A futile insurrection had been followed by terrible reprisals and a hardening everywhere of the articulated tyranny, terrorism, and espionage with which the Government ruled. Such from the beginning had been its practice in the long and uninspiring record of the Spanish occupation of the Philippines: sore oppression leading to inevitable revolt and then savage vengeance that sowed the seed of more revolt. Now, as always in that delirious procedure, innocent natives were swept to punishment indiscriminately with the guilty; men that had taken part in the uprising and men that had never heard of it. With the rest of these victims of insensate rage, marched, on the morning of February 28, 1872, three beloved priests and servants of God, of whose complicity in the plot was never a shred of ponderable evidence. One of them, lifting up his voice in prayer for his assassins as he went along, was eighty-five years old. Not his years nor his gray hairs nor those good works that had brought him honor1 availed to save Father [4]Mariano Gomez from the most ignominious of deaths. With Fathers Burgos and Zamora, he was garroted on Bagumbayan Field, fronting the sea at Manila; a place consecrated in the Filipino mind to memories terrible and yet grand. Native poets and orators that have seen there every blade of grass springing from the blood of heroes are hardly over-imaginative. On that spot to the same cause the same dull power sacrificed victim after victim, ending with the nation’s greatest and best.

But now, in 1872, forgotten medieval brutalities seemed to be brought back to darken life in a region the sunniest and of right the most cheerful. Prisoners were tortured with instruments the world believed to exist only in museums; tortured with thumb-screws, great pincers, and machines of devilish ingenuity that produced and reiterated the agonies of drowning.2 The whip was busy in the hands of men hired for their expert knowledge of how it could be used to yield the largest fruition of pain; many a wretched Filipino that had in his heart no more of disloyalty than you or I was flogged naked in the presence of officers in whose ears his shrieks seemed to sound like music. Hysteria and fear in the minds of the dominant class were added to the racial hatred always festering there. Under the empire of this triad of the beast, men that had worn the gloss of the almost classic society of Madrid became in the Philippines no better than hooting devils.

To the typical haughty Spaniard there the Filipino was an Indio, an inferior creature designed to render [5]service to the white man’s needs and to receive the white man’s blows. Each successive generation of rulers had learned at least once, and always with astonishment and disgust, that the lowly Indio was capable of combinations and resistances that sometimes shook the walls of Malacañan itself and started painful visions of massacres and wild fleeings. From the beginning to the end of the story, it was a discovery that first exiled reason and then multiplied work to the executioner. Yet the knowledge gained in this way by one generation never seemed to enlighten the next: each revolt created in its turn the same astonishment, as if for the first time in human experience wronged men had turned against their wrongers. Each generation, therefore, had the same obtuse notion of violent repression as the only answer to the natives’ complaint, a concept that each left with additions of its own to its successor. Hence the complex savageries of 1872, which might be regarded as in a way accretionary; not a soul in the governing class seeming to suspect, despite all this rich experience, that the essence of the slayings was no better than one revenge making ready for another.

In those evil days millions of Filipinos rendered to the dominant tyranny what it compelled them to render and kept alive in their proud hearts the longing for justice, the love of their country, and a respect for their race. One of these, Francisco Rizal Mercado, was then living in Calamba, a little town on the west shore of the great lake of Laguna de Bay. Manila was twenty-five miles to the northward; the tall mountains of Luzon, Mount Makiling and others, [6]gloomed or shone south and west; the plains around were fertile and well cultivated; it was a pleasant and profitable region. Francisco Mercado was of some substance and a character so excellent that all the country-side knew and honored him; a sturdy, resolute, reasoning man, wide-eyed, square-headed. He had prospered by diligence and deserving; his large two-storied dwelling was the best in Calamba. Overawing guns and the military checked his spirit but never daunted it. In his house the Government’s key-hole listeners and hired porch-climbers were defied, and no one hesitated to discuss the evils that had befallen the land.

One of the most detested instruments of the Spanish supremacy was a body of troops called the Civil Guard,3 a kind of military police charged with ferreting out disloyalty and the signs of revolt. In the strained relations between Government and governed that followed the cruelties of 1872, it may be imagined how zestfully the Civil Guards pursued their peculiar calling. Domiciliary visits were their specialty, sudden and without warrant; a species of terrorism not then practised anywhere in Europe outside of Russia and Turkey. A squad of these visitors was in the habit of watching Calamba and the neighboring town of Biñan, and when it was Calamba that they were favoring with their attention, the lieutenant commanding quartered himself and his horse upon the Mercados, where he could find the best fare and the best fodder in town. [7]

The crops in 1871 had not been good in that region. Mr. Mercado’s store of fodder diminished until he had barely enough to supply his own live stock. When next the lieutenant came the situation was explained to him, and with every politeness he was asked to bait his horse elsewhere.

He chose to take the request as an affront. Reciprocal hatreds were thick and rife around him; he conceived that in some way his honor as a Spaniard had been impaired by a “miserable Indio,” and he swore revenge.4

About the same time the unfortunate Mercado managed to offend another Spaniard still more powerful. For all such visitors to Calamba he kept a kind of gratuitous hotel; hospitality was and is a sacred and inviolable rite among his people. The judge of the local district, conferring upon the Mercados thus the honor of his uninvited presence, fancied that his reception lacked something of cordiality and ceremony. As to this, he may have been right; in the hearts of most intelligent Filipinos of those days the feelings toward official Spaniards were not likely to be exuberantly warm. The judge, like the lieutenant before him, deemed his Spanish honor to have suffered and went away with a similar appetite for vengeance, a lust to which the example of their Government richly incited them.

For judge and lieutenant the opportunity came more quickly than they could have hoped. At this neighboring town of Biñan lived José Alberto Realonda (formerly Alonzo), a half-brother of Mrs. Mercado. [8]He was deservedly of mark in his province; his father had been an engineer whose abilities were recognized by Spain in an order of knighthood that the son inherited, an order equivalent to a baronetcy in England; José Alberto himself had been at school in Calcutta, spoke English well, and had traveled widely. It was at his home in Biñan that Sir John Bowring,5 the English linguist and traveler, had been entertained; and Bowring had put into his book on the Philippines a graceful paragraph about his host and entertainment, the good taste with which the Realonda house was furnished, the excellent cooking set before its guests.

Don José Alberto had married young, and, as the event showed, not wisely. His wife was his cousin. They quarreled and separated, and the wife seems to have set afoot wild and fantastic stories, injurious to her husband. Divorces were difficult in the Philippines.

From material no better than these the lieutenant now manufactured against Mrs. Mercado and her brother a charge of conspiracy to murder Mrs. Realonda. It was a preposterous tale, but to such tales the institutions that, in those parts, by a figure of speech, were called courts of justice were in the habit of lending a ready ear if thereby they served any end of the dominant power or gratified a powerful Spaniard. In probably no other corner of the world with a pretense to Christian civilization was the judicial system so farcical; the next developments were typical of the conditions under which seven million people [9]dwelt at the mercy of perjurers, adventurers, and thieves. With joy the incensed judge received the accusation and ordered Mrs. Mercado to be arrested and imprisoned in the provincial jail.

This, although but left-handed and imperfect revenge, accorded with the ideas and practices of the governing class. The grievances of the judge and the lieutenant, if they had any, were against Mr. Mercado; they evened the score by striking not at him but at his wife. Incomprehensible or almost insane as this will seem to a healthier sense of honor, it was a custom of which we shall find other and more painful instances. Suppose the governing class, or a member of it, to believe the much cherished supremacy of the white race to demand that an example be made of an offending native. No nice discrimination was deemed necessary. If the offender was not available, retribution could still be inflicted upon the offender’s wife, or upon his children or even upon his brother-in-law or his great aunt, if he had no children, or if his wife was not within striking distance. In fairness to the Spaniards we are to note that this singular reversion was not a product of nationality but of geography; many a man defended vicarious vengeance in the Philippines that would have scorned it in Spain, so wonderful are the moral idiocies into which imperialism drives us.

Mrs. Mercado was ordered from her home to the prison at Santa Cruz, the provincial capital, at the other side of the lake. Ordinarily, traffic with Calamba was by steamer; but a road, rough and ill made, led along the shore. The more to taste the pleasures of [10]his revenge, the judge ordered Mrs. Mercado to be conducted by this road and on foot; that is to say, about twenty miles and in the sun.

It will later appear in this narrative that she was no ordinary woman; she came from a household that believed in liberty; she seems to have had a lofty spirit and a certain dignified self-mastery not rare among Filipino women. All about that part of the province she was known for her charities and good neighborliness. Her compatriots liked her. When, therefore, trudging along the shore road under the custody of a guard, she came at the evening of the first day to a village, she was received by its inhabitants with outpourings of sympathy and an invitation to lodge at the best house in the place instead of the village lockup as the judge had thoughtfully intended. She accepted the invitation; but with insatiable malice he had followed to see how his orders were obeyed. When he found the prisoner well bestowed instead of undergoing the miseries of the filthy prison, a madness of rage came upon him. He broke down the door of the house where his victim was sheltered, and, judge as he was, hesitated not to assault with his cane both the unlucky guard that had shown her lenity and the owner of the house that had received her.6

He was as merciful as the judicial system he adorned; as intelligent and as well ordered. One of the least of its offenses was that this same hedge-row magistrate, at whose order she had been arrested to gratify his spite, was also to be the prosecuting attorney, [11]when she should be brought to trial, and the judge before whom her fate should be decided. Mr. Mercado, meanwhile, had been putting forth every peaceful means to rescue his wife from this disaster. He had secured an attorney, who now presented a petition that her case should not be allowed to come before a judge so manifestly prejudiced against her. While Mrs. Mercado lay in jail, this appeal went before the supreme court, which sustained it and ordered the prisoner’s release. Before she could be set free the unjust judge brought a new charge against her, that her petition alleging prejudice on his part constituted contempt of court.

On this she continued to be a prisoner until another appeal could be made to the supreme assize. When it had been reached and argued, Dogberry wisdom seated upon this august bench upheld the court below and found that such a petition was indeed contempt. How, that being the case, a prisoner could ever escape from a court or judge manifestly hostile to her, these eminent authorities did not suggest. But as Mrs. Mercado had already been in jail much longer than the term of the sentence passed upon her for contempt, they ordered her liberation.

It was now to be supposed that the end of this business had been reached, vengeance had been satisfied, the crime of not feeding the lieutenant’s horse had been atoned for, and the woman might return to her family. Not in the Philippines, certainly. Before the prison doors could open, a new charge was brought against her. [12]

She was alleged by the judge-prosecutor-tribunal to have committed theft.7

Here is an incident luminous upon the society of that day and region; we had better pursue it. All this time, Mrs. Mercado’s half-brother, José Alberto, the engineer, whose unfortunate marriage had wrought so much of trouble, had been a prisoner in the same jail, similarly beset with accusing inventions. He had a moderate fortune; therefore the story went around that he had much money concealed about him. The scent of the peso was ever strong in the nostrils of the jail officials and court attendants. When the gold could not be found in José Alberto’s cell, the searchers for it reasonably concluded that the half-sister must have taken it, possibly by means of an astral presence or through some form of witchcraft.

For this rank imagining there was even less of basis than there had been for the conspiracy charge; yet it was months in falling apart. When it had dissolved in its own absurdity another quite as unfounded took its place. Justice à la espagnole—in the Philippines. Two years passed in these futilities. It was apparently the purpose of the authorities to keep their helpless victim in prison the rest of her life.

From such a fate she was now rescued by another incident not less than her imprisonment typical of misgovernment under which the country groaned. The governor-general of all the Philippines, representative in his single person of the might and majesty of Spain, [13]came to Calamba on a tour. Among the entertainments offered in his honor was dancing by children. One of the little girls by her grace and beauty particularly won the governor-general’s applause. He asked her what he could do for her. She said he could release her mother from prison. She was Mrs. Mercado’s daughter, and by this detour and purified recrudescence of Salome and Herod was Mrs. Mercado snatched at last from her persecutors and got again to her home.8

It was a populous household that welcomed her return; she had already borne eleven children to her husband, rearing them with an old-fashioned and sedulous care not yet out of vogue in the Philippines. Immigration had much affected the original Island strains; on both sides the family was of mixed descent. One of Mr. Mercado’s ancestors was Lam-co, a Chinaman of means and character that came to the Islands in the latter part of the seventeenth century. He settled at Biñan, was converted to Christianity, and was baptized in 1697, taking the name of Domingo. At Biñan he married the daughter of another Chinaman, whose wife was a mestiza, or half-caste Filipino. From this time on Chinese blood was mixed with Malay9 until in 1847 Francisco Mercado, descendant of Lam-co, married Teodora Alonzo, a Filipino lady of a distinguished family, partly Chinese in ancestry, and came to live at Calamba. It was her lot, twenty-five [14]years later, to be the victim of the strange story of persecution and villainy here related.

The seventh of her children, José, was then eleven years old and a student in a preparatory school in Manila. Upon his mind the reports that came to him of the successive steps in her degradation stamped themselves as if in iron. Even when he had become a mature man, famous, accomplished, absorbed in studies and achievements at the other side of the busy world, the thought of that great wrong haunted and goaded him. Yet it had been no novelty, even in his short experience; it had been no more than a focus, upon the one household he knew best, of wrongs with which other households were familiar and of which he had often heard. All his conscious days he had been aware, and ever better aware, of the cold, black, implacable despotism that had yoked and now drove and lashed his people. He knew well the hateful excesses of the Civil Guard, the license and arrogance of the governing class, the extortion and thefts, the infinite scorn in which the subject race was held, the intolerable parody of justice, the bitter jest of the code and the court-room, the flogging of men, the violating of women, the protected murderers, the rapists that went untouched and unabashed. When he was only five years old he used to sit on the shore of that beautiful green lake, the Laguna de Bay, and look across it and wonder if the people that lived on the other side were as wretched as the people of Calamba, whether they were beaten, kicked and trodden upon, whether they dwelt in the same terror of the Civil Guards and [15]the flogging-rods.10 He said years afterward that even then he had a distinct conviction that these things were not necessary and that there must be some region on the earth where its children could be happy and enjoy the sunshine, the flowers, and the beautiful things that seemed made for their delight.

Many of the troubles that fell upon his neighbors, or were laid upon them by the existing System, were troubles about land; and before ever the malicious lieutenant had begun his revenges upon the family, young José was familiar with stories of the wrongs the so-called courts inflicted upon tenants and the men that tilled the farms. It was miserable business for any child to master, if he was to make his way through life as anything but a gloomy misanthrope. Yet such things for his people made the world into which he had come. Doubtless much may be said to excuse the System the Spaniards maintained in the Philippines: they had inherited it, they had not the skill nor the inspiration to better it, and the like extenuations; when all is said, it remains but hideously stupid and cruel. In the beginning it was medievalism, neither better nor worse than was to be found in the sixteenth century in the most of Europe. Planted upon the other side of the globe as if upon another planet, it missed all the vivifying and enlightening influences that drew Europe out of the slough. The Philippines stuck as they were; Europe lumbered ahead. In all the world one could not find another such phenomenon, the sixteenth century cold-storaged for the instruction [16]of the nineteenth. Whosoever might wish to observe in action the political and social ideas of Philip the Second needed but to journey to the Philippines.

Almost nothing had changed there. In Europe ideas had dawned of a free press, free speech, general education, the ballot-box, parliamentary government, the rights of the individual, the immaculate nature of justice, the determining of legal causes by unimpeachable processes, the gradual eclipse of the monarchical conception of society, the passing of the barony. Not one of these had come near the Philippines. Government there was the autocracy of a privileged class, tempered slightly by occasional revolutions, unlimited and unrestrained by any other consideration, and carried on chiefly for personal aggrandizement.

Instead of freedom of publication, the censor sat upon an impregnable throne and scrutinized not merely every word to be printed in every journal but every book that was imported, even in a traveler’s hand-baggage. Instead of free speech, the natives might not even petition of their grievances. Instead of general education, the masses were of a purpose kept in ignorance. Instead of justice, they must lead their lives without other protection than they could win by a feigned humility beneath the arbitrary power of their rulers.

It was in such surroundings that this boy came into his consciousness. He had a mind receptive and powerful. By no possibility could these impressions fail to be reflected in his thinkings and then in his life. Other youths the same environment drove into sullen apathy, racial fatalism, or a life fed with always disappointed [17]hopes of revenge. This boy they drew along a path of strange adventures and almost unprecedented achievement to a place among the great men of all times.

The roots of this story begin three centuries before the Mercado family at Calamba was caught up in its heartbreaking intrigues. After what was called the “discovery” of the Philippines by Magellan, March 16, 1521, Spain laid claim to the entire Archipelago, more than two thousand sizable Islands.11 Portugal disputed this, neither having the slightest just basis for its claim, until 1529, when the pope settled the quarrel out of hand and gave the Philippines to Spain. In 1570 the taking by a Spanish expedition of the capital city of Manila was assumed to have put the physical seal upon this deed of gift, and Spain proceeded to annex and to govern such of the Islands as she could by persuasion or beating induce to accept her sovereignty. From the first the tenancy was incongruous and precarious; Europe of the Middle Ages laid upon a civilization more ancient, wholly alien, and traditionally well rooted. What followed is a tangle of inconsistencies. On the administrative side, Spain with musket-balls shot order and obedience into the natives; from first to last the rulers had but the one broad policy, which was to overawe the people they ruled and to subjugate them with fear. On the cultural side the account was at first wholly different. That they might give to these same natives the blessings of Christianity and the gospel of peace, the heroic Spanish missionary priests endured trials compared [18]with which most martyrdoms seemed easy. Thus in a naïve way, rather startling now to contemplate, perdition and paradise were to be glimpsed side by side, brute force marched with an apostolic love, and bullets were distributed with the Bible.

But, before the labors and good deeds of the missionary priests, scoffing falls silent. The soldier slew and destroyed; the priest planted schools, spread knowledge, bettered conditions. He did not even wait for the soldier to break a way or to indicate security, but plunged ahead of the armies into the wilderness where he knew he was likely to leave his bones.

Whether when all is said the general balance-sheet of the Spanish occupation shows more net advantages or disadvantages for the Filipino can be argued plausibly either way. In such a welter of conflicting testimonies the fair-minded will be slow to judge. We shall have to deal again with the question when we come to see how in his mature years José Rizal reacted to it and how his analyses disposed of the commonest of the Spanish claims. Considering it here in its due historic place, we may first remind ourselves that with all her faults Spain had at least one great virtue. She pretended no altruism. On a sordid impulse she took the Islands; she kept them merely as goods.

