Chapter X · FILIPINO INDOLENCE

The Indio that had startled the Spanish colony in Manila by daring to call the Philippines “my fatherland” proved his loyalty to the country he adored by serving it with a discriminating zeal. He would have been more picturesque if he had been well galvanized by Chauvin, but less useful. His mind, though powerful, could work in only one way, which was in orderly motions. These prevented him from dwelling so much on his country’s wrongs that he forgot his country’s faults. For this reason, and because he could have no heated bearings in his mental processes, he was Filipinas’s greatest asset. In “Noli Me Tangere” he showed that he understood well the native defects (products of the System) and would spare them no more than he spared the friars. But it was for his countrymen’s good that he rebuked them, like a wise father correcting his children; and whatever might be his employments he never forgot two great vital visions, Filipinas fast bound in the prison-house and education tardily on its way to set her free.

That the world looked with some disdain upon his people, that under the spell of the Spanish pen it ignored the honorable record of Philippine culture and the stirring Philippine history, were thorns that gave his mind no rest. None knew so well as he that this misprision was rankly unjust. In the face of almost universal opinion in Europe, he knew that the Malay mind, though different, was not inferior; he knew that what it wanted was no more than the sunlight and free air. In all ways the general verdict was askew: the Filipinos were not even innately lazy, as hundreds of writers had asserted, hundreds still repeated, and doubtless other hundreds will continue to parrot for years to come. He knew that lazy people could never have made the progress the Filipino had made before the evil day of the Spanish flag. The respect he had for the latent powers of his countrymen sprang from research and not from prejudice. It was true enough, but not a truth that he could keep refrigerated in scientific abstractions. It burned and struggled in him like something fighting to get free, and he relieved himself of an intolerable protest by writing (for “La Solidaridad”) a brochure on the subject.

The predisposition exists. Why should it not?

A hot climate requires of the individual quiet and rest, just as cold invites to labor and action. For this reason the Spaniard is more indolent than the Frenchman, the Frenchman more indolent than the German. The Europeans themselves that so liberally reproach the residents of the colonies (and I am not now speaking of the Spaniards but of the Germans and English themselves), how do they live in tropical countries? Surrounded with a numerous train of servants, never going about but riding in a carriage, needing servants not only to take off their shoes for them but even to fan them! And yet they live and eat better, they work for themselves, they look for riches, they hope for a future, free and respected, while the poor colonist, the indolent colonist, is badly nourished, has no hope, toils for others, and works under force and compulsion!

Perhaps the reply to this will be that the white men are not made to stand the severity of the climate. A mistake! A man can live in any climate, if he will only adapt himself to its requirements and conditions.

What kills the Europeans in hot countries is the abuse of liquors, the attempt to live according to the nature of his own country under another sky and another sun. We inhabitants of hot countries live well in northern Europe whenever we take the precautions the people there take. Likewise Europeans can endure the torrid zone if they will but rid themselves of their prejudices.

Moreover, do we not see the active European, who has gained strength during the winter, who feels the fresh blood of spring boil in his veins, do we not see him abandon his labors during the few days of his variable summer, close his office—where the work is not, after all, violent, where, in many cases, it amounts to talking and gesticulating in the shade or near a luncheon stand—do we not see him flee to watering-places where he sits idle in the cafés or idly strolls about? What wonder then that the inhabitant of tropical countries, worn out and with his blood thinned by the continuous and excessive heat, is reduced to inaction! Who is the indolent one in the Manila offices? Is it the poor clerk who comes in at 8 in the morning and leaves at 4 in the afternoon with only his umbrella, who copies and writes and works for himself and for his chief, or is it the chief, who comes in a carriage at 10 o’clock, leaves before 12, reads his newspaper while smoking and, with his feet cocked up on a chair or a table, gossips about all his friends?

