Note 83 — THE PHILIPPINES, 1860–1898—SOME COMMENT AND BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Marcelo H. del Pilar had taken an active part in stimulating opposition to the friar-curates, particularly in matters of local government, in his native province (Bulakan) for some years before the troubles of 1888. When the pendulum swung towards reaction, he left his family (being then a man of middle-age) and went to Spain to carry on the fight close by the center of government, support of his campaign being pledged by a committee who undertook to secure Filipino subscriptions, certain wealthy Filipinos being identified privately with the cause. Del Pilar’s writings show nothing of the poet or dreamer, as do Rizal’s; he had, in some degree, an “economic mind,” though entirely untrained in that line, and he was at the outset of the active propaganda in Spain (1889) a maturer man than Rizal. Coming straight from the problems of actual life among his people, he stated their grievances with more practical reference to direct and immediate remedies and with special reference to their economic status; while Rizal, as a student in contact with modern European life and thought, dreamed of and preached, in more general terms but on a far wider scope, the social regeneration of his people and the expansion of their political rights. Del Pilar would have made a good representative of his people in the Cortes. But Rizal was a genius, who with the touch of imagination and satire lifted the cause of the Filipinos to a place in the thought of the world, and at the same time, as poet and patriot combined, fired the enthusiasm of his own people and became their idol. And, in the course of events, it was Rizal who proved the soberer, the more mature as time went by. He was opposed to means of violence, even to the last, and the whole record bears out his protestations on this score; he still looked to the future as a dreamer-patriot, but he also looked to the present state of his people and saw that the most vital problem was the teaching them that they must raise themselves by their own efforts, must deserve a better destiny. Del Pilar, disappointed by the failure to achieve greater immediate, practical results by relying upon the progress of Liberalism in Spain, after seven years of propaganda along these lines, was starting for Hongkong or Japan, to conduct there a really revolutionary campaign, when death overtook him shortly before the Tagálog revolt in 1896. He had, apparently, lost faith in the ideals of “assimilation,” of Spanish-Filipino unity, which he had set forth in glowing phrases in 1888 and 1889. He had also, apparently, become convinced that the upper-class Filipinos, especially the most wealthy and prominent, were too lukewarm or too prone to temporize for safety’s sake, that the time had come to make the cause more distinctly one of the people as a whole. He is credited with having suggested and outlined the organization of the Katipunan, and he seems to have concluded that it was time for the Filipinos to resort to Cuba’s example and not to political petitions only.83