As to this debated point the findings of Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera seem clear.12

“Those that are wont to depreciate civilization and material development to the point of being inexact,” he says, “cite the voyage of Magellan as an enterprise [19]motived only by religious ideals and by sincerest and purest charity. They misrepresent or forget two incontestible facts. First, the voyage of Magellan was proposed to and accepted by the King of Spain, was approved by his ministers and was carried out by Magellan and his companions for the mercantile purpose of discovering, by sailing westward, a route to the Moluccas and thus wresting from the hands of Portugal the rich commerce that pertained to those, the Spice Islands. This and nothing else was the origin, inspiration and object of that famous expedition. Second, such a purpose could be realized precisely because the Spaniards had achieved a material development that inspired the enterprise and made it possible.”

The more honor, then, to the Spaniards, who, having in view only the purposes of a bargain, still added much to the equipment of the Islanders. They erected better buildings than the Filipinos had ever known, made better roads, introduced, with whatsoever cruelties, a better coördination, something like uniform laws, something like a welded and coherent polity; they discouraged piracy when it could no longer serve to subdue the natives; they gave money for schools, whether these were efficient or otherwise; they made some connection, however frail, between the culture of the Islands and that formerly existing in the rest of the world. Yet, aside from the labors of the missionaries, the other boons that followed their red trail are doubtful. Accepting these at the Spanish valuation, the fact still seems to protrude that Spain found an industrious population and managed to leave it indifferent [20]and indolent,13 found one style of civilization and left another.

Prejudice and racial hatreds have obscured about this one other fact that never should be overlooked. The Filipinos would not have stood still if the Spaniards had left them alone. True estimate, therefore, is to be made, not on a comparison between what they were when the Spaniards came and what they were when the Spaniards left them, but on what they probably would have made of themselves. They were no backward race; they had shown a remarkable aptitude to absorb the best of the progress around them, taking on arts, inventions, manufactures, and developing them. They made and used gunpowder before it was known in Europe; they made and used cannon of a considerable size, built better sea-going ships than the Spaniards, had developed more skilful artificers in silver and gold, and had evidently a disposition to improve methods and manners.14 In those three hundred years, supposing them to have been left to their own devices, they would never have ceased to look forward. Yet when the line comes to be drawn below the items of their progress under Spanish control and we glance across even to the most dilatory countries of Europe, we are compelled to admit that relatively the advance is small.

But because the natives writhed under the crude and savage oppression that walked with this, we are not to suppose the Spaniards they hated were all bad men. Goodness and badness hardly enter into the matter. [21]There came to the Philippines in these 325 years many a governor-general with a worthy inspiration to overturn the tables of the money-changers and bring in righteousness and justice. It appears that what was going on in the Philippines was not always ignored at home, and many a private citizen of good character started out to support a reforming governor-general. The significant fact is that all these efforts had one end. Nothing was ever changed. The best of the governor-generals fell impotent against the same menacing wall of System. Securely it had been based upon favoring conditions; it had grown under generations of greedy maladministration; it extended to every part of the Archipelago where Spain had authority; and it was buttressed by the power that in all times has proved the most difficult foe to the freedom and progress of the masses. For such is the power of accumulated profits to breed more power to make more profits and still more power. Here was indeed the appetite that grows by what it feeds on. The invisible government had swallowed the visible.

Nevertheless, for a long time, nothing is to be subtracted from the work of the fathers of the church. A noble zeal animated them; often they added to it a fine tact, much practical wisdom, unlimited capacity for self-denial, and even self-immolation. Years went by; the missionary era came to an end; there was no longer the splendor of the apostolic adventure into the jungle. A different spirit began to possess a part of the clergy; not all of it, but a part. Marvelously rich the country was that Spain had annexed in this fashion; hardly anywhere else had nature bestowed a more [22]fertile soil with a more pleasing climate. For two hundred years the Government at Madrid, with an excess of stupidity, restrained the natural development of this Eden by narrowly limiting its trade. Only to Mexico and only by means of one galleon a year could the struggling colony export its products; a process of strangulation into which some bugaboo of competition had harried the merchants of Barcelona and so the poor foolish Government. After 1815, as liberalism and the beneficent results of the French Revolution began to make their belated appearance in Spain, these restrictions were cautiously relaxed, and at once the value of Philippine lands began to increase.

Four orders of European friars15 had settled themselves in the Philippines, obtaining in the early days from the insular Government grants of estates that because of the lack of adequate surveying and for other reasons were of shadowy boundaries. As trade increased it multiplied the demand for Philippine products. Under this pressure, forests once covering great areas of rich land were cleared away by pioneers that settled upon the soil they had made tillable. In hundreds of cases the friars laid claim to such lands and demanded of the settlers possession or rents. If the settler resisted, the Civil Guard or other military force ejected him. If he sought relief in the courts he had only his heavy expenses for his pains.

Thus the monastic orders had become the System. Accumulated wealth had wrought upon them the effects [23]it ever achieves everywhere. Originally they had come to the Philippines with a pure notion of doing good; now they were caught in the soiled entanglements of gain. Through all the sequel a gap widened between the four orders and the rest of the church. Other clergy, notably the native priests, continued to serve, according to their lights, the professed objects of religion; the four orders were four great corporations, indurated with profits, playing the callous landlord, extorting rents, harassing tenants, extending their operations, and with every new peso of their hoards strengthening their influence upon Malacañan, the seat of the administration. So works the law that inevitably attends upon accretion. Gradually they dispossessed the military, official, and merchant castes that at first had been all in all. Such potency as in other countries belongs to banks or great industrial companies lay now in their hands. Whatsoever they wished, that, by one means or another, they won. It is not humanly possible that under such conditions men should not deteriorate; the men that sway so gross a rule, the men upon whom it is swayed.

It was so here. The friars of the orders became intolerable local tyrants. In the rural regions, the word of the curate, if he was of the dominant caste, outweighed the command of the provincial governor. As a rule the governor-general himself dared not in any way oppose the clerical domination; a few words lightly whispered at Madrid would be enough to make sure his recall and ruin. One of these governors that tried to assert his own authority had to [24]fight a clerical mob in his own palace, and fell dead, sword in hand, across the body of his son.16 The lesson did not need repetition; thenceforth the successors of the Governor-General Bustamante of 1719 made haste to placate a power so great and so malignant. Even the redoubtable Emiliano Weyler himself was careful and obsequious to maintain good relations with the four orders. Nay, he went to the length of supervising the ejection of settlers from the lands the friars claimed, and in at least one instance, as we shall see, accelerated the work with a battery of artillery.

It is now reasonably certain that most of these claims were without merit, but unlimited power had produced among the orders the effect it has had in all ages and climes upon the men that have possessed it. Over a certain genus of temperament the evil spell seems too great to be abridged by religion or by anything else. Nothing in the so-called civilizing adventures of Europe upon the fringes of the earth has been more clearly proved than that the white man, removed from the restraining influence of home and his neighbors and clothed with irresponsible power over people whom he deems inferior, is capable of reversion to an astonishing tyranny. The records of the Congo, of Dr. Peters in South Africa, of the Germans in the South Seas, are easy illustrations on a large scale of what happened here in little.

It has been the huge blunder of Europeans dealing with the Malay to mistake his patience for weakness and his silence for acquiescence. Aliens imposing themselves by force upon a remote people of another [25]color have seldom been at pains to pick up the keys to the psychology of the governed. Great is the misery that would have been avoided for the dark-skinned children of earth by the use of this simple process, and nowhere was it simpler than in the Philippines.

All these influences and causes were at work to make trouble. Partly by their own excesses, partly by becoming the symbols and visualized representatives of the whole foreign domination, with all its intolerable wrongs and oppressions, the friars were now the objects of a deathless hatred. Hardly were the landlords of old more abhorred by the Irish peasantry.

It was a people capable by nature of much hating as of much loving upon whom fell this bitter inheritance. One can only suppose that the average Spaniard in the Philippines stood sentinel against himself lest he should understand the people he thought were under his boot-heel. In point of fact, they were not stupid and inferior, as he always described them, but of an excellent mentality, quick apprehension, reasoning powers at least equal to his own, of a certain inheritance of culture, different, cruder, but in its way not less. Particularly they were a people in whom resentment against injustice might smolder long but only in the end to blaze into perilous fires. Three centuries of Spanish domination had not extirpated the Malayan instinct for liberty, but, judging from the climax of all this, only intensified it. Spanish officers watching with intent eyes for the least sign of revolt took from these people every discoverable weapon, even to bolos (knives) of blades longer [26]than so many inches. The better organization, discipline, equipment, and military skill that alone constituted Spanish supremacy was for ever being paraded in the eyes of the Indios. At every turn they were reminded in some way of their position, helpless, barehanded, and kept from one another by enmities the Spaniards knew well how to foster. In the face of all this sedulous care, behold in the story of their possession of the Philippines a serial of insurrection! Between 1573 and 1872, thirty-one revolts had been serious enough to leave enduring records in history.17

Going over these records now, no one can fail to see that the uprisings were progressive; however lamely inaugurated, poorly armed, fallaciously led, each was of an aspect more serious than its predecessor. Any Spaniard with the least skill in reading human history could have foretold the result. As education spread, as mankind elsewhere struggled more and more into comparative liberty, as the sense of injustice grew in the Filipino heart, the day would come when these people, too, would be driven to unite for the one great all-embracing, all-inspiring object of national freedom and national existence, and they would win it.

To this the friars and the governing class of the Philippines were now contributing by providing the immediate sting that seems always to be needed when an old and deep-lying resentment is to be goaded into outward and physical activities. The friars and the governing class were palpable; their acts of oppression [27]were daily before the people’s observation; but what they stood for as the emblems of a general condition was much more important than anything they did. Stories of men with causes just and righteous that had been ruined at the friars’ dictation in the farcical courts; stories of men and women persecuted as Mrs. Mercado had been persecuted; stories of men beaten to death, men strangled and men shot, men deported and women wronged, were brooded over in thousands of barrios.18 They but completed the tale of three hundred years of government with the iron fist. [28]

The boy that so early and by this savage tuition came to be initiated into his people’s sorrows was then chiefly remarkable for a gentle, tractable disposition and a liking for books and study. He had been born at Calamba, June 19, 1861. In his earliest childhood he seemed undersized and undervitalized; but when he was six years old there came to his father’s house his uncle Manuel, a figure of health and a resolute practitioner of open-air sports, who took José in hand and with daily exercises and rigorous living built his body to normal strength and agility. Filipinos have a natural aptitude for athletics; he verified now the ancestral blood in his veins. He ran and jumped; he took long walks; he learned to fence, to ride, and to like the sun and the wind.

By all accounts he must have been a singularly attractive child, even in a country where handsome children are common. His color was the fine tint of his people, a light, clean, even brown; his face a delicate oval, but the chin firm and rather long; the forehead nobly shaped, the nose almost classical, the lips full but nothing sensual. His eyes had a hardly discernible slant; when he was animated they flashed out of black depths a kind of black fire; but when he was quiescent they seemed gravely introspective. Long [29]afterward his neighbors and relatives, trying to recall his boyhood, and perhaps overstraining memory, thought he seemed always much older than his years, a notion that may have arisen from his unusual habits. He liked to read or be read to; he liked at times to be alone; he liked to hear his elders argue; he liked to go to church to see the people there; and he liked to reason.

José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonzo Realonda was his full name, made up in the Spanish fashion from both sides of his house, paternal as far as the connecting “y,” and maternal the rest of the road. Philippine names seem to the Anglo-Saxon mind a riddle that adds unnecessarily to the burdens of life. This boy was to be known all his life as José Rizal; his father had been and was always thereafter known as Francisco Mercado, his mother as Doña Teodora Alonzo. Francisco, the father, and all Francisco’s younger brothers in a family of twelve called themselves Rizal as much as Mercado and the rest; none of his older brothers used Rizal; all of his children bore it as their family name. Yet family name it was never, according to western standards; for it was added in 1849 by virtue of a proclamation of the governor-general and by the whim of the man then head of the house. A strange difficulty had arisen in the Philippines. The original Tagalog (or other native) surnames being invincible against the Spanish tongue, Spanish names were used as substitutes, but not, one might think, with sufficient variety. Religious fervor overworked the popularity of some of these until there arose an inextricable confusion: seventeen [30]Antonio de la Cruzes in one town, all unrelated; twelve Francisco de los Santoses in a single street. This knot the wise old Governor-General Claveria1 cut with ready sword. He provided a list of Spanish names, apparently copied in alphabetical order from the Madrid directory, and required the head of each family to take one of these, add it at the rear or front of whatever other names he was then carrying, and hand it down to his children.2 The father of Francisco Mercado met the spirit of the decree but evaded its letter. He chose for his official name of names Rizal, which was not on the governor-general’s list, but passed muster. It is a corruption of the Spanish word ricial, and means a green field or pasture; being here a poetic recognition, maybe, of the blessed state of Mercado’s own rentals.

In the long and many syllabled cognomen, sounding like a verse of the Æneid, with which José was baptized, is to be noticed the name Realonda. This was from his mother’s family, where it also was an innovation of the ingenious Claveria. Her family had long been known as Alonzo.3

Those that like to go over the first records of great men in search of phenomena foreshadowing something unusual in after-life will never be disappointed here. José mastered his alphabet when he was three years old, and before he was five could read in a Spanish version of the Vulgate from which his mother had [31]taught him at her knee.4 In other ways his debt to her was unusual; she turned his mind in his earliest years toward good literature, in which she had a discerning taste, being for her times and environment of rare learning and college bred in Manila.5 With other accomplishments she knew and loved good poetry, could make it herself, and early taught José to make it. He grew up thus with the advantage of a bilingual background. About him the common speech was Tagalog; his mother made Spanish fairly familiar to his ear.

Once she read to him a moral tale, “The Moth and the Candle,” translating as she went along, and emphasizing the lesson. The moth had been told by its mother to keep away from the flame, and now see what happened. A cocoanut-oil lamp was burning on the table as she read; winged insects were flying about and losing their lives in the blaze. José became much more interested in them than in the salutary warnings of his mother. He said afterward that he was not so much sorry for the insects that lost their lives as fascinated by their fate.

He had the soul of an artist, you may perceive, and the artist’s irresistible yearning for expression. Before he was five years old, and without tutelage or suggestion, he began to draw with pencil and to model in clay and wax. It was form that most took his attention; to model images of birds, butterflies, dogs, and men, to draw faces and to outline designs.7 For such studies his surroundings could hardly have been better; as soon as his bent was shown father, mother, and uncles gave him every encouragement; this is a race that upon any manifestation of artistic promise looks with a kind of solemn joy. Uncle José Alberto, his mother’s half-brother, had been a school-teacher as well as a student abroad; Uncle Gregorio was a great reader; the atmosphere of the house was friendly to study. After the Philippine manner it was grave, decorous, reserved; for there is not on earth, one may believe, a people by nature more serious-minded. The family was happy to have the benignant friendship of Father Lopez, the parish priest, a fair antithesis of the typical friar of those days and a noble inheritor of the purest spirit of the first missions. Father Lopez [33]was beloved of all the children of the parish. They had sound reason for their affection; there was no kinder or more useful man. The friendship he maintained with José seemed more like a page out of Charles Dickens than the barren realities of ordinary child life in the Philippines, and the priest to have stepped from some new and Spanish version of “Christmas Stories.” The boy was to learn by painful experience how different from certain others of the cloth was the gentle old curate of Calamba.

Years afterward, when he was entering upon man’s estate, he was induced to write what he called the story of his boyhood. It proved to be a juiceless sketch of a few pages covering many years. He was not enough egotist to make a good autobiographer. He begins by saying he was born a few days before the full of the moon. Then he adds:

[34]

He had nine sisters and one brother. Of his father he says that he was a model parent.9 “He gave us the education that was suitable to a family neither rich nor poor. Through careful economy, he had been able to build a stone house.”

The environment would seem nevertheless to be more propitious for the breeding of an agitator than of either a moralist or an artist. “Almost every day in our town,” he says, “we saw the Guardia Civil lieutenant caning or injuring some unarmed and inoffensive villager. The only fault would be that while at a distance he had not taken off his hat and made his bow. The alcalde did the same thing whenever he visited us.”

His father looked carefully to the beginnings of José’s education. There was daily drilling in all the elementary studies; an old man came and lived in the house to teach the boy Latin.

When he was nine years old he was sent to the boys’ school at Biñan, where his uncle José Alberto lived, and where he acquired knowledge in the traditional manner and under a liberal application of the rod. Dr. Justiniano Cruz, his teacher, seems to have had no modern illusions about the sparing of this implement; to have it hang by the side of the Bible and be more frequently used was his notion of thorough instruction.

José wrote of his experiences there:

From this feat, the other boys thought he was a clever wrestler. One of them challenged him. His pride had an early fall. The challenger threw him and came near to break his head on the sidewalk.

There was near-by an aged painter. José used to haunt his studio and learned much there about the secrets of pictorial art. He continues:

The tenderer plants of knowledge would hardly be expected to flower in this harsh air, but the boy acquitted himself well. In two years he had gathered into his little head all the wisdom Dr. Cruz could supply, even with the conscientious use of the birch, and his parents had decided to send him to Manila and the famous Ateneo Municipal of the Jesuits.12

In Manila, though not at the Ateneo, he had been preceded by his elder brother Paciano, long a student at the College of San José, where that Father Burgos, whose death at the hands of the terrified governing class in 1872 we have recounted, was an instructor. Paciano lived at Father Burgos’s house and was his intimate friend. What ideas and ideals dominated the Mercado household at Calamba we may surmise from incidents of Paciano’s own school life. He was pilloried at San José as a notorious patriot; because [38]he spoke with some freedom against the tyranny that blasted his country the authorities refused to allow him to pass his examinations.13 It appears that Father Burgos, although unjustly accused of complicity in the Cavite affair, was likewise a sturdy Filipino and convinced that the iniquities of the existing System could not long be maintained. In all probability he was sentenced for holding these views. No one will ever know this, because the trial was in secret, no testimony (if any was taken) was afterward to be found, and he that was called the witness for the Government was garroted by that same Government before the public could learn the nature of his inventions.14 A belief that Father Burgos was a general-principles victim is justified by the habitual proceedings of the Government. He was not the only man that perished in those days for what he thought and not for what he did.

The slayings of Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora took place a few months before José Rizal went to Manila. Almost before Paciano’s face his friend and teacher had been dragged to death. What communication about these things Paciano made to his brother, or how Paciano was moved by the tragedy, we can gather only from what happened afterward; but what it meant to José we know well, for as to that he has left eloquent testimony. Sixteen years afterward he compressed into twenty-two lines of bitter irony the scorn he had of Spain for that day’s work. The tragedy on Bagumbayan Field came at the time when his mother’s persecution was beginning; his departure [39]from home had been delayed by her arrest. He was already burning under the sense of an intolerable wrong; this sharp and gratuitous access of injustice must have pierced him with another wound to brood over.15 All the rest of his life he seemed a lonely and rather melancholy figure. It was here at the Ateneo that his aloofness began. A feeling grew upon him that he was alone in the midst of crowds. It was the counterpart of a sense equally developing in him that the misfortunes of his people were to be the business of his life.