Rizal found that in regard to indolence the Philippines were like a patient with a long continued disease. The doctor attributes the failure of his medicines to the debility of the patient’s system, and the patient ascribes his debilitated condition to the doctor’s remedies. He followed his illustration by remarking that, as in the case of a desperate illness, so in the government of the Philippines, the attendants seemed to lose their heads and, instead of seeking the causes of the disease to remove them, devoted themselves to attacking the symptoms, with here blood-letting (taxation), there a plaster (forced labor), and there a sedative (trifling reform).

Yes, transfusion of blood, transfusion of blood! New life, new vitality! Yes, the new white corpuscles that you are going to inject into its veins, the new white corpuscles that were a cancer in another organism, will withstand all the depravity of the system, will withstand the blood-letting that it suffers every day, will have more stamina than all the eight million red corpuscles, will cure all the disorders, all the degeneration, all troubles in the principal organs.

Be thankful if they do not become coagulations and produce gangrene; be thankful if they do not reproduce the cancer!

He comes then to the central fact he has undertaken to establish. Here it is in the teeth of the plausible assertions of prejudice and the selfish interests that depreciate the natives:

Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic, but not a hereditary malady.

Long before the coming of the Spaniards the Malayan Filipinos had an organized and outstretching commerce, foreign as well as domestic. A Chinese writer of the thirteenth century has recorded their intimate commercial relations with China, the probity and zeal of the Filipino merchants, the great extent of the trade they carried on. They exported cotton, cloth, pearls, tortoise-shell, betel-nuts, and other commodities the making or preparing or gathering of which meant industry.

Pigafetta, a Spanish writer with Magellan, speaks of the great variety of the island products. The natives worked mines, produced and wrought in metals, made ingenious and effective weapons, wove silk into their artistic dresses, and even made false teeth of gold. Their agricultural products were of kinds not to be had without labor.

The early Spaniards reported the Filipinos to be daring and indefatigable sailors, whose fleets of merchantmen covered the waters of the Islands and made far voyages, even regularly to Siam. Filipino soldiers fought in the wars of other countries. In 1539 they took part in the wars of Sumatra, and it was their valor that overthrew there a renowned potentate, the sultan of Atchin.

Magellan’s people testified that industriously the Filipinos tilled the soil, each man having his own field. It was a wealthy country: food-stuffs were abundant, the natives were well fed. Legaspi’s expedition (about 1591) reported again on their large variety of products, including manufactures of iron, porcelain and cloth. Nowhere was to be noted poverty or savagery; business had attained to an excellent growth. The natives knew something about the rest of the world; there were even among them, before a Spanish ship had ever anchored in Philippine waters, men that knew the Spanish language, having no doubt acquired it in their travels. When Cebu, a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants, was burned with all its food-supplies, its people did not suffer hunger, because the surrounding country quickly and intelligently organized to meet the emergency with abundant relief.

He cites de Morga to show that indolence came upon the Filipinos after the Spanish domination and was not conspicuous before that time. De Morga’s seven years as lieutenant-governor of Manila should have instructed him about this, when he says that the natives under the Spaniards lost some of the trades in which they had been most successful. They had even forgotten much about farming, the raising of poultry, of live stock, of cotton, about the weaving of cloth as they used to weave it in their paganism and for a time after their country had been conquered.

What, then, brought them down from their normal standards of activity and enterprise?

A fatal combination of causes, he finds.

Of course, it was the young, the hardy, the capable, the industrious that went by this route to further the cold schemes of Spanish ambition.

Under such a drain faded the moral and material resources of the people.

Second, we are to remember the ravages of the pirates. Before the days of Magellan these audacious plunderers had with avidity pursued their calling in Philippine waters, but what is not generally known is that their activities greatly increased under the Spanish domination. The Spaniards encouraged the pirates, not to prey upon Spanish settlements, but to terrorize remote populations, to make them amenable to Spanish rule, in some instances to disclose what weapons the natives had that these might be snatched from them, and sometimes merely to be rid of objectionable communities. As the pirates did a thriving commerce in slaves, to eliminate, with their help, the undesirable was easy. De Morga says:

Rizal lays the emphasis of capitals upon this last phrase, which indeed seems powerful evidence, coming from such a source.

