Chapter I · A PEOPLE’S WRONGS

To the typical haughty Spaniard there the Filipino was an Indio, an inferior creature designed to render service to the white man’s needs and to receive the white man’s blows. Each successive generation of rulers had learned at least once, and always with astonishment and disgust, that the lowly Indio was capable of combinations and resistances that sometimes shook the walls of Malacañan itself and started painful visions of massacres and wild fleeings. From the beginning to the end of the story, it was a discovery that first exiled reason and then multiplied work to the executioner. Yet the knowledge gained in this way by one generation never seemed to enlighten the next: each revolt created in its turn the same astonishment, as if for the first time in human experience wronged men had turned against their wrongers. Each generation, therefore, had the same obtuse notion of violent repression as the only answer to the natives’ complaint, a concept that each left with additions of its own to its successor. Hence the complex savageries of 1872, which might be regarded as in a way accretionary; not a soul in the governing class seeming to suspect, despite all this rich experience, that the essence of the slayings was no better than one revenge making ready for another.

In those evil days millions of Filipinos rendered to the dominant tyranny what it compelled them to render and kept alive in their proud hearts the longing for justice, the love of their country, and a respect for their race. One of these, Francisco Rizal Mercado, was then living in Calamba, a little town on the west shore of the great lake of Laguna de Bay. Manila was twenty-five miles to the northward; the tall mountains of Luzon, Mount Makiling and others, gloomed or shone south and west; the plains around were fertile and well cultivated; it was a pleasant and profitable region. Francisco Mercado was of some substance and a character so excellent that all the country-side knew and honored him; a sturdy, resolute, reasoning man, wide-eyed, square-headed. He had prospered by diligence and deserving; his large two-storied dwelling was the best in Calamba. Overawing guns and the military checked his spirit but never daunted it. In his house the Government’s key-hole listeners and hired porch-climbers were defied, and no one hesitated to discuss the evils that had befallen the land.

The crops in 1871 had not been good in that region. Mr. Mercado’s store of fodder diminished until he had barely enough to supply his own live stock. When next the lieutenant came the situation was explained to him, and with every politeness he was asked to bait his horse elsewhere.

About the same time the unfortunate Mercado managed to offend another Spaniard still more powerful. For all such visitors to Calamba he kept a kind of gratuitous hotel; hospitality was and is a sacred and inviolable rite among his people. The judge of the local district, conferring upon the Mercados thus the honor of his uninvited presence, fancied that his reception lacked something of cordiality and ceremony. As to this, he may have been right; in the hearts of most intelligent Filipinos of those days the feelings toward official Spaniards were not likely to be exuberantly warm. The judge, like the lieutenant before him, deemed his Spanish honor to have suffered and went away with a similar appetite for vengeance, a lust to which the example of their Government richly incited them.

Don José Alberto had married young, and, as the event showed, not wisely. His wife was his cousin. They quarreled and separated, and the wife seems to have set afoot wild and fantastic stories, injurious to her husband. Divorces were difficult in the Philippines.

From material no better than these the lieutenant now manufactured against Mrs. Mercado and her brother a charge of conspiracy to murder Mrs. Realonda. It was a preposterous tale, but to such tales the institutions that, in those parts, by a figure of speech, were called courts of justice were in the habit of lending a ready ear if thereby they served any end of the dominant power or gratified a powerful Spaniard. In probably no other corner of the world with a pretense to Christian civilization was the judicial system so farcical; the next developments were typical of the conditions under which seven million people dwelt at the mercy of perjurers, adventurers, and thieves. With joy the incensed judge received the accusation and ordered Mrs. Mercado to be arrested and imprisoned in the provincial jail.