He found much at the Ateneo that sharpened his observations of the source of the national disease. All things considered, the school professed unusual virtues; its wise conductors made something of a vaunt of equal treatment for all their pupils. Yet even so it was impossible to shut out or to mitigate the contempt and hatred the Spaniards had for the Filipinos. Before the faculty, Spanish boys and Filipino boys might have an equal chance to pass their examinations; outside of the class-rooms, the Spanish boys sedulously imitated the arrogance and brutalities of their elders. One of the first remarks made by José Rizal in his new academe was that the Spanish boys always bore themselves with aggressive insolence toward their schoolmates of darker skin; the “miserable Indio” attitude over again. The next was that while the Filipino boys seemed as a rule to accept a situation they were powerless to end, they were one and all insubmissive in their hearts. Next he made note that the Filipino boys were so little impressed with Spanish [40]superiority that in secret they laughed at their white tyrants, mocking them and well aware of their faults and weaknesses. Finally, he satisfied himself many times in many ways, that the Filipino mind was not in any respect inferior to the Spanish; for the pretense of Spanish superiority there was no other basis but the accident of the overawing military.

In cannon and not in mind, spirit, or genius lay all of Spain’s prestige.

Before this discovery all the theory upon which Europe dominated any part of the Orient crumbled and vanished. There was no such thing, it did not exist, it was only fabrication and device. The brown man was not inferior; he was not deliberately shaped by the Creator to be the white man’s patient drudge. Put down side by side with an equal course before them, footing the same starting-line, the brown boy in school won to the goal as quickly and surely as the white. And only as quickly and surely? It seemed to Rizal, after a time, taking careful note, that the brown boy was in every trial heat the nimbler and wiser.16 As, for example, here was all the instruction in this school given in Spanish, the white boy’s native tongue, but all alien to the brown boy. So, then, the brown boy must needs compass the language in which the instruction was conveyed as well as the instruction given therein. Yet, even so, handicapped by this and no less by universal contempt and disparagement, behold him winning at least as many prizes as the Spaniard, at least as proficient, diligent, capable.

Here was a revelation to shake the towers of accepted [41]doctrine. In the light of it how great (and how hideous!) was the wrong done to the people of the Philippines! The pretense upon which Spain ruled in this iron fashion, with so much cruelty and dishonesty, was (in effect) that in the cells of the brains and in the corpuscles of the blood of these people some undefined and mysterious essence was lacking, and for want of this they were incapable of ruling themselves or even of taking a place among the other children of earth. Being put to the test, no such lack appeared, but only aptitude, mental health, mental vigor, equal at least to those of the white man. The European ruled, then, because he had a larger share of the brute in him, because he had a sensual ambition to rule, because his taste found pleasure in humiliating and exploiting others, because he had a tougher conscience, and because luck had been on his side. Of any essential, irradicable, structural difference between race and race there was not an indication. What the Asiatic really lacked was opportunity, not intellect; and liberty, not character.

He came to these conclusions without haste, because his was a mind that worked deliberately and over stretched-out periods of observation. He has left a record of them: of the time when they caused him to believe that the Malayan mind must really be better than the Caucasian; of his final conviction that between mind and mind there is no racial distinction with which reasoning men will bother themselves; that all the children of mother earth under the same conditions will average about the same results. In the end he came to discard the whole theory of races; to his [42]mind it was nothing but the manufacture of prejudice, ignorance, or profit-mongering. Mankind he saw not separated by perpendicular lines into races but by horizontal lines into strata.17 Everywhere some groups of men, favored by conditions, by liberty first of all, by institutions, by opportunity, had climbed to higher strata; everywhere other groups of men less fortunate as to conditions, having less liberty, worse institutions, and narrower opportunity, remained still in the lower strata. But everywhere it was, first of all, conditions that determined whether men should climb or remain, and not blood nor the color of skin nor the texture of hair.

It appears that he would make full allowance for individuals of unusual gifts, for the Shakespeares and Hugos, Goethes and Voltaires. What he was considering was men in the mass, not individuals. If we may judge from his writings and the testimony of his friends he was singularly free from vanity; certainly from the little vanities of self-seekers. He could hardly have failed to perceive even then that he himself was of the order of the exceptional; at the same time he saw plainly enough that his own attainments were won by hard and systematic toil rather than the rare blessings of the gods dropped into his lap. Still looking upon men in the mass, he saw that to assign special qualities as special inheritances out of the reach of other complexions was wrong in science and foolish in practice. One race could not possibly inherit the right to rule another; one race could not possibly [43]be dearer than another to the Omnipotence that he believed had created all.

Equality, then, was not a dream of enthusiasts, like those of France; equality was the scientific fact. Liberty was not a rare chrism with which were touched the lips of a few peoples set apart by their complexions for this distinction; liberty was the indefeasible right of all.

Manila, Philippine Islands, year 1876—this was. He found nothing in the text-books put into his hands then that bred any of these ideas; above all, there was nothing of the kind in the tuition he was receiving. When he was a student at the Ateneo and later at the University of Santo Tomas, the trend of thought there and elsewhere ran all the other way. By his own mental processes he had worked out, when he was hardly more than a boy, the theory to which gray-beard science was to come a few years later. What he felt then the best schools teach now; a fact that if there were nothing else would establish his precocity. But we are to remember that he had formed early a habit of independent thinking and had been stimulated to form it. This accounts for much. Walls of convention that shut in upon and crushed the intellectual machinery of so many other youths (there and elsewhere) had no terrors for him; despite all weight of eminent authority he would at all times and on all subjects think for himself. To be thus erect intellectually in a university, even of these days and in these nations of ours abreast with the front line of human advance, is still not so easy that we fail to mark [44]it if ever we find it. In his day, in his nation, then intellectually dragged along at the moldering chariot-wheels of antique formality, behold a marvel and no less.

This habitual attitude of mind was a great asset in his make-up—the complete intellectual emancipation of the querist that will take nothing for granted, but without bias or passion will investigate, consider, weigh, seek, and decide. Being without feeling, it was curiously counterpoised against another asset that was all feeling, deep and real. His mind might climb into abstraction’s chilly heights; his heart would be hot for Filipinas. He was an example of that enlightened patriotism that has redeemed the word from its cheap and reactionary definitions. It was no mere instinct of attachment to the walls wherein he was born that moved him, the instinct that causes goats to come home and cows to low when they are sold. He saw a people of whom he was a member bowed under monstrous injustice, denied the birthright of opportunity, slandered by oppressors, and contemned by a world that took these slanderous inventions for a true coinage. In a soul that worshiped justice and loved equity, he revolted against these abominations, as it was certain he would have revolted against the same wrongs practised against another people.

Not in the same degree; for at home the brand had been thrust deep into him. He might not even have come, so far in advance of his time, upon the modern theory of races if he had not started with a sense of resentment against the suffering of his own. But when he had satisfied himself of the truth of his theory, [45]he naturally applied it to his own people and felt more than ever the yoke that galled and hobbled them. If the Filipino was not in fact made of different stuff from the marl that made up the white man; if he was held in subjection not because he was inferior in capacity but because he was shouldered out of his due share of the world’s light and hope, again how much more terrible was his plight! An aspiring soul, as fine and sure as any other, held as a brother to the ox, Rizal began to perceive even in those early days that the Filipinos were like a river that some great arbitrary force had closed in and dammed back. He could see the water rising and hear it struggling, and knew that some time it would break through the barriers and run its due course. To his thinking, the real powers of his people were latent, but of a kind the world would have to admit when these powers should be set free. And what should set them free?

Education and political liberty.

It has become a habit among some writers and speakers to look upon Rizal as a kind of superman, a creature of abnormal gifts, a brilliant exception to the common endowment of the Filipino. Some have described him as a bright, strange meteor flashing against a background of Malayan incapacity.18 As this narrative of a wonderful life unfolds it will probably show that the man thus pedestaled was only human and that the secret of his great works, enduring influence and pre-eminence in so many walks was nothing mysterious but plainly understandable. He had a twofold [46]inspiration. First, he developed a habit of ceaseless industry, carefully ordered, carefully followed. Second, and even better than this, from his youth he had been overmastered, fired and whirled along by a vision of his people redeemed. So then to their redemption he consecrated his life. He did it in his closet, quietly, without theatrics and without telling anybody. Macaulay’s theory that every great man has something of the charlatan in him falls short in this instance. For him the grand stand never existed. Whatever he did was dedicated first in his heart to Filipinas; whatever he thought, planned, dreamed, or hoped for had some reference to her and her service, and now when he studied it was to fit himself to serve her better.

We come back to him, knocking at the gate of Ateneo, eleven years old, small for his age, and all a boy still; for we have shot far ahead of that day to deal with the development of the ideas of which he was slowly possessed. It was not with a head full of philosophy that he made his application to the famous school, but, as he tells us in his short notes on his life, a heart full of misgivings. The day was June 10, 1872, and he was to take his entrance examinations at the College of San Juan de Letran, Manila. Christian doctrine, arithmetic, and reading were the branches of human erudition required of youth that sought to enter those doors. It is to be supposed that José could have passed them with his eyes shut. He received the required mark and spent the next few days at home. When he returned to Manila to begin his studies at the [47]Ateneo, “even then,” he says, “I felt that unhappiness was in store for me.”19

For all his good passing-mark, he came near to miss the opening he sought. Father Fernando, the Jesuit priest then in charge of the Ateneo, looked upon him without favor. He had come late in the term, for one thing; and then he was so small and slight. Only at the intercession of Dr. Manuel Burgos, a nephew of the priest officially murdered on Bagumbayan Field, the rules were relaxed and the midget from Calamba allowed to come in. For the moment he forgot his forebodings. With joy he put on the school uniform, the white coat called an americana, the necktie, and the rest. When he found himself in the chapel of the Jesuit fathers to hear mass, surrounded with strange faces, a new boy in a new school, he prayed fervently. Then he says he went to the class-room and appraised his teachers and school-fellows, on whom he seems to have looked with preternaturally keen eyes.

The title seems incongruous, but Rizal explains that to stimulate the boys in Jesuit colleges the custom was to divide them into two “empires,” one Roman, the other Carthaginian or Greek. These were continually at war—academic. The battles fought were in the class-room, over recitations. Points were scored by discovering errors in the work of the hated foe. Rizal was placed at the bottom of the cohorts of one of these “empires,” a private in the rear ranks. Within a month he was emperor; he had outstripped everybody else.

Paciano was there that first day and took him in charge. He would not allow the sensitive little artist to lodge in the Walled City or ancient part of Manila, “which seemed very gloomy to me,” says Rizal, a judgment others might echo. In another quarter of the town, twenty-five minutes away, he was lodged with an old maid, who seemed to have a superfluity of other lodgers and a scarcity of room to stow them in. “I must not speak of my sufferings,” says José, with pious resignation.20

The Ateneo was not an easy school in which to gain distinction or to win favor; Rizal speedily achieved both. By the end of the first week he was going up in his class. In a month he had captured his first prize and seems to have looked upon it with rapture. At the end of the first quarter he had won another [49]prize and the grade of “excellent.” He confesses that for the rest of that year he did not care to apply himself. He had taken on a boyish resentment to something a teacher had said, he explains. Possibly he was not yet inured to the prevailing method of driving instruction into the heads of the young with the aid of sarcasm and shouts. At the end of the year he says as if with a kind of sigh, “I had only second place in all my subjects.” He received the grade of “excellent” but no prizes, and the lack seems to have goaded him to remorse.

It must have been efficacious, for when he returned to school he flung himself with something like passion into the race for these laurels, and it was said of him that no student there had ever equaled his performance. The fathers began to look with wondering pride upon this premier medal winner. For all that, he was a boy still and no mere Johnny Dighard; he had fights and he read novels and he even found time for social amenities, so called. At these latter he seems not to have won distinction, though the records are meager; but at least it may be said for him that he managed to fall in love.21 One of the first works of fiction he read was Dumas’s “Count of Monte Christo” in Spanish. He says that it gave him “delight,” but it did more than that for him. The wrongs and sufferings [50]of Edmond Dantes bore in upon him the misfortunes of his own people and sharply reminded him of his mother and the two terrible years she had spent in Santa Cruz jail. In Calamba and all about him festered a social system infinitely worse than any Dumas had imagined.

About this time he began to lay out his days into a schedule of hours to which he aimed rigidly to adhere; so many hours for study, so many for reading; from four to five, exercise; five to six, something else. This was a plan he followed, or tried to follow, all the rest of his life, and accounts in part for that list of achievements that still staggers the investigators. It was strict economy of time and likewise an exercise in self-mastery, a virtue on which he set great store and in the practice of which few men outside of monastery walls have equaled him. He came to look upon his body as a kind of mechanism with which, as its master, he could do as he pleased; feed it, starve it, or run races with it. At the Ateneo he held it in subjection while he accumulated medals, fought when necessary, and composed treatises in chemistry, which, next to poetry and sculpture, had become his pleasure. [51]

For the times and the place the Ateneo was a good school, by general consent the best in the Islands, in some respects matching well with an inferior preparatory school in America. When the Jesuits were allowed to return to the country from which they had been banished, they brought with them new ideas of education into a region where for two hundred years such imports had been rare. For all that, education at the Ateneo was not to be had except at the price of a struggle. There was no suggestion there, at least, of Tennyson’s idea of a row of empty pates and kindly Instruction tumbling in the sciences. A student like Rizal, reputed in his second year to be the hardest working in the institution, seemed like a soldier fighting in doubtful trenches; education to be won, as it were, by hand-to-hand conflict. Years afterward Rizal wrote in his own vivid style a description of the manner in which wisdom was imparted in even the highest Philippine seat of learning, from which wonder grows to amazement that there were in those days any educated Filipinos. It reveals them again as of iron will and unmatchable persistence. No such dogged resolution in chase of knowledge is now required of any people; the pursuit of learning under difficulties, it may well be called. A Filipino reading it now may be excused if he is moved somewhat to hold [52]up his head among the nations. Every fact that one of his countrymen added to his store he must wrest from the hard hands of prejudice and desperate chance.

As to this, the Ateneo was not so bad as the rest, but bad enough. Within even its halls was as yet no emancipation from the notion that the student is the scum of the earth and the professor sent to scourge and chasten him. At Santo Tomas, whither Rizal was later transferred, this variant of purgatory was at its worst; tuition dwelt in the Lower Silurian. Rizal’s description is of the session of a class in physics. The discerning reader will conclude that it is the transcript of a personal experience:

Another pupil is questioned.

Rizal liked the Ateneo and the Ateneo liked him, students as well as fathers. His fellows seem to have had for him more of awe than affection as they contemplated his always growing list of victories. We may believe now that the distance that separated them from him was not so great as they thought, the wizardry of his prize-winning being, next to his hard work, the advantages of his definite aim. Most men that acquire this and follow it with any steadiness, whether it be for wealth, position, or reputation, seem to their contemporaries a kind of demon, but if they live, indent the chronicles of their times. The idea that seized upon Rizal and was always growing in his thoughts was that he ought to do something to help his people out of the prison-house of ignorance and tyranny in which they sat the bound captives of a preposterous social organization. This was enough to mark him apart from students that went to the Ateneo only because their parents told them to go. Good things for him were things that helped him to his purpose and bad things were things that got across his way.

Long after he had left those sequestered halls, he [60]put together notes on his recollections of his life at the Ateneo, that, curt as they are, light up his views of himself, his peculiar self-abnegation and his idea of his destiny. He says:

The instructor at the Ateneo that Rizal chiefly liked was Father Guerrico, a kindly, gentle, devout old man, full of learning and given to good works. Long after swift and stirring events in the great world had dimmed the memory of other faces at the Ateneo, the visage of Father Guerrico, furrowed with thought, yet beaming with good will to all mankind, was clear before Rizal, and with that marvelous gift of his for sculpture he made, out of his lingering recollections, a bust of the father, achieving a likeness of extraordinary quality, so subtly charged it is with the feeling of truth that confers life upon portraiture. But there is, indeed, no room to doubt his high artistic calling; if to painting or to sculpture he had cared to devote himself, he would have been one of the world figures of his day. When one so gifted and having also the artist’s craving for expression and achievement makes [62]of these a sacrifice for the general welfare, it may be doubted if rack or prison mean much more.

Sculpture came as easily to him as laughter to a child. From his babyhood, or thereabouts, he had been modeling these figures in clay, a spontaneous and irrepressible outgiving of the spirit in him; figures strangely vital, and wittily touched, so that to-day the observer coming upon them for the first time beholds them with a sense of something weird, as if in some way he had come also upon the sculptor behind his work. Often with no tool but a pocket-knife he worked in wood to the same results. There are extant faces and busts he carved thus in wood that have an almost inexplicable potency to suggest character, thought, or life.

He had as great a command over his brush and pencil; his sketch-book has a certain charm, distinctive and rare; he had the French artist’s uncanny power to suggest with a single line an inevitable trait or an overmastering feature of a landscape. He could paint before he had taken a lesson. When he was a mere boy, still at Calamba, before he had entered the Ateneo, a banner was spoiled that was to have been used in one of the local festivals that were then so important; José painted in its place a banner that all men declared to be better than the original.4 At the Ateneo he carved an image of the Virgin Mother that won the unstinted praise of men not novices in art, and a statue of Christ that for twenty years was one of the admired exhibits of the school hall. [63]

By all accounts, this multiplex being could write as easily; he was poet and dramatist as well as sculptor and painter. At school he continued to practise the art his mother had taught him, showing himself a skilled practitioner in verse and a devout worshiper of poetry, Spanish and Tagalog. For, despite the common European belief to the contrary, Tagalog is not the dialect of a tribe of savages but a highly developed language having an ancient and honorable literature. There were poems in Tagalog as early as in English, and many a beautiful Tagalog poem has been sung and resung and passed into the heritage of the people where no European speech had ever been heard.

At the age when children usually begin to learn their alphabet this boy was making verses. A little later he could see subjects not only for poems but for plays. Before he was eight years old he had written a drama that was performed at a local festival and brought him two pesos. At the Ateneo, poetry and dramatic composition were his relaxation, his pastime, his joy and rapture, when he turned from the ponderous routine of the curriculum.

