
of the great mass of the "Indians." The author, however, himself a
"miserable Indian," vividly depicts the unnatural conditions and
dominant characters produced under the outworn system of fraud and
force, at the same time presenting his people as living, feeling,
struggling individuals, with all the frailties of human nature and all
the possibilities of mankind, either for good or evil; incidentally
he throws into marked contrast the despicable depreciation used by
the Spanish writers in referring to the Filipinos, making clear the
application of the self-evident proposition that no ordinary human
being in the presence of superior force can very well conduct himself
as a man unless he be treated as such.
The friar orders, deluded by their transient triumph and secure in
their pride of place, became more arrogant, more domineering than
ever. In the general administration the political rulers were at every
turn thwarted, their best efforts frustrated, and if they ventured
too far their own security threatened; for in the three-cornered
wrangle which lasted throughout the whole of the Spanish domination,
the friar orders had, in addition to the strength derived from their
organization and their wealth, the Damoclean weapon of control over the
natives to hang above the heads of both governor and archbishop. The
curates in the towns, always the real rulers, became veritable despots,
so that no voice dared to raise itself against them, even in the midst
of conditions which the humblest _indio_ was beginning to feel dumbly
to be perverted and unnatural, and that, too, after three centuries
of training under the system that he had ever been taught to accept as
"the will of God."
The friars seemed long since to have forgotten those noble aims
that had meant so much to the founders and early workers of their
orders, if indeed the great majority of those of the later day had
ever realized the meaning of their office, for the Spanish writers of
the time delight in characterizing them as the meanest of the Spanish
peasantry, when not something worse, who had been "lassoed," taught a
few ritualistic prayers, and shipped to the Philippines to be placed
in isolated towns as lords and masters of the native population, with
all the power and prestige over a docile people that the sacredness of
their holy office gave them. These writers treat the matter lightly,
seeing in it rather a huge joke on the "miserable Indians," and
give the friars great credit for "patriotism," a term which in this
connection they dragged from depth to depth until it quite aptly fitted
Dr. Johnson's famous definition, "the last refuge of a scoundrel."
In their conduct the religious corporations, both as societies and as
individuals, must be estimated according to their own standards--the
application of any other criterion would be palpably unfair. They
undertook to hold the native in subjection, to regulate the essential
activities of his life according to their ideas, so upon them
must fall the responsibility for the conditions finally attained:
to destroy the freedom of the subject and then attempt to blame him
for his conduct is a paradox into which the learned men often fell,
perhaps inadvertently through their deductive logic. They endeavored
to shape the lives of their Malay wards not only in this existence
but also in the next. Their vows were poverty, chastity, and obedience.
The vow of poverty was early relegated to the limbo of neglect. Only a
few years after the founding of Manila royal decrees began to issue on
the subject of complaints received by the King over the usurpation of
lands on the part of the priests. Using the same methods so familiar in
the heyday of the institution of monasticism in Europe--pious gifts,
deathbed bequests, pilgrims' offerings--the friar orders gradually
secured the richest of the arable lands in the more thickly settled
portions of the Philippines, notably the part of Luzon occupied by
the Tagalogs. Not always, however, it must in justice be recorded,
were such doubtful means resorted to, for there were instances where