This, although but left-handed and imperfect revenge, accorded with the ideas and practices of the governing class. The grievances of the judge and the lieutenant, if they had any, were against Mr. Mercado; they evened the score by striking not at him but at his wife. Incomprehensible or almost insane as this will seem to a healthier sense of honor, it was a custom of which we shall find other and more painful instances. Suppose the governing class, or a member of it, to believe the much cherished supremacy of the white race to demand that an example be made of an offending native. No nice discrimination was deemed necessary. If the offender was not available, retribution could still be inflicted upon the offender’s wife, or upon his children or even upon his brother-in-law or his great aunt, if he had no children, or if his wife was not within striking distance. In fairness to the Spaniards we are to note that this singular reversion was not a product of nationality but of geography; many a man defended vicarious vengeance in the Philippines that would have scorned it in Spain, so wonderful are the moral idiocies into which imperialism drives us.

Mrs. Mercado was ordered from her home to the prison at Santa Cruz, the provincial capital, at the other side of the lake. Ordinarily, traffic with Calamba was by steamer; but a road, rough and ill made, led along the shore. The more to taste the pleasures of his revenge, the judge ordered Mrs. Mercado to be conducted by this road and on foot; that is to say, about twenty miles and in the sun.

He was as merciful as the judicial system he adorned; as intelligent and as well ordered. One of the least of its offenses was that this same hedge-row magistrate, at whose order she had been arrested to gratify his spite, was also to be the prosecuting attorney, when she should be brought to trial, and the judge before whom her fate should be decided. Mr. Mercado, meanwhile, had been putting forth every peaceful means to rescue his wife from this disaster. He had secured an attorney, who now presented a petition that her case should not be allowed to come before a judge so manifestly prejudiced against her. While Mrs. Mercado lay in jail, this appeal went before the supreme court, which sustained it and ordered the prisoner’s release. Before she could be set free the unjust judge brought a new charge against her, that her petition alleging prejudice on his part constituted contempt of court.

On this she continued to be a prisoner until another appeal could be made to the supreme assize. When it had been reached and argued, Dogberry wisdom seated upon this august bench upheld the court below and found that such a petition was indeed contempt. How, that being the case, a prisoner could ever escape from a court or judge manifestly hostile to her, these eminent authorities did not suggest. But as Mrs. Mercado had already been in jail much longer than the term of the sentence passed upon her for contempt, they ordered her liberation.

It was now to be supposed that the end of this business had been reached, vengeance had been satisfied, the crime of not feeding the lieutenant’s horse had been atoned for, and the woman might return to her family. Not in the Philippines, certainly. Before the prison doors could open, a new charge was brought against her.

Here is an incident luminous upon the society of that day and region; we had better pursue it. All this time, Mrs. Mercado’s half-brother, José Alberto, the engineer, whose unfortunate marriage had wrought so much of trouble, had been a prisoner in the same jail, similarly beset with accusing inventions. He had a moderate fortune; therefore the story went around that he had much money concealed about him. The scent of the peso was ever strong in the nostrils of the jail officials and court attendants. When the gold could not be found in José Alberto’s cell, the searchers for it reasonably concluded that the half-sister must have taken it, possibly by means of an astral presence or through some form of witchcraft.

For this rank imagining there was even less of basis than there had been for the conspiracy charge; yet it was months in falling apart. When it had dissolved in its own absurdity another quite as unfounded took its place. Justice à la espagnole—in the Philippines. Two years passed in these futilities. It was apparently the purpose of the authorities to keep their helpless victim in prison the rest of her life.

Many of the troubles that fell upon his neighbors, or were laid upon them by the existing System, were troubles about land; and before ever the malicious lieutenant had begun his revenges upon the family, young José was familiar with stories of the wrongs the so-called courts inflicted upon tenants and the men that tilled the farms. It was miserable business for any child to master, if he was to make his way through life as anything but a gloomy misanthrope. Yet such things for his people made the world into which he had come. Doubtless much may be said to excuse the System the Spaniards maintained in the Philippines: they had inherited it, they had not the skill nor the inspiration to better it, and the like extenuations; when all is said, it remains but hideously stupid and cruel. In the beginning it was medievalism, neither better nor worse than was to be found in the sixteenth century in the most of Europe. Planted upon the other side of the globe as if upon another planet, it missed all the vivifying and enlightening influences that drew Europe out of the slough. The Philippines stuck as they were; Europe lumbered ahead. In all the world one could not find another such phenomenon, the sixteenth century cold-storaged for the instruction of the nineteenth. Whosoever might wish to observe in action the political and social ideas of Philip the Second needed but to journey to the Philippines.