In December, 1875, he being then fifteen, he wrote “The Embarkation, a Hymn in Honor of Magellan’s Fleet,” a poem in seven stanzas of eight lines. The measure may be called anapestic dimeter, of which old Skelton was a master and in which Herrick occasionally performed, but rare thereafter in English poetry until Hood and Swinburne revived it. A few months later he appeared with a poem of nine stanzas arranged much after the manner of the Sicilian octave. [64]This was on “Education” and contained exquisite imagery, while it showed an unmistakable grasp of melodic resource.5

In ranging among all books, old and new, that seemed to promise any profit, he came upon one in these days at the Ateneo that helped mightily to direct his career, while it freshened his young hopes to a new bent concerning his people and what was to become of them. It was a Spanish translation of “Travels in the Philippines,”6 by Dr. F. Jagor, the German naturalist. Something more than the flora and fauna of these fascinating Islands concerned Dr. Jagor; like so many other just and reflective visitors in those parts, he had been led to think much about the remarkable characteristics of the inhabitants and the singular misfortune that had befallen them. Unless all signs were deceptive, this was a race endowed for a career and a place in the world’s procession; of these it had been cheated by an outland despotism whose sole foundation stood upon force. In all probability this anomaly could not endure. Spain, still groping in the past, was no possible cicerone for a race that felt springing within it the strong man-child of nationality and progress. One thing, if none other, was at hand to insure the doom of such absurdity. Dr. Jagor had traveled in the United States and considered its profound influence upon other nations. Its life and growth were daily proofs before him of the eternal persistence of the democratic idea, and from that showing the world [65]could never turn away. He saw that the example of the United States had spurred all South America to revolt and eventually to win freedom; hence he concluded that the spread of this influence around the Pacific was inevitable.7

[66]

These deliberated forecasts deeply impressed Rizal. They were written about 1874. Looking back now, the applause Jagor deserves for his keen vision is easy, but in 1874 or 1876 who hailed him as a prophet? If he found a disciple outside of the grim walls of the Ateneo the fact escaped record; but to Rizal the sequence seemed normal to his own reflections. He had an instinctive faith in the latent capacity of his people; now he noted that this cool-minded scientist came from judicial analysis of these same people to share the same belief. The next step was facile; he perceived the logical procession of Jagor’s reasonings about the rising American influence. It must be so, then, that America would prove to be light and leadership to the Far East, and from this time he turned to the United States as an example and a well-spring of hope.8

That same year came the celebration of the first one hundred years of American independence, and the reports of it fell pat with his new meditations. As a rule, the newspapers of Manila, inspired by the Spanish habitude, had referred with phrases of contempt to the American republic. The centennial festival seemed to modify or to beat through their prejudices, for space was given to long and respectful reviews of the progress and achievements of the United States, and with these an outline of the desperate struggle by which it had won its independence. Upon a mind like Rizal’s, enlisted for freedom, susceptible to all things heroic and idealistic, the effect must have been galvanic. It [67]was a lesson of more than one angle. Here was a people that had been under such an incubus of political medievalism as was strangling his countrymen. A handful challenging the greatest power in the world, they had achieved their emancipation, and he could not fail to note that the disparity between the Philippines and Spain was hardly greater than that between America and Great Britain in 1776.

In the next place, the heart of the system the Americans had thrown over was the idea that the royal authority imposed upon them was of God and resistance to it was an impiety God would surely punish. One nation, according to this record, had not only resisted such authority but cast it off and trampled upon it, and, behold, its reward was not the curse but the apparent blessing of God in richest measure. He studied the history of this nation, considered its work in the world, and deemed the conclusions of Jagor to be sound and just.

But Jagor had supplied also a certain warning. “It seems to be desirable for the natives [Filipinos] that the above-mentioned views should not speedily become accomplished facts, because their education and training hitherto have not been of a nature to prepare them successfully to compete with either of the other two energetic, creative, and progressive nations.” Nothing could be plainer; this was the great work to which he should apply himself. His people must be trained and educated for the freedom they were one day to have. They must be educated first and then aroused. Therefore, whatever learning, discipline, equipment [68]of facts and knowledge, power and resources he could gain were capital, energy, equipment laid by for their service.

Toward two sorts of men the world has never warmed while they lived; toward a man of melancholy and a man with a fixed and serious purpose other than material. Rizal was both of these in one. A school is a microcosm of the world outside it. He was admired at the Ateneo but went his way there essentially alone. He seems to have felt that this must be so and accepted loneliness in the spirit of his philosophy and as part of the task laid upon him. The natural complement of his loneliness was an unusual capacity for friendship; the natural complement of his melancholy was a keen sense of humor and a flashing wit; for so do men seem to be made up and (except in novels and plays) never of one piece.

Being real and breathing and not a lay figure of romance, Rizal was like the rest of us, subject to gusts of this and that and a gamut of moods; and yet, like other men of strong will, managed to steer fairly straight for one landfall. When the fit was on him he was wont to draw for his family vastly funny sketches, to write quips, to make jokes, and even to fashion comic verses. His gift of portraiture, a singular power to reproduce with convincing strokes any face he had ever noted, ran over at the least provocation into rollicking burlesque. In later times he would have been a priceless cartoonist; to illuminate any thought that crossed his mind a humorous or grotesque or inspiring picture fell easily from his pencil. It was from his brooding introspection that he reacted [69]to his excruciatingly funny caricatures, and if he had not some such vent might have gone mad or (terrible thought!) even have become a prig.

But from these adventures he came back to the sobering facts of his mission as the business and only reality of life. To contribute something to the helping and enlightening of these people was his métier and the only thing really important. A many-sided man, as you shall see. With all the laborious exactions of his time schedule, he could still continue his worship of art and beauty; he kept on with his modeling, kept on with his painting and poetry. His holidays he sometimes spent with his mother at Calamba; and his habit was to go home to her with a pocketful of verses of his recent making. That excellent woman and judicious critic set herself to clarify and direct the fire thus burning.9 She must have succeeded after good models, for Rizal freshened the laurels of his Ateneo triumphs by winning prizes beyond its intellectual tiltyards. The Manila Lyceum of Art and Literature founded a competition among Filipino poets, “naturales y mestizos.”10 Rizal won it with a poem entitled “To the Philippine Youth.”11 From a point of view that was never urged he had no right to win it: the Lyceum was supposed to be for adults, and he was only eighteen years old. But the subject had called forth the best that was in him; it offered a chance to preach his favorite theme, to appeal to his young countrymen, and to stir in them something of the passion [70]that moved him, while he suggested the Filipinas that might be.12

His achievement went beyond prize-winning. By a route that even he had never imagined, it became a thing of history. In this poem he called the Philippine Islands his “fatherland.” The Philippine youth were the Bella esperanza de la Patria Mia!13 Simple and natural as the reference was, it started the easy typhoon to blowing. No such phrase from such a source with such an application was tolerable. In his poem on “Education,” Rizal had spoken of that sweet wisdom as illuminating the “fatherland,” but this was naïvely taken to have a wholly different meaning. To these people, in the litany of lip-service, at least, the only fatherland they knew was the Spain they had never seen but of which the image in their hearts was all somber and cruel. With passionate adoration Rizal now spoke of another fatherland, of the Filipinas of his birthplace; he dared to address it even as a Spaniard might address Spain, “Vuela, Genio Grandioso!” “Come, thou great genius!” Yet he knew it as a country that breathed the effluvium of an unnatural existence—chained to a corpse. In irony he was dealing; a terrible, sobering irony. Already he felt in his heart that the existing state could not last; no proud, capable, normally minded people with a historic background of their own would long endure it. Echoes of the great wave that rolled around the rest of the world grew every day in the ears of these Islanders. Discontent surged in their hearts, and Rizal in his [71]poem was the first voice and wise articulation of their protest.14

In this, and as a piece of art, it was powerful and significant. He addressed the young men of the Philippines as if they were like other young men of the world, free, and able to put forth their powers, to make their way; not inferior, not the fags and drudges of the hateful Spanish tradition. Here was innovation—here was danger! In no such vein were they accustomed to be addressed, and the neuremic espionage that sustained the existing order seems to have been quick to notice the novelty. He had been careful to declare with due emphasis his loyalty; but in every autocracy the uneasy governing class learns first of all to discount such professions. The poem added to the disfavor in which the official world held him; his aloofness and studious habits seem to have multiplied suspicion. A youth with such sentiments and such ways must be thinking mischief; devilish plottings were irresistibly suggested. So, then, the blacker the mark against his name! The press of Manila, all censored, all edited in behalf of the rulers, seems to have learned early of this proscription. In the stealthy way of the journalistic prostitute it was already giving Rizal warning.15

There were other things in his habits not calculated to give pleasurable sensations to sedulous supporters of things as they were. From the beginning of his career at the Ateneo he had taken the position that the Filipino boys were not to serve as door-mats and [72]punching-bags for their Spanish fellow-students. He had the courage to insist upon this principle at whatever cost, which was often the breaking of his own head. In all years and all conditions it is character that determines; naturally he became the leader of the Filipinos in all these encounters and led them without flinching. The recluse came from his cell at the sound of battle; the student threw aside schedule and book. He had grown at the Ateneo; he was no longer a midget; and, having kept up his exercises with the rest of his regimen, he could hit hard and take punishment. One side or the other was driven off the field; he contrived to make the retreat a rout if victory sat upon his banners. “Sir, you have wrestled well, and overthrown more than your enemies.” One of these conflicts had, as you are presently to learn, results that he had never counted upon; among them another shadow on a life already troubled enough.

On March 23, 1876, he received the degree of bachelor of arts with the highest honors from the Ateneo, and in April, 1877,16 matriculated at the ancient university of Santo Tomas.17 Some of his studies he continued to pursue at the Ateneo, which he always preferred. The choice of a career still weighed upon him; in what way of life, business or profession, could he fit best and furnish the most help? He looked upon the fertile soil of the Islands, he looked upon the medieval methods of cultivation in use there, and he half resolved to be a scientific farmer and show the wonders [73]of which the soil was capable. He looked upon the general ignorance of the laws of health among his people and in the end determined to be a physician, choosing diseases of the eye to be his specialty. Oculists were almost unknown in the islands, even poor ones; and diseases of the eye were wide-spread there as in all tropical countries. Every year many Filipinos went blind whose sight science might easily have saved. For lack of competent treatment his own mother was likely to share this dread calamity.

To the profession he had chosen he surrendered nothing of his addiction to the arts; he modeled, painted, drew, and sang as before. Without yielding to the extravagant eulogy that has attended his fame in recent years, it appears certain that he was in art one of those rare creatures that are endowed at once with two great faculties. He could create and he could analyze; he could feel and he could reason; and on either side his activities could be carried on with the same native ease.

About the time he was entering Santo Tomas the Lyceum staged another poetic tourney, this time to celebrate the glory of Cervantes. Rizal was a competitor with an allegory called “The Council of the Gods,” in which he developed a critical exposition of Cervantes and his art, lucid, just, and competent; as remarkable a production as the imaginative part of his work. The awarding of the prizes in this competition resulted in a painful incident that took its place in the chain of fateful things now drawing him away. Mystery surrounds the facts and always will, but it appears that the competitors entered the lists [74]with assumed names, and that Rizal won the first prize; but when he was discovered to be a Filipino the laurel was taken from him and bestowed upon a Spaniard.18 It was a slash in the old wound; not even in that domain of art, supposed to have shut doors upon the prejudices of nation and birth, was the Filipino to be allowed to forget his inferiority. His fellows at the Ateneo felt that he had been wronged, and knowledge of the general resentment took nothing from the ill will with which he was viewed by the governing class. In all lands it is the fate of the foreign colony to be swayed by puerile emotions; among these in the Spanish colony of Manila suspicion led all the rest.

Meantime his fate was crying out to him in strange voices that led him, before he was aware, into the road from the Philippines. At the Ateneo the students were fond of enacting plays of their own devising. Rizal was poet and dramatist; here was the plain call to his favorite pursuit. He wrote for his fellows a metrical drama called “Beside the Pasig,” and on December 8, 1880, it was publicly performed by one of the student societies. Courage he had never lacked, the courage of a mind too reasonable to be deluded by fear. He showed now what he had in his heart. One of the characters in his drama was the devil himself. Into the mouth of Sathanas he put (with a dazzling audacity) a sentence denouncing Spain and her policy toward the Philippines.

There are single colorations of character that sometimes reveal and illuminate the whole man. This was one of them. Disclosed here was a certain precise, [75]firm touch of workmanship as typical as was the pluck demanded to say such a thing. The perfect barbing of the satirical arrow no Philippine audience could miss; Spain so bad that the devil himself condemned her! Nothing could be more poisonous. But among the persons whose attention was enchained by the daring flight of fancy were members of the Government’s secret service. To keep watch against such young enthusiasts tempted to raillery upon the existing order was a chief point in their varied and malign industry, and in this instance the author of these burning thoughts was no stranger to them. Even if the bold iconoclast had never shocked right-minded people by calling the Philippines his fatherland, he must have been from the first an object of suspicion to the souls that could find sedition in the drooping of an eyebrow. Brother of Paciano Rizal, son of Francisco Rizal Mercado, should aught but evil come of that stock? To these ferrets, his outbreaks in verse must have been no more than the fulfilment of prophecy.

Then, again, Rizal did not like Santo Tomas. He was galled to think that its methods of instruction lagged behind those of the Ateneo, which it should have led. He knew well enough that the cold frown of hostility was turned upon him by the friar professors. Santo Tomas was Dominican; the Ateneo was Jesuit. In Rizal’s case jealousy between the two orders was added to the heavy handicap he must pay as a reputed insurgent against the System. The Jesuits had sent forth this prize-winning prodigy. Logically, then, the other orders were constrained to sniff at him.

He had other encounters with the System that in [76]so many and diverse ways wearied his people. One night when he was visiting his mother at Calamba he came, half blinded, out of the lighted house into the darkness of the street and dimly perceived passing him the figure of a man. Not knowing who or what it was, Rizal said nothing and made no movement. With a snarl, the figure turned upon him, whipped out a sword, and slashed him across the back. It was a Civil Guard—so called. Rizal’s duty as a Filipino under the barbarous code of the times was to make a salute whenever he might see one of these strutting persons. Spaniards need not salute; only Filipinos. If he had known that this was one of the precious police Rizal would have performed the important ceremony and so fulfilled his obligation to king and country. As in the dark the policeman looked like anybody else he thought it hard to be wounded for not possessing the vision of a cat. The injury was painful but not serious. When he recovered, he deemed it his duty to report to the authorities what had occurred. Jeering indifference was all his reward. An Indio had no rights that a Civil Guard was bound to respect, and instead of complaining Rizal should be offering thanks that the offended soldier had not taken his life.

All these experiences must have weighed together, but it was the political aspect of his plight, no doubt, that decided him. He had set out in life resolved to win the best education his times and his means might allow; for himself and more, for his cause much greater than himself. He now began to see that in his country, and even because of his love for it, he would [77]be debarred from the knowledge and training he desired for its sake. Often the sage old counselors had told him to look abroad for that training, not at home. Most Filipinos that had won any eminence had first escaped from the evil environment of their nativity. So long as he could he resisted these arguments. The lost prize seems to have completed the business for him. He made up his mind to get the rest of his education abroad.

To go was not so easy as to dream of going. He must have a passport, and of all men in Manila he was the last to which the Government would allow that or any other favor; the patriot poet, the singer of the “fatherland,” the critic of Spain, suspected of sowing treason in the minds of youths at best none too docile. Through the help of a cousin and his own ingenuity, he evaded this difficulty and all others. The cousin got a passport in another name. Paciano and an uncle supplied funds;19 a sister gave him a diamond ring to pawn. To outwit official suspicion, José went to Calamba ostensibly to visit his family, and really to wait until a vessel should be ready to sail. A cryptic telegram gave him the warning. He slipped into Manila and after midnight stole aboard his steamer. When day broke he was well on his way to Singapore.20 [78]

What life meant for average millions in the Philippines, under what chill shadows of the jail and visions of the firing-squad they must draw breath, how shifty and blackguard was the Government imposed upon them, we may glimpse from what happened as soon as Rizal’s absence was discovered. Civil Guards and official eavesdroppers were busy at Calamba; all members of the family were dogged, watched, waylaid, and cross-questioned as if suspected of murder. They must do more than lie to protect themselves. Paciano, the brother, who had been a confidant in this desperate plot to take ship and go, was reduced to a kind of play-acting, running about Rizal’s lodging and inquiring frantically for his lost brother as if he conjectured suicide, assassination, or kidnapping. All the Government seems to have been thrown into chill alarm by the fact that one college student, not yet of age, had left Manila without its permission. If there has been upon this earth a tyranny that existed without the finger of fear upon it history, surely, has no mention of it, and in the case of the Spanish tyranny in the Philippines the vague and kindergarten terrors that assailed it had long been notorious. To be afraid of a solitary student whose most dangerous manifestation had been a taste [79]for radical poetry may seem fantastical to steadier pulses but was real enough to the anxious souls that then steered Spain’s sovereignty through unquiet waters. In due time the fact could no longer be concealed; gone he had indeed and in very truth—gone, quite gone. Then, in characteristic fashion, the Government proceeded to revenge itself upon the fugitive’s relatives. It was again a case of a second cousin where the offender or his brother was not available. In vengeance the taste of the Government was never overnice. To make somebody suffer was its length and breadth, and not too much haggling as to the identity of the victim.

Sketch-book in hand, the cause and occasion of all this uproar pursued his way in peace, recording types among his fellow-passengers and sopping up information like some form of sponge. From Singapore he journeyed by French mail-boat through the Suez Canal to Marseilles, and so to Barcelona. There he tarried some months and observed without infection the extreme revolutionary movement that centered always in that restless city.1 Many Filipinos were in Barcelona; it was passing strange to one late escaped from the gag-law and press-gang conditions of the Philippines to a place under the same flag where men could say and print what they thought. There were publications in Barcelona that in the Philippines would have brought out the executioner and added martyrs to the overcharged lists of Bagumbayan Field. The Socratic mind of Rizal, with a question for every phenomenon, could not fail to note this nor to find the [80]cause of it. Government loved freedom of speech no better in Barcelona than in Manila. But in Barcelona the people were ready to fight for their rights as they had fought for them more than once. In this fact lay all the contrast.

At the University of Madrid, where he came soon after to anchor, he elected to study medicine, literature, and philosophy, while outside the university he took on art and modern languages. The burden of so many studies was less than its appalling appearance, or less for Rizal. With him, as with other good minds reared in a bilingual atmosphere, languages were an easy acquisition. In his childhood he had spoken Tagalog and Spanish; at school he had added Latin and Greek; after the school of the pedant, to be sure, but still Latin and Greek. He now assailed French, English, and Italian, all at the same time, and without apparent difficulty. A little later, he mastered Catalan, Arabic, German, Sanskrit, and Hebrew.

