Note 81 — THE PHILIPPINES, 1860–1898—SOME COMMENT AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

The Propagandists.—A full history of the Filipino Propaganda would list a large number of names, both of members of the Filipino colonies abroad and of secret agitators and wealthy contributors at home. But the story must be developed from the various sources to be cited, and we are concerned here with those who figured most actively by their writings. Of these, Marcelo H. del Pilar and José Rizal were altogether the most notable, their prominence indeed leading to the formation of factions about them and the display of those personal jealousies which wreck or threaten to wreck every Filipino movement.81 It is significant that the propagandists coming to the front in the eighties were, one may say, genuine “sons of the people” though associated with them were others who were sons of the half-caste aristocracy. It is significant also, that, though these two leaders Del Pilar and Rizal, came from Bulakan and Laguna provinces respectively, the heart of the more advanced communities of Tagálogs around Manila, yet the islands as a whole were beginning to be represented in the propaganda, notably by the Lunas, from Ilokos, and Graciano Lopez Jaena, a Bisayan. The latter started the first Filipino periodical of consequence, La Solidaridad, and published eighteen numbers of it at Barcelona up to October 31, 1889, when Del Pilar took charge of it, transferred it to Madrid and edited it there as a fortnightly till 1895. It was face to face with La Política de España en Filipinas from 1891, and, as the latter is the chief source for the pro-friar and anti-liberal side of the controversy, so La Solidaridad, which circulated among the educated Filipinos in many parts of the archipelago despite the censorship, is the chief source for the writings of the propagandists.82