Almost nothing had changed there. In Europe ideas had dawned of a free press, free speech, general education, the ballot-box, parliamentary government, the rights of the individual, the immaculate nature of justice, the determining of legal causes by unimpeachable processes, the gradual eclipse of the monarchical conception of society, the passing of the barony. Not one of these had come near the Philippines. Government there was the autocracy of a privileged class, tempered slightly by occasional revolutions, unlimited and unrestrained by any other consideration, and carried on chiefly for personal aggrandizement.

Instead of freedom of publication, the censor sat upon an impregnable throne and scrutinized not merely every word to be printed in every journal but every book that was imported, even in a traveler’s hand-baggage. Instead of free speech, the natives might not even petition of their grievances. Instead of general education, the masses were of a purpose kept in ignorance. Instead of justice, they must lead their lives without other protection than they could win by a feigned humility beneath the arbitrary power of their rulers.

It was in such surroundings that this boy came into his consciousness. He had a mind receptive and powerful. By no possibility could these impressions fail to be reflected in his thinkings and then in his life. Other youths the same environment drove into sullen apathy, racial fatalism, or a life fed with always disappointed hopes of revenge. This boy they drew along a path of strange adventures and almost unprecedented achievement to a place among the great men of all times.

But, before the labors and good deeds of the missionary priests, scoffing falls silent. The soldier slew and destroyed; the priest planted schools, spread knowledge, bettered conditions. He did not even wait for the soldier to break a way or to indicate security, but plunged ahead of the armies into the wilderness where he knew he was likely to leave his bones.

Whether when all is said the general balance-sheet of the Spanish occupation shows more net advantages or disadvantages for the Filipino can be argued plausibly either way. In such a welter of conflicting testimonies the fair-minded will be slow to judge. We shall have to deal again with the question when we come to see how in his mature years José Rizal reacted to it and how his analyses disposed of the commonest of the Spanish claims. Considering it here in its due historic place, we may first remind ourselves that with all her faults Spain had at least one great virtue. She pretended no altruism. On a sordid impulse she took the Islands; she kept them merely as goods.

“Those that are wont to depreciate civilization and material development to the point of being inexact,” he says, “cite the voyage of Magellan as an enterprise motived only by religious ideals and by sincerest and purest charity. They misrepresent or forget two incontestible facts. First, the voyage of Magellan was proposed to and accepted by the King of Spain, was approved by his ministers and was carried out by Magellan and his companions for the mercantile purpose of discovering, by sailing westward, a route to the Moluccas and thus wresting from the hands of Portugal the rich commerce that pertained to those, the Spice Islands. This and nothing else was the origin, inspiration and object of that famous expedition. Second, such a purpose could be realized precisely because the Spaniards had achieved a material development that inspired the enterprise and made it possible.”

But because the natives writhed under the crude and savage oppression that walked with this, we are not to suppose the Spaniards they hated were all bad men. Goodness and badness hardly enter into the matter. There came to the Philippines in these 325 years many a governor-general with a worthy inspiration to overturn the tables of the money-changers and bring in righteousness and justice. It appears that what was going on in the Philippines was not always ignored at home, and many a private citizen of good character started out to support a reforming governor-general. The significant fact is that all these efforts had one end. Nothing was ever changed. The best of the governor-generals fell impotent against the same menacing wall of System. Securely it had been based upon favoring conditions; it had grown under generations of greedy maladministration; it extended to every part of the Archipelago where Spain had authority; and it was buttressed by the power that in all times has proved the most difficult foe to the freedom and progress of the masses. For such is the power of accumulated profits to breed more power to make more profits and still more power. Here was indeed the appetite that grows by what it feeds on. The invisible government had swallowed the visible.