At Madrid it was with him as it had been at the Ateneo. In a few weeks the university buzzed about this rare young Filipino that could do so many things brilliantly and lived so much like a Trappist monk. His fellows remarked of him that he had at its best the fine, gracious courtesy characteristic of his people but was no great addition to the university’s social assets. If the cafés, clubs, and other places the students thronged knew little of him, he had two good reasons for keeping to himself and living modestly. His excursion in higher education was financed on slender terms by his father and his brother, and he had work in hand that took all his attention; he must be at all times [81]about his country’s business. To a certain extent when he walked apart he was doing violence to his own nature. By temperament he was no horseman for black care to ride behind. He was frank, cordial, quick, rather sanguine, and appreciative of good company and of conversation with good minds. When he had the luck to fall in with these and loosened the rein upon himself, or when he was with his own circle and forgot the great thing he lived for, he made the common air sparkle with shrewd, witty comment.2 His studies in so many languages had given him an unusual vocabulary; his talk flowed on without a break.

His own circle was a group of about a score of Filipino students, and (strange to say) one Englishman and one German, that somehow found themselves to be congenial and elected to meet at one remote café. There they read the newspapers (London), played dominoes and chess, and talked about serious things. It was the opinion of these young men that Rizal came too seldom to their meetings, but whenever he consented to be of the company he was its intellectual electric battery. He liked to play chess and played it well; he liked better to discuss and to learn. One afternoon he came in and announced that he was going away. He sat by the side of the table and drew with his pencil on its bare top a merry caricature of every person present. Then he bade them good-bye and disappeared, and a waiter came with a cloth dipped in [82]kerosene and erased the drawings. The place did not see him again.3 A few years later, the price of those caricatures the waiter so easily expunged would have equaled the value of the café.

He carried to Madrid his favorite notion of life led by time-tables; and, dividing his day into segments, set apart one for general reading. In this his choice was liberal; anything that would be likely to assist his purpose was welcome. French classics, Shakespeare, Goethe, to help his lingual studies; books on modern political questions; history above everything, any history; biography by way of illustration; and the theater (which he attended as often as his purse would allow) for readjustment.

A book that early captivated him was a volume of the lives of the Presidents of the United States, printed in Spain and in Spanish.4 It seems to have made a deep impression upon him; he all but wore it out with frequent thumbings, and procured another edition with later biographies that he carried with him wherever he went. These stories of so many picturesque careers to eminence must have had an apt relation to Jagor’s prophecy, a thing he never forgot. The application was too obvious to escape such a mind. In a democracy, men born into the utmost poverty, men born in log huts, the sons of peasants, the sons of artisans, made their way to the highest positions, and not a soul cast their birth at them. It was so; here were the recorded proofs. Under the old monarchical system of society they would have found every door [83]shut in their faces and a thousand chains of caste to hold them in the pit where they had been born. In a democracy every door stood open and nothing impeded their ascent. Why does anybody write fiction when fact is so much more dramatic and wonderful? In a student’s cell in a back corner of Madrid was then being forged the wedge of brass that was to overthrow moldering antiquity in all the Pacific and all the Far East, and was so far hidden from the wise and prudent of earth they would have laughed at the mere suggestion of it. Yet there it was, day and night—forging. Well could Prophet Jagor see what was to happen but not the manner of it. He knew that in the end it was the United States that would remake the Philippines, even if at the time he wrote the American people in general were so little acquainted with this part of the sun’s dominions that to many of them Filipino suggested only something to eat; even if he never dreamed that the instrument Fate would use in strange ways to bring all this to pass was in the hand of a slim brown youth naturally addicted to poetry and mooning.

While he was yet in the university, Rizal came into contact with another influence that affected both his career and the story of his country. He became a freemason. Upon all secret societies, but especially upon the freemasons, the governing class in the Philippines had scowled implacably; the friars and the church generally being still more hostile. The governing class in its jumpy way believed that any kind of secret organization must signify treason; the Civil Guards objected because here were keyholes at which [84]one could not watch; the friars thought freemasonry threatened the economic welfare of the church. By these, Rizal’s religious convictions were gravely doubted, but need not have been since they were easily ascertained. He was of a broad and sweet faith and a charitable practice, cherishing a universal tolerance refreshing to encounter, but he was in the substance of his belief a loyal Catholic. In his father’s house he had been accustomed to hear religious questions discussed without the least restraint;5 within those walls Francisco Mercado would have freedom of speech if it existed nowhere else in Filipinas. From such discussions he had learned that religion was a matter about which men would differ widely and yet without just reproach; the independent, courageous, and conscientious man would decide for himself. When he came to understand the subjugation of his country and the part played in that great wrong by the monastic orders his faith in the organized church as the custodian of men’s minds and thinkings faded out, but not his faith in the essentials of the Christian religion, from which he seems never to have wandered.

At the suggestion that freemasonry was or could be a foe to religion he scoffed. Not only did he accept masonry for himself but he resolved that upon his return to the Philippines he would further it among his countrymen. He may have loved it for the enemies it had made; he would have been scarcely human if he had not felt some such impulse. But beyond all such considerations he must have found in the ritual something of beauty and in the associations something of [85]the calm and fortitude for which the sorely tried soul yearned within him. We are to remember here again that he was one carried by fate and the stress of conditions out of his inclinings. He had the soul of an artist; by sheer force of will he put himself down into an arena of strife. He loved the cloister, books, and meditation; he forced himself to battle with primitive men for primitive rights. He was a poet, with an ear peculiarly sensitive to sweet sounds, a soul on fire about beauty and its recompenses; and he turned his back upon all these because he thought he heard a call to duty. Some men give their lives to a great cause; some men give still more.

To reinforce the pittance his uncle was able to send him he earned money by tutoring, though to work one’s way through a university was not so easy nor so common at Madrid as we know it in America. He seems to have been a fairly human kind of instructor. According to a letter from one of his class in German he showed an exceedingly human impatience when his pupils failed to grasp his ideas as rapidly as he uttered them.6

Throughout all his studies he performed better in languages, history, and belles lettres than in medicine; conclusive proof that he had not followed his own desires but made a sacrifice of them when he chose this profession. We have here his school ratings from 1878 in Manila until the time he left Madrid University; they offer material for an interesting mental clinic if one cares to undertake the exercise: [86]

SCHOLASTIC RECORDS OF JOSÉ RIZAL

Studies in Medicine

Studies in Philosophy and Letters

Three years elapsed between the bestowing of his licentiate in medicine and the taking of his degree. The lapse was never explained by Rizal, but the reason was his poverty. His father was now in much distress, and Rizal to prosecute his studies must live with narrow scrimping and sometimes on crusts. He could not afford to pay the fee for his doctor’s degree and went without it until his fortunes mended. [88]

But his record of triumphs in philosophy and letters must have balanced all possible regrets for the lack of this laurel while it added to his great fame in the student world. So many scholarships, honors, mentions, “excellents”!—these were the prizes he had won with so much industry. The plan of his career he had now worked out to his satisfaction: he was to visit the foremost countries of Europe, study their institutions, learn the secrets of their progress, and carry home to his countrymen information that might spur them to cast off their lethargy and emerge from the national eclipse. Meantime, he was to perfect himself in his profession that he might add to his usefulness and take up his work among them. From Madrid, therefore, he went to Paris, where he became clinical assistant to Dr. L. de Weckert, one of the most famous oculists of Europe.7

It was in Paris that he took the first direct steps to his own ruin. While still in Madrid he had come upon the idea of addressing his countrymen through the medium of a novel. He had been reading and studying Mrs. Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and he pondered with awe the far-reaching effect upon history and human progress of that inspired work. The thought occurred to him that similarly wrought pictures of the servitude of the Filipinos might awaken them to a knowledge of the yoke that was slowly crushing them, pictures that might at the same time reveal to the world the justice of the Filipino cause. He went so far as to suggest such a work to the Filipino club at Madrid, the story to be of joint authorship; [89]for he seems to have had doubts of his own ability. When his fellow-members failed to see how great were the opportunities involved he was driven back upon himself, as he so often had been and was to be. From Madrid to Paris the idea grew upon him. At Paris he took his pen and started seriously upon the composition of a story of Philippine life.

This was the beginning of “Noli Me Tangere,” the greatest work in Philippine literature and one of the great achievements of all times and all lands. He was not perfectly equipped to be a novelist, for he had not the great dramatic fictional sense that sees a moving tale in the large and coördinates to the catastrophe every incident as the plot unfolds; but he had assets many dramatic fictionists never possess. He had the compelling fire of a lofty indignation, the sense of a great cause, the faultless knowledge of the hearts and minds and sorrows of the people of his little stage. He had something else that put him in a class with Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and William Dean Howells. He was a great reporter. Nature had gifted him with a marvelous power of observation; as truly as with his pencil he made those startling and hardly surpassed sketches of men and things, so accurately his mind seized and stored the significance of incidents, conversations, petty broils, clashing ambitions, village tyrants, unsung Hampdens, and cities of men and manners.

He wrote in Paris the opening chapters of “Noli Me Tangere” and carried them to Heidelberg, where the next year he was a student at the university.8 [90]

By this time he had begun to attract the attention of scientists for zealot-like devotion to his scientific research. At Madrid, Paris, Heidelberg, he was first the student and then the close friend and coadjutor of the foremost oculists of that time. It appears that upon his capacity and powers of concentration, which were extraordinary, they founded large hopes of a brilliant professional career. Despite his preoccupation and his aloofness, it is equally apparent that he exercised upon them the charm of a singularly magnetic manner. Readily he made friends; as easily he kept them. To the end of his life some of the greatest scientists in Europe, men like Virchow, Jagor, Blumentritt, and de Weckert held him in affectionate esteem and delighted to correspond with him.

They had sound human reasons for liking him. In addition to so liberal a store of other good gifts, this man was a master of the now rare art of letter-writing. To the family at home he sent the most charming epistles, full of shrewd observations, colorful descriptions, and a cheerful wit. Often they were illustrated with his incomparable thumb-nail drawings and humorous designs, and sometimes when he wrote to his mother he sent her the latest poems on which he had been engrossed.9

From Heidelberg he went to Leipzig and its university, studying, in especial, psychology; thence to Berlin, where he took cheap lodgings and settled himself to complete his novel while he should still pursue his [91]studies; for besides his specialties he had lately taken on anthropology and entomology.

His association with Virchow enlarged and enlightened his views concerning democracy and overcame much of the grave disadvantages of his birth. Men born under a monarchy have always this to overcome if they are to become effective soldiers of the Common Good. Virchow was a philosophical democrat that had seen, as in a long perspective, the ascent of man and had drawn thence an unshakable faith. Although Rizal was now more than ever a democrat, on calmly reviewing the state of his countrymen he believed that for his day the national independence of the Philippines was out of the question. Memories of the popular ignorance oppressed him. To be free, he thought, a people must know how to use freedom. It seems not to have occurred to him that there was no school but one in which that precious wisdom could be taught, and in it were and could be no text-books. For, whatever scholiasts may imagine and Utopians dream, it is experience and experience alone that tutors man in the good use of his freedom. The theory that a nation must wait until all its men have university degrees before it can be trusted with its destinies is either the dishonest handmaid of exploitation or, as in Rizal’s case, the footless product of the cloisters. Man, endowed with freedom, will use it wrongly and use it rightly; and which is the right way and which the wrong he will not know until responsibility enlightens him. After all, it is not wholly strange that even so excellent a mind as Rizal’s should have gone astray [92]on this point; for he was codisciple of the schoolmen, and in his day schoolmen taught only his error. We need not on this account lower any estimate of his worth and genius. He could see that if in his day and with their antecedents the people of the Philippines should suddenly arrive at their independence they would probably make for a time but erratic use of it. What he could not see was that at its worst their condition then would be better than the blight and curse of their previous state, and that under the tuition of experience they would work out their problems and vindicate their capacity.

But we have to deal here with the unfolding of this marvelous man and the heritage of his deeds and thought. He meditated long upon the unfortunate state of his people; he saw them bogged in ignorance and blinded by superstition, and hence he concluded that until there should be popular education, independence would mean only failure and temporary reversion. Of the eventual freedom of the Philippines, as of their eventual greatness and glory among men, he had never a doubt.

Meantime, the first work in hand was to arouse these people to the need of education and to wrest from Spain by peaceful means some practical relief from the savage tyranny that weighed down their hearts, darkened their lives, and of purpose kept them in ignorance.

With all his other occupations he found time to press the work on his great book, until he had completed in it an exposition of the full body of his faith. Perhaps in the way of construction it is not so much a [93]novel as a series of vivid pictures of life in the Philippines of that time; but with a strangely vivifying necromancy difficult to analyze or define, the power of these pictures is hardly excelled in modern literature.10 We may believe that the secret of this compelling power is the intensity of Rizal’s feeling; it gives to his portraitures a sincerity and virility no striving and no art could come by. He obeyed, unconsciously, the Sidneyan injunction about the heart and the writing; some of the passages seem to be done in his blood and some in his tears. The test of their might is easily made. Take to-day a reader that has never been in the Philippines and knows nothing of the peculiar life there; when he has read “Noli Me Tangere” he will not only feel that he knows that life but it will be to him as if he had seen it, as if he had heard these characters talking, noted their visages, and discerned their motives no less than their acts. All this he will feel in spite of the insulating septum of translation, against which all the finer beauties of the style must fall dead; the terse, vigorous, often biting sentences through which this tortured heart uttered its protest, and even the almost magical charm of the descriptions of the Philippine environment.

To be thus vivid and convincing about any phase of life is not easy; to make intimate to the European a life in the world’s remotest outskirts, of whose terms the European has no conception, in which he has no natural interest, whose actors are of a different race, color, and psychology from his own, is a feat bristling [94]with difficulties. Some critics, piqued, maybe, that a Malay at his first attempt should have triumphed in a form of art deemed the exclusive heritage of the white man, have objected that Rizal’s work has no great connected moving story, such as Dickens or Ohnet would have dealt in. Suppose this to be true, it is but a narrow view of fictional art. The mirror fiction holds up to nature may be of many shapes, and the life chosen for mirroring may be of many phases. All that the world can insist upon is that they shall be representative and perfectly shown, and for these Rizal had a facility like that of Cervantes.11

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 [95]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, [96]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.

Everywhere is dense ignorance. The world that three hundred years before left all these conditions behind still goes rolling in advance, and hardly a Filipino knows of its passing. A great population endowed with the potentialities of free minds, free limbs, free souls, free ideas, is submitting to a yoke pressed down into men’s very flesh by superstition on one side and brute force on the other.

We know that many of the incidents were but transcripts of what Rizal himself had seen and known; many of the characters transferred themselves from Calamba to his pages. Even when we read them for the first time, and have, maybe, no previous knowledge of the locale, this conviction of truth and sincerity possesses us; how much more it must have reached and stung those whose enormities it paints! “It is only the truth that hurts.” [97]

The story is of a young Filipino, Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra, whose father had wealth, was respected by the Spaniards, and wielded much influence among his own people. Juan, still in his boyhood, is sent to a school in Europe, that his education may be of the best. All prosperous Filipinos hoped to send their sons, if they had any, on this quest for the classical golden fleece. While Juan is gone his father becomes involved in a dispute with the local friar magnate, the virtual dictator of all the region about, as always; but this man brutal, arrogant, revengeful, and lawless beyond the average of his peers. The quarrel is about land; most quarrels with the friars had to do with land or rents or fees or graft or some fancied lack of crawling humility toward overblown pomp. As a rule the ill will of a friar meant for the layman involuntary exile taken at utmost speed or a persecution to the grave and without defense; it being part of the friars’ system of government that of any person that dared to offend them a salutary warning should be made. In the pursuit of this serviceable design, men put to death for alleged sedition but really because they had fallen out with the friars were sometimes quartered and hideous fragments of their bodies nailed up in the towns,1 as in Spain five hundred years before. [98]

Father Damaso is the friar that the elder Ibarra has offended. The power of the System has been put forth. Ibarra, though innocent of any crime, is arrested and thrust into prison, where he is kept without examination or trial until he wilts away and dies, crying out the name of his son. All ignorant of these events, Juan comes home; he knows his father is dead, but he suspects nothing of foul play. Gradually the truth is unfolded to him. He has returned full of hope for the Islands, full of faith in their Government. Gradually he is disillusioned, as one ugly development after another shows him the blight under which his people drag out their lives.

Still he knows nothing against Father Damaso. That dark and scowling figure he greets as his father’s friend.

The views of Island life, sharp, vivid, are like those of a stereopticon or the wizard Zola. There is a native woman, Sisa, married to a worthless dog of a husband who beats her, robs her, and gets drunk. All her life centers in her two boys, Basilio and Crispin. They earn a pittance each, working for the sacristan of a church in another village, ringing the bells and cleaning the chancel. They are to come home to-night, and Sisa has been preparing something to please them, a supper with things they like to eat, earned by her hard work and self-denial. She has bought some small fishes, picked the most beautiful tomatoes in her little garden (for she knows how fond Crispin is of tomatoes), and begged from a neighbor some slices of dried wild boar’s meat and a leg of wild duck. To this she adds [99]the whitest of rice, which she herself has gleaned from the threshing-floors.

Then her worthless husband comes in and eats most of the boys’ supper.

Sisa says nothing, although she feels as if she herself were being eaten. His hunger at last appeased, he remembers to ask for the boys. Then Sisa smiles happily and resolves that she will not eat that night because what remains is not enough for three. The father has asked for his sons; for her that is better than a banquet.

The boys do not come, and the father goes away. At the church serious trouble has fallen upon Basilio and Crispin. The curate has accused Crispin of stealing and demands restitution; otherwise, the boy, says the humane curate, will be beaten to death. That night while their mother waits for them they are kept ringing the great bells in the church tower, for a storm is raging and it is well known that the sound of church-bells ringing keeps off the lightning. In the midst of this employment, the sacristan suddenly appears, fines the boys for not ringing in tune, renews the accusation of theft (which is quite groundless), and drags Crispin off to punishment, locking Basilio in the tower. He hears his brother’s cries for help dying out in the distance. Then he climbs the belfry, unties the ropes from the bells, ties them to the railing, lets himself out of a window to the ground, and runs home. But Crispin never appears. He has been shot and killed by a Civil Guard.

Two or three days later Civil Guards come to Sisa’s house and arrest her for Crispin’s alleged theft. She [100]is paraded through the streets as a common malefactor and locked in the common jail. Basilio has crept to the woods. Sisa begins to learn of Crispin’s fate. When she is released from jail she has become insane.

