Note 15 — Chapter VII · AGAIN IN THE PHILIPPINES

When we recognize this basis, which shows plainly enough in his writings,15 his attitude toward Spain, otherwise mysterious or contradictory, is consistent enough to suit any taste. He wished Spain to grant reforms, to adopt a system of education that would meet some, at least, of the urgent needs of the people, to unchain the press, to remake the grotesque courts, to recognize the people of the Islands as human beings, and to give them something to live for. The effect of these changes, he well knew, would be to release the Filipino mind, and when that should be set free the result could be only one thing. It was darkness and ignorance that enabled Spain to rule; the symbols of all her power were of the night. But he thought the reforms that would allow the Filipino to stand upright before the world Spain itself must grant; to try to wrest them from her, gun in hand, would be to miss them altogether. Spain must grant them. True, she would thereby be lighting her own eventual exit from the Islands, but he was able to make himself believe (for a time) that the Spanish Government could be persuaded, or led by events, to do this thing. This was a lovely dream and possible only to one of faith larger than the average man’s in the innate strength of a cause just and reasonable. It was not really in him inconsistent that all this time he was under no illusion about the bespattered record and reactionary tendencies of the controlling power in Spain; what he thought, apparently, was that by bringing home to that power a sense of the world’s contempt and urging the need of sweeping reforms such agitation would generate its own compulsive and undeniable force. He is not the only man in history in whom the sense of justice was so strong it obscured its total want in others.