Nevertheless, for a long time, nothing is to be subtracted from the work of the fathers of the church. A noble zeal animated them; often they added to it a fine tact, much practical wisdom, unlimited capacity for self-denial, and even self-immolation. Years went by; the missionary era came to an end; there was no longer the splendor of the apostolic adventure into the jungle. A different spirit began to possess a part of the clergy; not all of it, but a part. Marvelously rich the country was that Spain had annexed in this fashion; hardly anywhere else had nature bestowed a more fertile soil with a more pleasing climate. For two hundred years the Government at Madrid, with an excess of stupidity, restrained the natural development of this Eden by narrowly limiting its trade. Only to Mexico and only by means of one galleon a year could the struggling colony export its products; a process of strangulation into which some bugaboo of competition had harried the merchants of Barcelona and so the poor foolish Government. After 1815, as liberalism and the beneficent results of the French Revolution began to make their belated appearance in Spain, these restrictions were cautiously relaxed, and at once the value of Philippine lands began to increase.

Thus the monastic orders had become the System. Accumulated wealth had wrought upon them the effects it ever achieves everywhere. Originally they had come to the Philippines with a pure notion of doing good; now they were caught in the soiled entanglements of gain. Through all the sequel a gap widened between the four orders and the rest of the church. Other clergy, notably the native priests, continued to serve, according to their lights, the professed objects of religion; the four orders were four great corporations, indurated with profits, playing the callous landlord, extorting rents, harassing tenants, extending their operations, and with every new peso of their hoards strengthening their influence upon Malacañan, the seat of the administration. So works the law that inevitably attends upon accretion. Gradually they dispossessed the military, official, and merchant castes that at first had been all in all. Such potency as in other countries belongs to banks or great industrial companies lay now in their hands. Whatsoever they wished, that, by one means or another, they won. It is not humanly possible that under such conditions men should not deteriorate; the men that sway so gross a rule, the men upon whom it is swayed.

It is now reasonably certain that most of these claims were without merit, but unlimited power had produced among the orders the effect it has had in all ages and climes upon the men that have possessed it. Over a certain genus of temperament the evil spell seems too great to be abridged by religion or by anything else. Nothing in the so-called civilizing adventures of Europe upon the fringes of the earth has been more clearly proved than that the white man, removed from the restraining influence of home and his neighbors and clothed with irresponsible power over people whom he deems inferior, is capable of reversion to an astonishing tyranny. The records of the Congo, of Dr. Peters in South Africa, of the Germans in the South Seas, are easy illustrations on a large scale of what happened here in little.

It has been the huge blunder of Europeans dealing with the Malay to mistake his patience for weakness and his silence for acquiescence. Aliens imposing themselves by force upon a remote people of another color have seldom been at pains to pick up the keys to the psychology of the governed. Great is the misery that would have been avoided for the dark-skinned children of earth by the use of this simple process, and nowhere was it simpler than in the Philippines.

All these influences and causes were at work to make trouble. Partly by their own excesses, partly by becoming the symbols and visualized representatives of the whole foreign domination, with all its intolerable wrongs and oppressions, the friars were now the objects of a deathless hatred. Hardly were the landlords of old more abhorred by the Irish peasantry.

Going over these records now, no one can fail to see that the uprisings were progressive; however lamely inaugurated, poorly armed, fallaciously led, each was of an aspect more serious than its predecessor. Any Spaniard with the least skill in reading human history could have foretold the result. As education spread, as mankind elsewhere struggled more and more into comparative liberty, as the sense of injustice grew in the Filipino heart, the day would come when these people, too, would be driven to unite for the one great all-embracing, all-inspiring object of national freedom and national existence, and they would win it.