She wanders about the country, living on alms and sleeping in the woods. Basilio comes home to find her gone and starts in search of her. When at last he comes in sight of her, she in her madness believes him to be another enemy and flees. He runs after her and overtakes her in time to hold her in his arms as she dies.

The story of Sisa is interwoven with the development of the story of Ibarra.

Gradually the truth is unfolded to him, the legalized murder of his father, the dishonor to his father’s ashes; for, buried in a cemetery, the body of the elder Ibarra has been, at the friar’s orders, disinterred2 and cast into the lake. Still he does not quite perceive what part Damaso has played in this nor understand that he himself is pricked next upon the roll of death. Soon or late, he must learn all. Then will devolve upon him the duty of vengeance. For safety’s sake the friar plans to silence him betimes.

Meanwhile, the youth, in whom Rizal has typified the large generous notions he himself once entertained of Utopia under the rule of Spain, gives himself to projects for the elevation of his countrymen. He is impressed with the darkness of ignorance around him, [101]with the almost comic futility of the educational system, which is no system at all. Meeting an old schoolmaster, he discusses these conditions, and thus is laid bare to us the means by which the native mind is kept in its prison-house.

The curate is the same Father Damaso, the friar with whom Ibarra’s father had quarreled. In his overbearing arrogance he has wantonly insulted the poor schoolmaster, who goes on thus with his narrative:

He has tried to abolish whipping in his school. “I endeavored to make study a thing of love and joy, I wished to make the primer not a black book bathed in the tears of childhood but a friend that was going to reveal wonderful secrets; of the school-room not a place of sorrows but a scene of intellectual refreshment. So, little by little, I abolished corporal punishment, taking the instruments of it entirely away from the school and replacing their stimulus with emulation and personal pride.”

The innovation was regarded as sacrilege and heresy.

So in despair he brought out the whips again, and sadness reigned in the school where he had introduced happiness and work. The number of his pupils was reduced to a fifth of the former attendance.

It is doubtless a perfect picture of education in the Philippines and outlines the size of the task that Rizal had shouldered.4

He resolves to build and endow for the town a modern school-house. As the time comes for the laying of the corner-stone, at which ceremony he is to officiate, he receives a mysterious warning that an attempt will be made upon his life. This he seemingly disregards; and yet, when he must descend into the trench and stand beneath the corner-stone suspended from the scaffold, he looks anxiously above him, watches the apparatus, and is tense for a leap. There is a sound [104]of cracking timber; in an instant the great stone falls, but he has sprung aside and saved his life.

At the dinner with which the day’s ceremonials are concluded, Padre Damaso is a conspicuous guest. Not even yet is Ibarra, despite certain intimations, aware that Damaso was his father’s remorseless enemy, that the gloomy, vindictive friar had put forth the hidden powers of the orders and dragged his father to death. But at the dinner Damaso, stung with baffled hate because Ibarra has escaped the gin so cunningly spread for his life, loses all self-control and utters against Ibarra’s father an insult no son could be expected to endure. Ibarra springs at his throat, knocks him down, and stands glowering over him. In the eyes of the petrified spectators murder is about to be done, when Maria Clara, Capitán Tiago’s reputed daughter, throws herself between the infuriated youth and the prostrate friar.

Maria Clara is Ibarra’s sweetheart. She pleads with him with her eyes, and he recovers enough self-command to take himself away.

But the assault upon the friar is his ruin. He has committed the unpardonable sin, the blackest crime in the calendar: he has laid “violent hand upon a friar, representative at once in his own person of the might of the church and the majesty of the realm.” That day he is excommunicated, a punishment that in the Philippines, nineteenth century, retained all the poignancy it had in Darkest Europe, 1000 A.D.

He has become a moral leper.

Capitán Tiago breaks off the engagement with his daughter; in his view the word of the friars is sacred, [105]oracular, final. He is one of the great portraits of the book, this Capitán Tiago; a typical Filipino of the class that bent assiduously at the feet of power. The drawing is like many a sketch in Rizal’s note-books, a piece of startling realism. Tiago is a living, talking, sputtering, foolish thing of flesh and blood that we see and hear. Even though we have never seen another being of his kind anywhere, we see him in this picture-making. He is vain, pretentious, fearful, abjectly superstitious, filled with strange notions about the influences of graven images and the grandeur of Spain; a Filipino perverted by some wealth, the allurements of a social ambition, and an education grotesquely awry. Against the ills of the flesh and the chances of loss in the cockpit, he has recourse to the same arcana: so many candles burned before this shrine or that, so many bombs to be exploded at a fiesta, or so many masses bought at current rates. In all things, to cultivate the favor of the friars is the boundary of his more earthly philosophy. Ibarra, rich and eminent, newly returned from Spain with the gloss of a European education fresh upon him, is in his eyes a delectable son-in-law. Ibarra under the ban of the friars is an object of horror.

The affection between Ibarra and Maria Clara has the welcome fragrance of purity and exaltation in the midst of these miasmas. They had been playmates in childhood, they had grown up together, they had really plighted their troth when Ibarra went to Europe. He had been chivalrously true to her in all his seven years of travel. He has come back to her sure of her love and looking forward to an early marriage. Upon all [106]such dreams Tiago sets his foot; he not only forbids any further communication with Ibarra, but he favors another lover, one Linares, a feeble-willed young Spaniard brought forward with suspicious haste by Father Damaso. With this candidate, against the vehement protests of Maria Clara, an engagement is quickly made.

Meantime, the governor-general comes to the town and hears about the troubles of Ibarra, whose father he had known and admired. The governor-general is a type of many that Spain sent to the Philippines, excellent in purpose, well aware of the malignant fever of friarism, resolved to withstand it, and invariably finding his good resolutions crumbling under him. Yet, in this instance, he will save if he can the son of his old friend from the clutches of the modern Inquisition. Between the friars and the archbishops of Manila is a smoldering feud, for the archbishop is usually chosen outside of the four orders. The governor-general nudges the archbishop; the archbishop cancels the excommunication; and Ibarra, escaped from this damnation, is doomed by the friars to another still worse.

With Tiago the lifting of the ban upon Ibarra makes no difference; he is still anathema to the all-powerful orders. The campaign for Linares and against Ibarra is waged vigorously with the aid of many candles on many shrines and the promises of many bombs. At fiestas, it should be explained, the custom was to burn great quantities of fireworks by day and night; and the piety of the devout, as expressed in squibs, crackers, rockets, pin-wheels, and bombs, was supposed to [107]insure their salvation. In this form of divine worship, the friars had a commercial interest; it may be believed that if a doubt of its perfect efficacy occurred to them they managed to master it.

Under the Spanish social system, Philippine maidens of all complexions married whomsoever their parents told them to marry and silenced their objections, if they had any; hence, in the Tiago household the preparations for the marriage of Maria Clara and the half-witted Linares are urged with a sweet confidence. Maria Clara herself contributes the only flaw in these proceedings. She falls desperately ill.

News of her condition is brought to Ibarra by the person in the book called “the Pilot Elias,” who is one of the pivots on which the narrative turns. It was Elias that warned Ibarra of the plot to crush out his life with the corner-stone. In a picnic fishing expedition Ibarra had saved Elias from the jaws of a cayman (crocodile) and Elias had sworn his gratitude. He is evidently much above his caste, which is that of a boatman; he has had an education. In and out of the story he flits mysteriously until his true vocation is revealed; he is a man with a history, a victim of the prevailing despotism, forced by his sufferings to ponder the ills of his people and become at last a secret, restless, wary, and intelligent agitator against the System of his day.

It is through him that Rizal voices his protests. As the plot unfolds, Ibarra wins Elias’ story. We shall repeat it here, but with a preface of warning. In these times, the average reader, the more if he is an American, will look upon the tale as a wild extravagance, so [108]easily are the conditions of one generation obliterated in the next, and so difficult is it to believe the life of one country is not like the life of all countries. Yet what Elias is fabled here to have told Ibarra might have been taken with changes of names from veritable records. Exactly these things happened in the Philippine Islands in the nineteenth century, even in the last decade of the nineteenth century. They happened in many regions and to many persons. Still worse things happened, if worse can be conceived; for lust and greed and reversion ran savage riot under two conditions that have always been hothouses for such growths: autocracy, and distance from the world’s observation.

Elias desires Ibarra to put himself at the head of the people and secure their emancipation from these horrors. Ibarra draws back; all the instincts of his class and the prejudices of his education are against anything of that kind.

[115]

It is like a conversation in Rizal’s own heart between the spirit of the college and the spirit of his country. Into it, beyond a doubt, he put the conflict that was torturing his soul. The spirit of love and good will in him grappling like Jacob with the soul that told him that from oppressions by violence could come only revolt by violence.

It may be profitable to follow this farther. It is a page of Rizal’s own revealing always overlooked by those that insist he was opposed to Philippine independence.

No one can believe Rizal wrote this without feeling it in his heart and soul.

He means the slaying of the guiltless priests, Fathers Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora, victims to the homicidal mania that descended upon the Government after the revolt of 1872. [116]

The trap the friars have prepared for Ibarra is a thing infamous in Philippine history, and yet so common that in fact and not in fiction it has sent scores of innocent men to their deaths. It had never been known to fail. Agents provocateurs stage a pretended revolt. Nothing is easier; the materials are always to hand; likewise the occasion. It is but necessary to take the latest outrage by the Civil Guard and stir some one to object to it. The rest follows automatically. In this instance Ibarra is the pretended instigator, although he has never heard of the wrong he is supposed to resent.

Elias warns him of what is afoot and urges him to escape; innocent as he is, he shall have no chance for his life before the tribunal that will try him if he waits for arrest. He will not go until he has had word with Maria Clara. The last scene between them is excellent drama; he gets under her window in a boat and climbs up the vines. For the charge of complicity in the stage rebellion is no basis except a letter that seven years before he had written to her. Some phrases that might be construed to suggest a vague discontent with conditions in the Philippines make up the entire case. On slighter evidence many a man has been tortured first and gone next to the Golgotha at Bagumbayan Field. The friars have this letter. How did they get it when [117]for so many years it had been one of the dearest possessions of Maria Clara? Ibarra can surmise only that she has willingly surrendered it and so betrayed him. In that last interview he learns that it was filched from her by the friar Silva, whose interest in her has been more than ecclesiastical and who on the same occasion has disclosed to her the facts as to her own parentage.

She is not the daughter of Capitán Tiago but of Father Damaso—an illegitimate daughter.

Satisfied that she is innocent, Ibarra now consents to escape from his foes. Elias, the pilot, who has so often befriended him, is waiting below in the banca. They row up the Pasig River. When they approach a soldier, Ibarra hides himself in the bottom of the boat under the freight. At last the Civil Guards are in pursuit. Elias tries to escape by hard rowing. The Guards begin to fire. Elias slips overboard. Taking him for Ibarra, the Guards follow in their banca, firing constantly. The hunted man is seen to sink. When the Guards come up they think they see blood. They take the news back to Manila that Ibarra, the desperate revolutionist, trying to escape, has been shot and killed. At the word Maria Clara gives up all earthly hope and flees to a nunnery. [118]

By the title of his novel Rizal meant not that he was touching a person forbidden, but a subject. The words he had found in a Latin version of the New Testament in the passage where the risen Christ is beheld by Mary Magdalene; but he used these words in a sense wholly different from the scriptural significance. Conditions in the Philippines he had thought of as having become a social cancer that persisted first because of a notion that nobody must treat or touch it. Of all the men of his times and country, he was the only man that had the courage to break through this barrier and the skill and perfect knowledge to dissect the hideous growth behind.

With one of the first copies that came from the press he wrote to his close friend, Dr. Blumentritt, a letter in which he lays bare his own idea of his work:1

But for his habitual reticence about himself he might have said much more; if he had known his own powers he might have spoken of his lifelike delineations; he might have urged a gift like prophecy. All the impression of a strong personal relation one has throughout the reading of “Noli Me Tangere” is well founded. Into it Rizal was writing himself. Ibarra was a prefiguration, in some respects marvelously accurate, of himself in the days at hand when he should return to his native country. Of the material of the book the greater part had been verified in his own experiences. The imprisonment of Ibarra’s father was the story of Rizal’s own mother. Father Damaso he had seen and watched, and Father Silva no less. In Tasio, the philosophical evolutionist, he had but drawn his own elder brother, Paciano. But above all, the story of Maria Clara was a tragedy from his own life; at that time a tragedy he might have feared but had not as yet experienced, strange as that may seem. [120]

Maria Clara is Rizal’s cousin, Leonora Rivera, his sweetheart and first great disappointment. She was born in Camiling, province of Tarlac, on April 11, 1867, the daughter of Antonio Rivera, who was Rizal’s uncle, benefactor, and ardent partisan.2 She was twelve years old when the family moved to Manila, where they rented lodgings to students in Santo Tomas and the Ateneo. Among these, after a time, came Cousin José Rizal, at about the third shifting of his quarters in Manila. Leonora was enrolled as an undergraduate at Concordia College for girls, where Rizal’s youngest sister, Soledad, was likewise a student. He would sometimes spend a half-holiday at Concordia to see and to amuse his sister, whereupon he and his beautiful cousin became good friends, although she was six years his junior. She was not only beautiful, but she seems to have had an unusual intellect of the kind that would be likely to attract Rizal; for she was in fact, and not by repute alone, studious, thoughtful, of the Malay seriousness, but with also the Malay delight in music. She sang well; she is said to have played the piano with a skill that distinguished her even in the corps of able pianists of which Concordia was proud. If so, the eminence was not lightly won; for the worthy Sisters that conducted that institution taught music thoroughly and well.

She must have been also of a sweet and gentle spirit; all the memories extant of her twenty years [121]after her death included this tribute. The various commentators that have differed often about other phases of Philippine life have been of one mind in praising the typical educated Filipino woman and yet have not exaggerated her worth. In a world wearied of artificiality, her simple sincerity shines to cheer as much as to charm. Visitors that have observed her well have usually noted the excellence of her mind, the honesty of her walk, and the reserve strength of her character. Rizal’s mother was of this order, the diligent ruler of the household, the laborious instructor of her children; and, when the blows of the Spanish tyranny fell upon her head, bearing them with the proud fortitude of a Roman matron of the republic. Doubtless, the halo of Rizal and Leonora’s own romantic story have magnified her intellectual stature; yet when all allowance is made for exaggeration that may color the work of a friendly biographer, the fact is apparent that she also was of this same admirable womanhood.

The first time she seems to have suspected in herself a feeling for her handsome young cousin stronger than cousinly regard was on a day at her father’s house when the young leader of the Filipino forces at the Ateneo was brought in with a broken head and covered with dust, blood, and glory. It was not the first time he had been so ornamented, but only the first time she had seen him thus. At the sight of the youthful champion of the Filipino people disabled early in the fray, Leonora ran with speed to get warm water and bandages to dress his hurts. The rest was easy and according [122]to the formulæ for such cases well known and accepted. She loved him for the battles he waged, and he loved her that she nursed him so tenderly.

A year later with the full approbation of their parents they were betrothed. Mr. Rivera was fond of his nephew; to the aunt, José was at least not objectionable, though she seems to have been a lady of a captious and changeable temperament. It was the uncle that first suggested Rizal’s withdrawal from the Philippines when it became evident that the governing class had marked him as a young man to be suppressed. Mr. Rivera knew well enough what that would mean in Santo Tomas and elsewhere: every avenue closed, every possible obstacle thrown in his way. The malice he had aroused he could hope to defeat in some measure if he could win in Europe a training and a distinction that would on his return provide him with a practice in spite of Spanish opposition. Mr. Rivera assisted his flight, sent him money while he was pursuing his studies in Madrid, and showed at all times a sincere interest in his welfare. The lovers had a tender parting just before Rizal went aboard his ship that night; as a sign or image of his presence when he should be far away he left with her a poem that began:

[123]

At Madrid he wrote her regularly and with deep affection and received replies that, his diary says, gave him unbounded joy, as these entries indicate:

No trait is more to be emphasized in observing the Filipino people than their respect for womanhood. It is hardly less than phenomenal. In Burma the women may have as much power; in Filipinas they have power and respect as well as affection. Rizal was all of this order; the most sacred object in the world was his mother; the next most sacred the woman that should be his wife; after her came his sisters. He had developed in advance of his times a certain philosophy of feminism that has since become much more general. In his letters he dwelt upon it. He thought the Filipino woman might be one of the great instruments for the deliverance of the country, exercising her power and influence conscientiously for education and liberty. Therefore, every Filipino woman ought to prepare herself for this service by utilizing every road to knowledge and enlarging her understanding of the [124]nation and its possibilities. He believed that a general effort on these lines by the educated women would make a profound impression upon the young and be invaluable in the next generation.

There seems to have been no flaw in his attachment to Leonora; his career abroad has been searched in vain for a reminiscence of an escapade. He lived a life of purity and that self-control that he held to be the first demand of the moral code he professed. Seldom has the biographer a career like this to write in which appears not enough of human frailty to spice the narrative. He had made for himself certain rules of conduct—abstemiousness, temperance, chastity, no wasting of time, no wasting of health—and to these he adhered with the stern inflexibility of an ascetic. The artist is usually saved, says Edmund Clarence Stedman, by his devotion to beauty. Rizal was an artist, and never has knelt before the ideal of beauty a worshiper more devout. The beauty of righteousness seemed to rule out of him all promptings to the coltish excesses of youth; that, and the dignity of his love, and his conception of the gravity of his mission. He that is called to bring light to his people must not linger at the wayside inn nor ruin their hopes by capitulation to man’s grosser senses.

Meantime, the Riveras had moved from Manila to Dagupan, in the province then called Laguna. The reputation that Rizal had left behind him was not bettered by the handling it had from the governing class after his flight. Evil propaganda has always been easy to great power in any form. In his absence the spies and agents provocateurs of the Government [125]made it but the day’s work to smear with lies the name of Rizal. “Some of it will stick,” is the philosophy of the professional slanderer. In this case the word proved true enough. Mrs. Rivera seems to have been much affected by the sad decline and fall of her prospective son-in-law. She was an excellent lady but one that set exaggerated store by the verdict of society and what Shelley called the great god “They Say.” Among all colonists everywhere this is a deity of might. With the slender group of Filipinos that strove to grasp the skirts of a society drawn disdainfully away from them, the cult amounted sometimes to a frenzy.

The reports that came from Madrid about Leonora’s lover, or were affirmed to come thence, were no salve to the mother’s wounded sensibilities. He was said to associate with sad young dogs, revolutionists and outcasts and all that, with Filipinos that had been exiled after the governmental sand-dance of 1872 and with other agencies of treason. The thought of the career that such a man would probably have in the Philippines seems to have struck Mrs. Rivera with inexpressible terror. What her friends and social co-mates would say when her daughter should be married to one sure to be a pariah if not a victim of the garrote was beyond her strength to endure.

