Note 12 — Chapter IV · VOICES OF PROPHECY

The theme is the gross, fat-witted tyranny that had enchained the Filipinos and the extent to which they themselves were to blame for it. Neither oppressor nor the complaisant among the oppressed was spared in those cadent pictures; here each might behold his ugly countenance faultlessly drawn. With bitter reproach he showed to his countrymen their ignorance, their sloth, their tame submission that invited more wrongs. In all human experience one observation has been invariable. It is that the force that rules with autocratic and irresponsible sway is able to bear anything else better than ridicule. The ridicule that Rizal poured upon the dominant powers in the Philippines would have stung to the quick Caracalla himself. One by one he marches them across the stage, the whip of his terrible sarcasm always on their shoulders. It is an immortal procession: the scheming, arrogant, lawless, immoral friar, drunk with power and greed; the Spanish government officer, all brute to the native, all crawling sycophant before the powerful orders; the arrogant Spanish émigré, stuffed with the ridiculous bombast of a bygone century, the émigré that has become rich in the islands at the expense of the native and now hates and despises the rounds of the ladder by which he did ascend; the native that cringes before the feet of the classes that have so unspeakably wronged him; the woman of Spain’s Island colony, “more deadly than the male”; the pretentious and all but worthless educational system; the raw excesses of the courts; the wanton cruelties of a Government conducted by expatriated savages; the tortures and pathetic helplessness of the native masses. On all this the man worked like Hogarth; he will startle and frighten you, but he will convince you on every page that this is the truth. In this misery, exactly this, dwelt the unfortunate millions that Spain misgoverned; in this terror, thus trampled upon, overawed, silenced, but not subdued. These were the people’s oppressors, lustful, cruel, rapacious, their burning eyes following every pretty woman or girl, their pockets lined with the peasants’ money, their claws reaching for more. All the scenes of the drama and all the players in it, drawn with irresistible art: the Civil Guards, the coarse instruments of this despotism; the means by which terror was capitalized; the constant temptation to revolt; the devilish work of the agents provocateurs; the sickening punishments devised for those that yielded to the wiles of such agents.12 Against this shone the native grace and charm of the Filipino woman, justly illumined, her goodness, kindness, ready and apprehensive mind, the pitfalls dug for her by the bestial oppressors of her people. You will say that all the materials are here for one of those great dramas of human life that reach down to the primeval base of first causes and of such framing this book has been made.