The pirates came every year, sometimes five times, sometimes ten, and an average visit cost the Islands more than eight hundred persons.

Gaspar de San Agustin tells of an Island near Cebu that by 1608 the pirates had almost depopulated and points to the fact that the natives had no defense.

Third, forced labor. This was a grievous matter: again and again it drove the Filipinos to revolt, but the Spaniards would learn nothing and to the last clung to a thing certain to wreck them. Its evils were first manifest in the ship-building enterprises the Spaniards undertook. They found the Filipinos among the best natural ship-builders in the world, having constructed, as before noted, some of the largest vessels then afloat. Other great vessels were planned by the Spaniards, and to get out quickly the needed timbers they compelled thousands of natives to work without pay and to provide their own food; a viler than ordinary form of slavery. To get out the masts for one galleon, six thousand natives were employed for three months, finding their own subsistence. Trees large enough to furnish these masts grew only in the interior; the labor of moving them through jungle and over mountains was enormous. Fernando de los Rios Coronel says that “the surrounding country had to be depopulated” in the ship-building work and that the natives furnished the timbers “with immense labor, damage, and cost to themselves.” San Agustin says that “the continual labor of cutting timber for his Majesty’s shipyards” was a great cause of the decline in population because it hindered people “from cultivating the very fertile plain they have.”

The fields once cleared ceased to be cultivated; the towns once flourishing lost population and trade. The Filipino was launched on a backward career. Because,

Fifth, there was the psychological or spiritual fruitage of all this lethargy.

Worse than all the others and the culminating cause, this was. The Filipino’s spirit sank under the alien yoke. It appears that he no longer cared; what was there to care for? Spanish polity offered him in exchange for his lost liberty here only the prospect of salvation in another life. The bargain was not stimulating. Salvation depended in no degree upon terrestrial industry; the idle were saved equally with the active. We think, besides, that a racial spring was touched too fine to be suspected by the trampling soldiers that Spain sent over to walk upon these bowed necks. The Malay responds to kindness; under blows, compulsion, or superior brute force he retires within himself into a sullen apathy. This now fell upon the native wherever the Spanish flag waved and to the extent that the Spanish methods prevailed. To go beyond Rizal’s able treatise and to record what even he could not have expected, the Americans, when their day came, noted with astonishment that the Filipinos of the South were more active, industrious, and resilient than their brothers in the North, although this was to reverse the usual order of nature. Some Americans ascribed the Southerner’s advantage to his religion and credited to Mohammedanism a virtue it hardly possessed. The real explanation, which abundantly confirms Rizal’s thesis, is that the Southerner had never gone under the lethal yoke of the Spanish conception of society.

De San Agustin gives these practices as the reason why the gold-mines of Panay, once “very rich,” had ceased to be worked; the natives preferred to live in poverty rather than to work under the conditions imposed upon them. Exploitation was the business of the Spaniard (from the governor down), and the only business that seems to have been attended to with diligence. To get rich quickly and to get home to spend the money was the real inspiration, an impulse not unknown in other parts of the earth where with his trusty rifle the white man has imposed his peculiar civilization upon his dark-skinned brother. In some places the dark brother under these ministrations lies down and dies; in the Philippines he ceased to work except under the lash or when he was fomenting an insurrection. Reviewing these facts the superior wisdom supposed to lurk mysteriously under the white skin seems to require much explanation.

The whole story deserves the attention of mankind; the debacle and its causes. It is a simulacrum of exploitation and exploitation’s fatal results.

