The Social Cancer: A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere
the missionary was the pioneer, gathering about himself a band of
devoted natives and plunging into the unsettled parts to build up
a town with its fields around it, which would later become a friar
estate. With the accumulated incomes from these estates and the fees
for religious observances that poured into their treasuries, the
orders in their nature of perpetual corporations became the masters of
the situation, the lords of the country. But this condition was not
altogether objectionable; it was in the excess of their greed that
they went astray, for the native peoples had been living under this
system through generations and not until they began to feel that they
were not receiving fair treatment did they question the authority of
a power which not only secured them a peaceful existence in this life
but also assured them eternal felicity in the next.
With only the shining exceptions that are produced in any system, no
matter how false its premises or how decadent it may become, to uphold
faith in the intrinsic soundness of human nature, the vow of chastity
was never much more than a myth. Through the tremendous influence
exerted over a fanatically religious people, who implicitly followed
the teachings of the reverend fathers, once their confidence had
been secured, the curate was seldom to be gainsaid in his desires. By
means of the secret influence in the confessional and the more open
political power wielded by him, the fairest was his to command,
and the favored one and her people looked upon the choice more as an
honor than otherwise, for besides the social standing that it gave her
there was the proud prospect of becoming the mother of children who
could claim kinship with the dominant race. The curate's "companion"
or the sacristan's wife was a power in the community, her family was
raised to a place of importance and influence among their own people,
while she and her ecclesiastical offspring were well cared for. On
the death or removal of the curate, it was almost invariably found
that she had been provided with a husband or protector and a not
inconsiderable amount of property--an arrangement rather appealing
to a people among whom the means of living have ever been so insecure.
That this practise was not particularly offensive to the people among
whom they dwelt may explain the situation, but to claim that it excuses
the friars approaches dangerously close to casuistry. Still, as long as
this arrangement was decently and moderately carried out, there seems
to have been no great objection, nor from a worldly point of view,
with all the conditions considered, could there be much. But the old
story of excess, of unbridled power turned toward bad ends, again
recurs, at the same time that the ideas brought in by the Spaniards
who came each year in increasing numbers and the principles observed
by the young men studying in Europe cast doubt upon the fitness of
such a state of affairs. As they approached their downfall, like all
mankind, the friars became more open, more insolent, more shameless,
in their conduct.
The story of Maria Clara, as told in _Noli Me Tangere_, is by no means
an exaggerated instance, but rather one of the few clean enough to
bear the light, and her fate, as depicted in the epilogue, is said
to be based upon an actual occurrence with which the author must have
been familiar.
The vow of obedience--whether considered as to the Pope, their
highest religious authority, or to the King of Spain, their political
liege--might not always be so callously disregarded, but it could be
evaded and defied. From the Vatican came bull after bull, from the
Escorial decree after decree, only to be archived in Manila, sometimes
after a hollow pretense of compliance. A large part of the records of
Spanish domination is taken up with the wearisome quarrels that went
on between the Archbishop, representing the head of the Church, and
the friar orders, over the questions of the episcopal visitation and
the enforcement of the provisions of the Council of Trent relegating
the monks to their original status of missionaries, with the friars
invariably victorious in their contentions. Royal decrees ordering
inquiries into the titles to the estates of the men of poverty and
those providing for the education of the natives in Spanish were
merely sneered at and left to molder in harmless quiet. Not without
good grounds for his contention, the friar claimed that the Spanish
dominion over the Philippines depended upon him, and he therefore
confidently set himself up as the best judge of how that dominion
should be maintained.
Thus there are presented in the Philippines of the closing quarter of
the century just past the phenomena so frequently met with in modern
societies, so disheartening to the people who must drag out their lives
under them, of an old system which has outworn its usefulness and is
being called into question, with forces actively at work disintegrating
it, yet with the unhappy folk bred and reared under it unprepared for
a new order of things. The old faith was breaking down, its forms
and beliefs, once so full of life and meaning, were being sharply
examined, doubt and suspicion were the order of the day. Moreover,
it must ever be borne in mind that in the Philippines this unrest,
except in the parts where the friars were the landlords, was not
general among the people, the masses of whom were still sunk in their
"loved Egyptian night," but affected only a very small proportion of
the population--for the most part young men who were groping their
way toward something better, yet without any very clearly conceived
idea of what that better might be, and among whom was to be found the
usual sprinkling of "sunshine patriots" and omnipresent opportunists
ready for any kind of trouble that will afford them a chance to rise.