She had also the strange notion that steals into the minds of some subjugated people that intermarriage with the dominant color promises relief from the sting of inferiority. About this time the railroad was being extended to Dagupan, and a young English engineer, Henry C. Kipping, came to take charge of the building of the last section of the new line from Bayambang. [126]His work took him often to Dagupan, where he met and fell in love with Leonora. He seems to have urged his suit with ardor and persistence and to have had from the beginning an adroit partisan in Leonora’s mother. Here had come, as if by the order of Providence, a means to save her daughter from an unhappy marriage. How much better to wed an English engineer than a Filipino agitator! With joy she seized every opportunity to praise the ingenious Kipping, gave thanks (for she was of a resolute devotion) to the wisdom that had arranged all this, and even prepared to give it help of her own devising.4

Cold fell her eulogies on Leonora’s ears. When Kipping talked love to her she told him frankly that she was engaged to marry Rizal, whom she loved and would always love, and that another suitor was for her impossible.

Nothing in Kipping’s reports of these chilly receptions daunted Mrs. Rivera, her heart being set on this match. She knew well the weight of parental authority among her people. Also, she had faith in the effects of absence, if judiciously interpreted and assisted. She can hardly have read the novels of Charles Reade, but that eminent author would have found in her a character all made to his mind. She now had resort to an expedient that was one of favorite practice among his own villains. Many a reader of his it has left cold, deeming it impossible or extravagant. Behold, then, vindication for the novelist, and straight from history. Mrs. Rivera augmented the glacial effects of separation by stopping all letters [127]between the young lovers. To this end she bribed two postal clerks.5 For a monthly stipend they agreed to bring to her all the letters that Leonora wrote to José and all the letters that José wrote to Leonora.

Months went by and not a word came from Madrid. Leonora began to droop under the suspense. Skilfully and industriously her mother plied her with insinuations and the wise shaking of the head so eloquent to the anxious. We could and if we would, and that line of ambiguous givings out. At last, she openly declared that Rizal had found another sweetheart. Leonora hysterically affirmed her faith in her lover. But the physical fact persisted that mail after mail arrived from Spain and not a line from Rizal. “He is sick,” said Leonora, “and I am here, I cannot take care of him.” The next time the expected letter failed she said deliberately, “I know José. He has given his word. He will die before he breaks it.”

The mother seems to have known how to beat down this spirit. At last she brought to an issue the slow, sure undermining in which she had been employing her wits. “If you truly love me, you ought to remember that, after God, you owe to me all you are, and after God, then, you owe me your duty. I urge this marriage, not because it means anything to me, but because I am your mother. I seek your true happiness. All the hope of my life is centered upon it. Do you wish to kill your mother?”

At this, Leonora capitulated. So great is the maternal influence in the Filipino household it is likely that most other Filipino girls in the same conditions would [128]have yielded. According to Miss Sevilla, Leonora’s sympathetic biographer, the daughter now fell into the mother’s arms and said:

“I owe you my life; I will sacrifice it for you, and make this marriage as you wish, but you will find that I shall not live long after it. In return, I ask you three things, that I shall not again be asked to play or to sing, that my piano shall be kept locked, and that you shall be at my side when I am married.”6

The next day she burned the letters she had received from Rizal before her mother had interfered with her happiness. Following a Filipino custom, she put the ashes into a little box which she covered with a piece of the dress she had worn when she was betrothed and a piece of the dress she had worn when she yielded to her mother about Kipping. The box is still in existence. It bears on its covers the letters “J” and “L” worked in gold.7

The wedding was fixed for June 17, at Dagupan. A few days before this date, Mrs. Rivera was called to Manila by some business transaction in which she must take a part. She seems to have forgotten the postal clerks, or they to have forgotten their employment; for while she was gone a letter arrived from Rizal to Leonora, and it fell into her hands. She opened it with wonder and trembling, and lo! it was filled with tender reproaches for her long silence. He had written to her regularly by every mail, but all these months had come not a word in answer. Had she forgotten him?

The next scene may be deemed to justify the [129]writers both of fiction and of melodrama. Leonora waited in silence until her mother returned from Manila, for her quick intelligence showed her unerringly who had been the author of this wreck of her happiness. The moment her mother opened the door the storm broke. Leonora, for once, defied the restraint the Filipino girl must traditionally feel in the presence of her parents and spared nobody in her passionate denunciation of the treachery of which she had been the victim. Mrs. Rivera seems to have admitted everything and borne with composure the whirlwind of her daughter’s wrath. She knew that the discovery had come too late to disturb her own success. The wedding was close at hand, the banns had been cried, the guests invited, the peculiar Filipino pride was involved and her daughter would hold to her word.

Kipping was baptized and became a Catholic. The wedding took place at the appointed hour. Afterward some of her relatives recalled that it was a ceremony without joy or good omens. They said that from it the bride returned in a state of chill lassitude. Contrary to her mother’s hopes, the marriage proved unhappy, and Leonora survived it only two years.

[130]

Still unaware of the ruin that had come upon his hopes, Rizal was living in Berlin and working on the last chapters of “Noli Me Tangere.” He had taken cheap lodging in one of those huge modern German apartment-houses, in the complex depths of which he could bury himself, press on with his work, and be as remote as Tahaiti. He had known from the beginning that he must bring out his book at his own expense, poor as he was, if it was to be published at all. To a European publisher the subject would seem too unconventional and outlandish; and as for the Philippines, not a printer there would venture on his life to so much as look at it. The type was set (in Spanish) in a small job-office not far from Rizal’s lodging. Of the report that he himself eked out his remittances by working at times as a compositor in this shop, there is no satisfactory evidence; he had not previously appeared as a printer, but with his marvelous dexterity and ease in assimilating all knowledge he might have picked up even this craft, too, with others, difficult as it is. If so, he may have enjoyed in Berlin an unusual experience. He may have been an author putting into type his own copy.

One problem had harassed him. Whence could he [131]hope to get the money to pay for the publication? He was still largely supported by remittances from home, from Paciano the ever faithful, from other members of his family; but these were not more than enough to keep him alive. The Fates that packed his wallet so full of other good gifts seem to have omitted a facility in making money, but supplied in its stead an abnormal power of self-denial. He now started out to save the sum he needed by inciting the spirit to triumph over the flesh. About this time there came to visit him in Berlin Maximo Viola, a wealthy and excellent young Filipino he had known in Madrid. Viola records that he found the young author living in a rear room and subsisting upon one meal a day, largely bread and coffee,1 which were cheap.

The raven had come that was not only to feed this prophet but to lead him out of the wilderness. Viola’s object had been to invite Rizal to go with him upon a walking tour through rural Germany and Switzerland. At the proposal, Rizal’s eyes blazed; no project could be more alluring to him, as Viola had well known. Then he said that it was impossible; he could not go. Why impossible? asked Viola. Native pride forbade any direct answer, but Viola extracted the truth. He was saving money to publish a book. What kind of a book? Rizal told him, whereupon the Filipino blood stirred in Viola’s veins also, and he offered on the spot to advance enough money to bring out the book and then enough to take Rizal on the walking tour.

A few weeks later, “Noli Me Tangere,” a finished [132]novel of five hundred pages, was printed and bound and launched upon its eventful way.2

The facts about this man would stagger credulity if they were not of so sure and recent record. This novel of his contains more than two hundred thousand words. He obtained his medical licentiate at Madrid in June, 1885, and nothing of his book had been written then; nothing was written until months later. After a time he went to Paris, where he was employed as a clinical assistant to a busy oculist and also in pursuing his studies. Thence he went first to Heidelberg, then to Leipzig, where he entered the universities. Next we find him in Berlin, again an active and laborious student. Yet “Noli Me Tangere” was completed on February 21, 1887. The thing does not seem to be in nature. We cannot recall another instance in literature of such rapid composition under the like conditions of distraction.

It was a stormy petrel that he had set free, and trouble began early because of and around it. His first object was to circulate it in the Philippines. Nothing could have been more unpromising, with a censorship keeping watch and ward and an author loathed and feared by the whole System. Yet he accomplished the difficult feat. He had stout friends in Barcelona and Madrid, Fernando Canon, Mariano Ponce, Damaso Ponce, Ramon Batle, and, in especial, Teresina Batle, who was Mr. Canon’s sweetheart. Her quick wit helped the conspiracy. Rizal sent to Mr. Batle certain [133]boxes containing copies of his book. These his friends disguised as dry-goods and the like innocent freight and forwarded to Manila. Ramon Eguarras and Alejandro Rojas were Manila proprietors of substance and good repute. They smuggled the boxes past the official Argus and before his very face.3 When the authorities awoke, the fierce new appeal was going from house to house with ominous rumblings in its wake.

This could not last long. To know what the submerged people were reading and thinking was one of the chief businesses of the bureau of spies and department of sleuthing. Soon the censor was hot upon the trail of this omen of unrest. A copy of the book was brought to him; he read it with a horror that seems to have shaken his soul. Now the attention of Government was called to the scandalous work. Government, ever responsive to such ill news, appointed a committee of solemn owls from the faculty of Santo Tomas, no less, to study and report upon a literary felony so momentous; Government being apparently impressed with the notion that a crisis was near and revolution was to be crushed as usual in the serpent’s egg. For this nothing could be so effective as the weight of an awe-inspiring authority from the university. No great deliberation was needed to enable the committee to reach its findings. In what was plainly intended to be a blasting fire of ecclesiastical wrath, book and author were condemned, and Government was austerely warned that here was a most insidious and perilous attack upon all the safeguards of society, [134]upon law and order, civilization, monarchy, the supremacy of Spain, business, holy church, and religion itself.4

Long experimentation with the surviving methods of the Inquisition had made the Government expert in these matters. It issued at once a decree excluding from the pious Islands a work of such sacrilege and ordered diligent search to be made for any copies that might have slipped in to corrupt virtue and overthrow the king. Wherever such copies might be found they were to be burned by the public executioner. Most rigorous punishments waited upon the heels of this decree. Any Filipino found after a certain date in possession of a copy of “Noli Me Tangere” was to suffer imprisonment or deportation, with the loss of all his property; this to be confiscated for the benefit of whomsoever should inform against him. Despite all this valorous resolving and proclaiming and shaking of the long ears of senile decrepitude, the book continued to come in and to be circulated. One may suspect that what the Government chiefly effected was gratuitous advertisement. In a short time “Noli Me Tangere” became the first topic of conversation throughout the educated circles in the islands. The classes whose vices and villainies were most fiercely attacked in it were its most determined readers. Let the Government do its utmost to annihilate the book; in the teeth of decrees, Civil Guards, spies, and inquisitors, Rizal’s purposes were already accomplished. The corrupt, greedy, tyrannical friar, the plundering, swaggering, brutal Spanish officer, the beneficiaries of [135]the System and those consenting to it, saw themselves for the first time pilloried in print.5

About this process is always something more potent and salutary than can be easily explained. It is the elusive, indomitable spirit of that pitiless publicity, at once the armed champion of modern social progress, the healer of its diseases, and the corrector of its errors. Suppose the social malefactor to know full well, as well as he knows anything, that when he reads in print the story of his misdeeds not one hundred other persons are likely to see it; he is shaken with ineffable alarm, nevertheless. The magic of the printed page overwhelms and confounds him; in his ear every type-letter is a separate demon yelling “Scoundrel!” Suppose him to have known theretofore that one hundred thousand men were saying among themselves this that he now reads in print; the knowledge would have disturbed him not to the quiver of an eyelash. But to have it thus in visible record, open to the world’s eye—intolerable! Many a man case-hardened otherwise to conscience or reproof has fled to suicide before that unwavering finger and relentless condemnation.

The life of all this is truth. Against printed words that are not true even the guilty can make a stand, but it is invincible verity that leaves him naked and trembling. When the first cold shiver had gone by of the discovery that some one had at last dared to put into print the horror of the Philippines, one cry for vengeance went up from the stripped and shamed exploiters. It was a cry like the angry snarl of hurt [136]hyenas, ready to tear into pieces whomsoever should fall into their den.

Presently there came among them the very man of their desire, the author of all this, the object of all their furious hatred; unsuspectingly he walked into their jungle.

When he had finished his book Rizal felt free to make the excursion Viola had proposed. They tramped together through remote Germany and saw something of Switzerland and of Austria. Rizal, as he went, studied peasant life, and diligently he compared it with the conditions of the Philippine farmers. At the end of the tour, he went to Dresden. There he found that by reputation he was already known to Dr. A. B. Meyer and other scientists, most of whom speedily became his friends.6

For some weeks the museums of Dresden detained him; now the splendid collection of pictures, and now the unusual specimens in the zoölogical and ethnological museums. Thence he passed to Leitmeritz, old Bohemia, where he began that close and intimate friendship with Dr. Ferdinand Blumentritt, the famous ethnologist, that was to last so long as Rizal lived. For months they had been in correspondence; they had even progressed in their letters to the stage of a more than ordinary esteem; for Rizal, as we have seen, having so many other good gifts, had also this abundantly, that he could cause his real self to shine through the imperfect medium of the written word and make it appear what it was, a spirit of power and grace. That he might be identified at the station by his Austrian [137]friend, Rizal sent in advance a pencil-sketch he had made of himself, and with this in hand Dr. Blumentritt knew him instantly. The high opinion the elder scientist had formed of Rizal’s character and talents must have been justified upon closer acquaintance; it appears that Rizal spent most of his time at the Blumentritts’, and Mrs. Blumentritt signified her approbation of him by cooking for him rare old-time Bohemian dainties, unknown to the restaurants and hotels.7 Thence to Vienna, where he became intimate with Nordenfels, the Austrian novelist, and met other men prominent in literature and art. Upon all these he seems to have left the uniform impress of a mind strong, capacious, and candid, and a soul disciplined and enlightened.

His studies in Vienna completed, he passed into Italy, and in a few weeks was pondering the antiquities of Rome. Reviewing there his observations and researches in so many lands, he concluded that the time had come for him to return to the Philippines. The irregularity of his passport by which he had escaped from Manila he had since corrected; legally, he was as free as any one else to travel in the Islands. His objective had been won; he had made good use of his time. He might even have congratulated himself on the diligence of his service. Consecration and an almost prodigious industry had made him one of the foremost scholars of the day; he must now put to use the resources he had gathered for the chief purpose of aiding his people. If we knew more about his disastrous romance we might possibly find that Leonora’s [138]silence had become a motive to draw him home. What we do know is that he was distressed by the reports he had of his mother’s failing eyesight and eager to return to her and help her. For months a double cataract had been growing upon her eyes. He felt sure that he could remove it and restore her vision: it was to this branch of optical surgery that he had given most heed. From Rome he sped to Marseilles, took steamer on July 3, 1887, for Saigon, and transhipped for Manila. On August 5, after five years of wanderings and so many triumphs, he saw once more the green tide of the Pasig.

As soon as he landed he hastened to his mother at Calamba and, laying aside every other business, devoted himself to the care of her eyes. With entire success he performed the operation he had intended, the first of the kind ever done in the Philippines. The fame of Mrs. Mercado’s healing speedily went throughout all the Islands and beyond. In the opinion of most persons of that day and region it meant that, by a miracle as of old, sight had been restored to the blind; and, at a word, Rizal stepped into eminence and a great practice. Of this he was not unworthy. As we shall have occasion to see later, he was well aware of his skill and learning; and, so far as the Orient was concerned, he eclipsed all previous practitioners. Patients came to him with confidence from all parts of the Philippines and even from China.

He had time to renew some of his old friendships, notably with Fernando Canon, who had been fellow-student with him in old Spain and later one of the most effective agents in getting “Noli Me Tangere” [139]into the Islands, whither he had lately returned. Some of the boxes that contained copies of the book had been passed in as Mr. Canon’s stores. One day, walking up and down with him at Calamba, Rizal revealed how nearly the world had come to the loss of this work:

“I did not believe ‘Noli Me Tangere’ would ever be published. I was in Berlin, heartbroken with sadness8 and weakened and discouraged from hunger and deprivation. I was on the point of throwing my work into the fire as a thing accursed and fit only to die. And then came the telegram from Viola. It revived me; it gave me new hope. I went to the station to receive him and spoke to him about my work. He said he might be able to help me. I reflected and then decided to shorten the book and eliminated whole chapters. So he found it much more concise than it had been. This accounts for the loose pages of manuscript to which you have referred. But these will have a place in the continuation.

“I will publish seven volumes about Philippine conditions. Then if I do not succeed in awakening my countrymen, I will shoot myself.”9

To his account of this incident Mr. Canon adds:

“Still there vibrates in my ears the inflections of his voice as he said this. One could recognize Rizal anywhere by the tones of his voice.”

In the midst of his busy employments, there fell upon him, early in 1888, a summons to Manila to appear before Governor-General Terrero. [140]

This ominous message was the first repercussion from “Noli Me Tangere”; the classes affronted in that book and burning for revenge were moving to secure it. Here between the claws of their System was the man they hated; it would go hard if he escaped where so many lesser men had perished. With what feelings he obeyed the summons he has not told us, but there can be hardly a doubt that he knew by whose manœuvers he was now in the toils. It is the most singular fact in his whole strange career that he never betrayed the least concern as to what should become of him and throughout whatsoever process might be instituted against him behaved as if it were the trial of another person of which he was only the moderately interested witness. It was so now. With unruffled self-possession he passed before the governor-general. Terrero told him bluntly of the report of the committee appointed to examine “Noli Me Tangere.” Rizal observed that the examination must have been faulty, for the book was not what the committee had called it but innocent. He made so able a defense that Terrero said finally that as for himself he had read no more of it than the extracts the committee had cited in its report, but now he should like to read it all and judge for himself, and asked for a copy of it. This modest request being (despite all fierce decrees) complied with, the governor-general hemmed a little and said he feared that great enmity had been aroused against Rizal among the classes he had described. It was enmity that might even go so far as to attempt the author’s life. For his safety, therefore, [141]it had been deemed wise to assign to him a body-guard so long as he should remain in the Islands.