To do business in the Philippines, as we understand business, was almost impossible, year of grace 1890, so numerous were the obstacles, documents, papers, signatures, tangles of red tape to be unwound, officers to be bribed. If there is no commerce, how can there be industry? If there is no industry what shall the masses of people do but idle? “The most commercial and most industrious countries have been the freest,” says Rizal; “France, England, and the United States prove this. Hong-Kong, while it is not worth the most insignificant of the Philippines, has more commercial movement than all these Islands together because it is free and well governed.”

The Spanish aristocrats in the Islands contributed to the general impulse to indolence. They posed as superior persons and exalted models, yet they did no work and despised all that labored. The vice of gambling, which the Spaniards deliberately encouraged in the natives, added to the general stagnation; not only cock-fighting (officially protected and a source of government revenue) but other gaming. It is a passion to which the Malay blood seems peculiarly susceptible, as the Chinese are to opium-smoking. Under government encouragement gambling became almost a native obsession wherever the Spanish rule was strongest. Having taught them to gamble, the Spaniards denounced the Filipinos as a race of gamblers; but this was again a species of injustice of which the Spaniard had no monopoly. It is easy to instance white communities that refuse to allow colored men to perform any but menial offices and then despise them as a race of menials. As to this practice in the United States of America, for example, reference may profitably be had to the pointed comments of Mr. George Bernard Shaw.

It would not even seek a market for the insular products.

“Add to this lack of material inducement,” says Rizal, “the absence of moral stimulus, and you will see how he who is not indolent in that country must needs be a madman or at least a fool.”

The injustice with which the native was treated everywhere, merely because of his birth and his color, atrophied his energies; such were the windings and curlings of the vile snake of racial antipathy. Let the Filipino with whatsoever effort achieve whatsoever prize in fair competition with a white man, and the wreath he had won by worth would be snatched from him by trickery or plain theft. Why, then, should he strive?

But still worse were the evils of what was called by way of euphony the educational system maintained under this dispensation.

Finally there was the paralysis laid upon the Filipino because he was divested of the infinite sustaining and guiding strength of a national sentiment.

Thus of the possible contribution of these people the world was deprived because a grotesquely unintelligent tyranny stifled the expression of their natural forces. It is the office of absolutism to try to make men think alike. This absolutism tried to keep them from thinking at all.

Once the Filipino was active, alert, industrious, prosperous. Now he had become inert, often inept, indifferent, poor. For these transformations, behold here the reasons. They are enough.

With more than one purpose we have dwelt at length upon this remarkable treatise. It shows Rizal’s mind, how clear and strong, and his thinking, how firm and sure. It shows how logically he arranged his ideas to a climax, a faculty that marks all his writings. It shows how well based upon reading and reason, no less than upon observation, was his faith in the Filipino people. Not from mere instinct nor from racial prejudice, he felt that here was a great and suppressed power. We dwell upon it also because it offers an unequaled picture of the Philippines after three hundred years of alien rule and indicates the appalling boundaries of the task that he had single-handed undertaken. Courage is the quality that mankind has elected most to honor. Surely the courage of battle-fields is little compared with the supreme courage of a man that looking level-eyed upon such terrific difficulties as are outlined here sets himself to the one business of combating and overcoming them.

One other reflection pertains to this chapter, profoundly suggestive to any mind that will give heed to it. After all these generations of a system so elaborately designed to annihilate their spirits and chloroform their energies, the Malays of the Islands were still unerased. A few years after Rizal’s so able plea for them had been written they were in arms beating back the best troops of the oppressor. Thirty years later, under changed auspices, they were giving to the world a conspicuous example of intelligent and successful self-government. No sooner was applied to them the stimulus of a measure of freedom than the old reproach of indolence began to fail.

In thirty years they had demonstrated the truth of all this man had said of them. Sympathetic insight proved to be better than the solemn platitudes of wise men reasoning backward. As you see the Filipino now, said the wise men, so he must be always. Indolence—it is of the race and incurable! With a dash of his pen Rizal sent all this seven ways. He knew the heart of Filipinas; the wise men knew only what had been written by somebody who had read what somebody else had deduced about her.