Add to the apathy of the masses dragging out their vacant lives amid
the shadows of religious superstition and to the unrest of the few,
the fact that the orders were in absolute control of the political
machinery of the country, with the best part of the agrarian wealth
amortized in their hands; add also the ever-present jealousies, petty
feuds, and racial hatreds, for which Manila and the Philippines,
with their medley of creeds and races, offer such a fertile field,
all fostered by the governing class for the maintenance of the old
Machiavelian principle of "divide and rule," and the sum is about
the most miserable condition under which any portion of mankind ever
tried to fulfill nature's inexorable laws of growth.
II
And third came she who gives dark creeds their power,
Silabbat-paramasa, sorceress,
Draped fair in many lands as lowly Faith,
But ever juggling souls with rites and prayers;
The keeper of those keys which lock up Hells
And open Heavens. "Wilt thou dare," she said,
"Put by our sacred books, dethrone our gods,
Unpeople all the temples, shaking down
That law which feeds the priests and props the realm?"
But Buddha answered, "What thou bidd'st me keep
Is form which passes, but the free Truth stands;
Get thee unto thy darkness."
SIR EDWIN ARNOLD, _The Light of Asia_.
"Ah, simple people, how little do you know the blessing that you
enjoy! Neither hunger, nor nakedness, nor inclemency of the weather
troubles you. With the payment of seven reals per year, you remain free
of contributions. You do not have to close your houses with bolts. You
do not fear that the district troopers will come in to lay waste your
fields, and trample you under foot at your own firesides. You call
'father' the one who is in command over you. Perhaps there will come
a time when you will be more civilized, and you will break out in
revolution; and you will wake terrified, at the tumult of the riots,
and will see blood flowing through these quiet fields, and gallows
and guillotines erected in these squares, which never yet have seen an
execution." [6] Thus moralized a Spanish traveler in 1842, just as that
_dolce far niente_ was drawing to its close. Already far-seeing men had
begun to raise in the Spanish parliament the question of the future of
the Philippines, looking toward some definite program for their care
under modern conditions and for the adjustment of their relations with
the mother country. But these were mere Cassandra-voices--the horologe
of time was striking for Rome's successor, as it did for Rome herself.
Just where will come the outbreak after three centuries of
mind-repression and soul-distortion, of forcing a growing subject
into the strait-jacket of medieval thought and action, of natural
selection reversed by the constant elimination of native initiative and
leadership, is indeed a curious study. That there will be an outbreak
somewhere is as certain as that the plant will grow toward the light,
even under the most unfavorable conditions, for man's nature is but
the resultant of eternal forces that ceaselessly and irresistibly
interplay about and upon him, and somewhere this resultant will
express itself in thought or deed.
After three centuries of Spanish ecclesiastical domination in the
Philippines, it was to be expected that the wards would turn against
their mentors the methods that had been used upon them, nor is it
especially remarkable that there was a decided tendency in some parts
to revert to primitive barbarism, but that concurrently a creative
genius--a bard or seer--should have been developed among a people
who, as a whole, have hardly passed through the clan or village
stage of society, can be regarded as little less than a psychological
phenomenon, and provokes the perhaps presumptuous inquiry as to whether
there may not be some things about our common human nature that the
learned doctors have not yet included in their anthropometric diagrams.
On the western shore of the Lake of Bay in the heart of the Philippines
clusters the village of Kalamba, first established by the Jesuit
Fathers in the early days of the conquest, and upon their expulsion
in 1767 taken over by the Crown, which later transferred it to the
Dominicans, under whose care the fertile fields about it became one
of the richest of the friar estates. It can hardly be called a town,
even for the Philippines, but is rather a market-village, set as it
is at the outlet of the rich country of northern Batangas on the
open waterway to Manila and the outside world. Around it flourish
the green rice-fields, while Mount Makiling towers majestically near
in her moods of cloud and sunshine, overlooking the picturesque
curve of the shore and the rippling waters of the lake. Shadowy
to the eastward gleam the purple crests of Banahao and Cristobal,
and but a few miles to the southwestward dim-thundering, seething,
earth-rocking Taal mutters and moans of the world's birth-throes. It
is the center of a region rich in native lore and legend, as it sleeps
through the dusty noons when the cacao leaves droop with the heat and
dreams through the silvery nights, waking twice or thrice a week to
the endless babble and ceaseless chatter of an Oriental market where
the noisy throngs make of their trading as much a matter of pleasure
and recreation as of business.
Directly opposite this market-place, in a house facing the village
church, there was born in 1861 into the already large family of one
of the more prosperous tenants on the Dominican estate a boy who was
to combine in his person the finest traits of the Oriental character
with the best that Spanish and European culture could add, on whom
would fall the burden of his people's woes to lead him over the _via
dolorosa_ of struggle and sacrifice, ending in his own destruction