Of this labored device Rizal might have said that it was but glass, and the very sun shone through it. Henceforth every movement he made was to be watched and reported, and here was the spy provided by the Government, clumsy-clever, as usual, and forcible-feeble.10

Yet even this incident, as things fell out, was to contribute something to his fame and little joy to his enemies. The body-guard assigned to him was a young Spaniard, Lieutenant José de Andrade, born into the governing class and fulfilled with all Spanish prejudices. Although his associates were of the type that Rizal had so mercilessly pilloried, so that in “Noli Me Tangere” he could hardly fail to recognize portraits of intimate friends, Lieutenant de Andrade could not more than other men withstand the singularly magnetic charm of this unusual personality.11 From his initial status as official spy and watch-dog, he became Rizal’s devoted friend. Together they took long walking trips into the country, climbed mountains, compared notes and experiences, and recited verses. It is to be supposed that the lieutenant returned the reports he was assigned to make, but reasonably certain that they contained no matter that gratified the hatred of the reactionary element.

We have noted what frenzy of consternation seized upon that element at the lightest whisper of revolt [142]among the oppressed people. It was one of the invariable characteristics of the Spanish domination, an intermittent fever under the empire of which all reason or semblance of reason went to the winds and men outside the asylums acted like raving maniacs. Such manifestations of this strange psychology (only to be explained by recalling the Spaniard’s total misunderstanding of the Filipino nature) as followed the uprising of 1872 were still remembered by oppressor and oppressed. It was now revived for both as knowledge spread of this strange and powerful book. Besides the unendurable smart of its lash, the governing class saw in it consequences of the gravest import. It was standing and irrefutable evidence that the contempt for the native upon which Spanish rule proceeded was baseless; a native had created literature of the highest order. Still more alarming, it threatened to lead the way, to offer the example, to pioneer ceaseless ambuscades of the same kind, to show that the thing superstitiously held to be above all attack could be attacked safely and even with ridicule and this deadly laughter. If the author of “Noli Me Tangere” should escape without punishment, imitators might be expected on every side. Any native anywhere might take up similar weapons; hence, the white man’s supremacy in all the East was in jeopardy.

It is not easy for the Occidental mind to grasp the power this suggestion has upon men charged with the holding in subjection of vast Asiatic populations; but it is to such men always the first consideration. It must be, in fact; because their situation is so abnormal that in times of cool reflection they must wonder [143]at themselves. With bands of soldiers insignificant in numbers they are required to impose upon millions a sovereignty that the millions generally loathe. Diligently, then, they must support the fiction of the white man’s superiority, support it day and night without ceasing and be not too finical about means or manner. Doubtless, to many the task soon becomes congenial, so easily is race hatred bred in places out of the observation of Europe, and so strong is the addiction to it in some hearts not yet well removed from the stone age. Yet there have often appeared in these grimy scenes Europeans that instinctively hated the business and knew well enough that at bottom the real reason for dominating these subject peoples was dirty profits dirtily obtained.12 But these very men, again and again, by the clamors about them and by the panic nature of the fears of what the aroused brown millions might do, have been swept despite themselves into acts at which their better natures revolted.

Governor-General Terrero was of this order, and even above its average. He was willing at the instigation of angry friars to assign a spy to watch Rizal but was determined to avoid the silly and stupid crime of shooting or garroting or even exiling a man whose offense was that he had written a novel some persons did not like. In other days and other administrations men had been shot or garroted or exiled on charges as flimsy, but light was breaking in Spain; even in the face of tradition and old frowning privilege, light was breaking. The first rift in the medieval eclipse was [144]driven by the sword of Napoleon. Slowly ever since it has been widening to echoes of the world’s advance elsewhere. In 1888 the governing class in Spain had become aware of the scorn of that world and began to feel a little the sting of it. Not much, then, nor since, as we are to see in this narrative, and might illustrate by other citations. Lo, it was this same Spain, and so late as 1909, that murdered Francisco Ferrer, the most learned man in her dominions, for but teaching her children in the manner of other nations—nations so far in the front of her that, looking back, they could scarce descry the dust of her sluggard footsteps!

Terrero, at least, was not indifferent to the verdict of enlightened mankind; yet the pressure upon him to take some action against this atrocious leveler and dangerous character was greater than he could withstand. It came from the power that made or broke governor-generals, the power of the orders, supreme in the Islands, supreme in Spain on any matter that related to the Islands. By the beginning of 1888 their demand had reached a point where he must compromise with it, and he “advised” Rizal to leave the Philippines at once. The word is equivocal and was meant so to be; the real significance of “advice” in this instance was an unofficial order of deportation.13

Rizal obeyed, but not until he had given to the world new evidence of the versatility of a genius to which there is scarcely a companion in human records. We are to remember, first of all, he was a physician that had chosen diseases of the eye for his specialty, [145]wherein he stood in a place of distinction before his profession. He was next an artist in sculpture and painting; a poet; a master of terse and nervous prose in Spanish, in his native Tagalog, and in ten other languages. He was next a scientist, distinguished in original research, already honored with the regard of leading European minds in many branches of recondite knowledge. This, it will be admitted, is a most unusual range of pursuits. From them economics might be regarded as far removed and negligible. Yet he now showed that his many-sided mind could enlist its energies in even the “dismal science” and his skill in expression could illuminate it.

Taxes in the Philippines had always been haphazard. They were levied without system or anything akin to system. Only one feature about them could be said to be uniform: everywhere the wealthy evaded their just share of the taxation burden; everywhere the poor bore more than was right for them to bear. The history of Spanish rule was a succession of promises of reform, usually wrenched by an insurrection from the unwilling lips of a governor-general and ignored when the time of danger had passed. In the year of grace 1888 came such a reformatory spasm about taxes. When it reached Calamba it was received with exceptional interest for the reason that the Dominicans, with whom the householders had an ancient feud, owned a great deal of property there and on it paid very little.

This, though outside of Rizal’s studies, was a subject all within the purpose to which he had consecrated [146]himself. He was to live for his people; he was to do whatever came to his hand to help them to rise. Here was a poignant illustration of the vast and complicated evils that weighed them down. Since his first interview with Terrero he had been living at Calamba in his mother’s house, practising with brilliant success his profession and lending his influence to every project that seemed to promise good for the Filipinos. His prestige and influence had become great. Despite all the efforts of the Government, knowledge of his book and of its meaning was wide-spread. Copies were continually being smuggled into the country and passed from hand to hand. Often at the approach of officers they were buried in fields or rubbish-heaps and dug up again when the danger was gone. A Filipino that could read was a popular man, then, in his community; he found much employment reading “Noli Me Tangere” to groups that cowered in the brush, maybe, a sentinel posted to give warning of the approach of the Civil Guard. The result of all this could be but one thing. From the mass of the despised Filipinos he was emerging as their natural leader.

He observed now the approach of the taxation issue and, one might say, went forth to meet it. His facile and powerful mind absorbed the whole business. Taxation he studied until he seemed to know more about it than any other man in the Islands. In the manner of the true modern investigator, he sought for facts, not arguments: what the poor man paid upon his small holding, what the rich owner paid upon his great estate. When these had been gathered, he reduced them all to a report that the overburdened taxpayers [147]took for their own and presented to the Government impressively signed by their local officers.14

He had done more here, very likely, than he himself knew. The document thus prepared became the rallying-point for another of those struggles between the people and the Government that increasingly signaled the downfall of the existing System. Slowly the nineteenth century was closing in upon the sixteenth, democracy upon the autocracy that at the borders of civilization still outlived the date of its normal demise. Rizal’s work on taxation showed the Filipinos what they could do by uniting their efforts. In their country, too, the exploiter held the exploited by fomenting among them envyings, jealousies, and caste; a process that everywhere attends (and usually comprises) the white man’s burden, and whereof India offers the chief surviving example. In the face of every obstacle and discouragement the Filipinos were now learning the lesson of union, and the only shadow union cast forward was revolt.

Rizal’s leadership was a phrase we used in a foregoing paragraph. It is to be noted that he came into that eminence without an effort of his own, without planning or connivance. He was elated to find greatness thus thrust upon him and would not have been human otherwise; yet to be conspicuous had never been any real part of his scheme of life, and when elation was at its height it never obscured the fact that what he really sought was a result for the country and not kudos for himself. But he was the most famous of living Filipinos; knowledge of his place among the [148]world’s scientists was now general among his countrymen; those that had not been able to read “Noli Me Tangere” nor to hear it read were becoming aware by common report of the nature of its protest. He was the one man that had been able to make the bitter cry of the Filipinos audible to the world. He had best formulated and expressed the wrongs under which those people suffered. He alone, with this fierce derision, had dared to defy the power of the friars and the brutal fists of the Civil Guards. Naturally, the people turned to him, and the unanimity with which they sought his counsel might have shown the Spaniards again among what fires they were walking; for the spirit that gave rise to the popularity of Rizal was even more significant than anything he said in his book. Before that book was written the spirit had been there; it was growing while the friars debated the best means to suppress the audacious author; it was certain to break out into open revolt—if not under Rizal, then under some one else.

In view of these conditions, Rizal has been subjected to some criticism for obeying the sugar-coated deportation-order of the governor-general and taking himself from the Islands at a time so momentous. The criticism is not now important but, to keep straight the thread of narrative, may be examined here. To say nothing of the obvious fact that, as the power of the governor-general was absolute, hesitation to obey would be followed by an explicit command, other things were to be considered. All Rizal’s instincts strove against the idea of advance by physical violence. He believed in the weapons of the spirit, not [149]in the carnal sword. To defy the governor-general’s “advice” meant but one thing. It would be a direct appeal to physical force; it would be followed by revolution and slaughter; and to these he felt he could never consent.

Moreover, he was up to this time not in favor of immediate separation from Spain. On this issue his views have been distorted by controversialists that have selected expressions seemingly favorable to one side or the other of a disputed question. Long after events had wholly changed the face and the substance of Philippine affairs it was the custom of persons opposed to Philippine independence to cite Rizal in support of their arguments. This was unfairly done. Reference to one undeniable fact should be enough to dispose of the fabricated uncertainty about his views on this question. All the reforms he strove for looked to independence and could not look to anything else. It was not for academic satisfaction he desired increase of culture among his people, but that with wisdom and confidence they might take their place among the nations of earth. It was not for the mere sake of teaching that he desired to see them taught, but that they might be taught to be free.

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, [150]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.

But even so, in a way, what confronted him and the Philippines at the moment was beyond choosing. The immediate demand must be for the reforms that lay in Spain’s power to give or to withhold; these were imperative; [151]that a start may be made upon the road, let us unite and demand these first reforms.

There can be no manner of doubt that these were the ideas that controlled him when Terrero “advised” him to depart, and none that in the next few years his views on these subjects contracted as he looked more searchingly upon the troglodyte methods of the Spanish rulers. He was the less reluctant to leave the Philippines because his private life, apart from his career of service, had been darkened by the catastrophe of his love-affair; he had come home to find Leonora married. Two other impulses concurred to urge him away. The success of “Noli Me Tangere” (despite so many and powerful measures taken to suppress the book) and the manifest effect of it upon the Filipino mind must have strongly reminded him of that sequel he had vaguely intended when he completed the last chapters of his novel. He could not hope to accomplish any such work at home; he could not hope, even if he should write it there, to find a publisher for it in the Islands nor to smuggle out the manuscript. To write it he must be abroad. Next, he had seen much of Europe but nothing of that American Republic about which Jagor’s prophecy had so inflamed his youthful mind. Here, by Jagor’s logic, was the power destined some day to transform all the regions bordering upon the Pacific, and he had never seen it. This was also the country whose history and spirit he had glimpsed in the “Lives of the Presidents” that he so eagerly read and returned to. In that country farmers’ boys, canal-boat drivers, tailors’ apprentices, rail-splitters, journeyman printers, any son of the plain people could [152]rise to any place, even the highest. It was a country that conspicuously had won to freedom and independence out of a gross tyranny. Therefore, it had a peculiar claim to his attention. As he must go somewhere, he planned to return to Europe by way of the United States.

He was relieved of all anxiety about his mother. The eyesight of her youth had been restored to her.

This time there was no difficulty about his passport and no need that he should, like an escaping criminal, steal at night from the city. The responsible powers were but too glad to have him go. He sailed from Manila on February 28, 1888, going first to Hong-Kong. There and in the neighboring city of Macao he visited and talked with many refugees and exiles of 1872, annus hystericus in Philippine history. By deportation or flight that year the islands had lost hundreds of their best minds and ablest servitors. That many of these were afterward proved to have had nothing to do with the uprising for which they were banished or hunted is superfluous evidence of the mad psychology of the time. In most of these cases there were no trials, no investigations, no queries. Some one frenzied with fear imagined the man across the street to be behaving in a way that indicated conspiracy; to the Ladrones with him! Some one else saw two men in the street salute each other with suspicious gravity; the next morning both were on their way to the Carolines.16 The Herrara family had maintained a back yard quarrel with the Venturas. Mr. Ventura [153]was denounced and spent the rest of his life in loneliness at Macao. It was the Lion’s Mouth and the cachets of the Bastile, revived for the astonished instruction of the age of steam. Cases are in the records of men that were seen carrying home bundles—fish, maybe, or steak. “Bombs!” cried the officers, under the sway of emotion, and that night haled the unfortunate householder from his bed. Sometimes the intended victims of these maniacal manifestations received friendly hints before the blow fell and had time to flee to the woods, whence they made their way out of the country, to live, very likely, in the utmost poverty.

Such was the lot, in fact, of most of the men deported. One of them, a learned lawyer, the ornament of the Philippine bar, as innocent of the conspiracy as the premier of Spain himself, was twenty years later picking up the crumbs of a living by trying to practise a little Spanish law in London.17

It is to be assumed that conversation with such men did nothing to soften Rizal’s spirit or to cool his ardor of service. They were the living monuments to the hopeless incapacity of the existing System to govern or to advance. From his days and nights in their company he passed to Japan, where in the space of one month he achieved the almost incredible feat of mastering the Japanese language. But for the testimony of the facts the hardiest biographer would scarce dare the assertion. Rizal came to Japan with scarce a word of Japanese; he remained but one month; before he departed he was speaking it so well that the natives [154]thought he was a countryman of theirs, and he was acting as their interpreter. Thereafter he could speak and write Japanese as readily as English or German.

At Hong-Kong he had been somewhat surprised to find himself invited to the Spanish consulate and urged to abide there.18 At Tokio this experience was repeated, the Spanish legation offering him its hospitality and even suggesting employment as a translator. The purposes of these advances were clear enough. He was one that the Government willed, after its custom, to have always under surveillance; to have him beneath a legation roof was easier and cheaper than to hire secret service men.

From Yokohama he sailed for San Francisco, astonishing his fellow-travelers by conversing with all the aliens in their own tongues, whatever these might be. Among them was a Japanese that knew not a word of English. Rizal attached himself to this unfortunate and acted as his interpreter all the way to London.

When he landed at San Francisco, April 28, 1888, his first experiences under the American flag were hardly calculated to swell his enthusiasm for the republic. It happened to be a time when a terror of epidemics was afoot, and he might have reminded himself from what he saw that sporadic hysteria is not the exclusive possession of the Spaniards nor of anybody else. What a whisper of insurrection meant to a Spanish government officer in Manila, a vision of a cholera-germ might signify to a health-officer in America. The health authorities of San Francisco were then busily [155]quarantining everything that came into the port. To them the fact that Rizal’s steamer carried a clean bill of health meant nothing, nor that she had been properly inspected and cleared at Yokohama, nor that no disease had developed among her people on the way over. Who knew what horrent microbes might be lurking in her woodwork or snugging in the coal-hole? Therefore, authority decreed to hold her day after day in quarantine while the passengers chafed and fidgeted and the British among them complained to their consul and threatened an international scandal.19

Rizal seems to have endured the affliction with his customary philosophy. From the deck he made sketches of the new country that thus slammed its doors in his face—among them a reproduction of the revenue flag, with its eagle and perpendicular bars, which he thought was a novel and taking design. He did not fail to observe, however, that while the human beings on the steamer were rigidly quarantined the cargo was unloaded, and he wondered how infection could be carried by the passengers and not by the freight. When he was released, he went to the old Palace Hotel in San Francisco and spent several days observing the strange life of the city. Thence, by train over the mountains, noting with astonishment how great an area of the country through which he passed was uninhabited, and apparently being rather entertained than enraged by the horrors of the American sleeping-car. Two things of much greater moment [156]impressed him sadly. One was the race prejudice against the Chinese in San Francisco (then at its height), and the other the race prejudice against the Negro, manifested in some other parts of the country.

Afterward he wrote this summary of his swallow flight across the continent:

From Albany he had gone forward by the Hudson River, and was greatly impressed with its magnificent scenery, but thought that, in the way of commerce alone, the Pasig was busier. From New York he sailed on the steamer City of Rome, then esteemed a maritime masterpiece, and reached London, where he found lodgings with the organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral and settled himself for a season of work and study.

Part of this work became afterward an invaluable legacy to his countrymen and literature. In his youth he had heard of a wonderful book, of which only two or three copies existed in all the world, a book written in 160720 about the Philippine Islands and their people as they were then. A blunt, honest old Spaniard, Antonio de Morga, had written it, apparently with no purpose except to tell the truth, an impulse that in [157]itself for his times was enough to confer distinction. Other Spanish writers of that day had written to create desired impressions, to justify theories or to excuse the Spanish aggression, whereby the lies had dripped like oil from their pens. De Morga had as good a chance as anybody else to know the Islands; he had accompanied one of the earliest of the Spanish expeditions and for seven years had been a part of its exploits. One of the few copies of his book, “Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas,” was in the British Museum. Rizal formed the ambitious design to rescue it from oblivion and republish it, annotated and clarified.

With some difficulty he ran the barrage so strangely erected around this institution and found the precious volume to be all that had been said in praise of it. De Morga’s observations, evidently unbiased, established what Rizal had long surmised and then asserted, that the Filipinos had been historically wronged. The sea-coast folk, at least, the bulk of the nation, had not been more truly savages when Magellan came than the Spaniards themselves. From de Morga’s accounts it was easy to show that the Filipino’s spirit, activities, and general welfare had been in no way bettered by Spanish rule. Arts, industries, products in the Islands, and even energy, seemed to have been more observable among the people in de Morga’s day than at the close of the nineteenth century.

This was a matter of grave importance to the Islanders and so remained long after Rizal’s labors had ceased. The Spanish excused to the world their presence and their cruelties alike on the one ground that the Indio was a savage. Suppose him without [158]European restraint and European inspiration, they said; he would revert to his caves, his raw meat, and his bows and arrows. To learn that he was heir to these centuries of dignity and worth was not only disconcerting but raised a question to which there was no answer. If he was as civilized as the Spaniard, why had he not the Spaniard’s right to be free?

De Morga described at length the arts and industries that flourished in the Philippines long before a Spanish flag had fluttered above their waters; the excellence in weaving, in metalwork, agriculture, government, domestic arts, commerce, navigation; how the natives lived and worked, what good ships they built, what busy marts they had erected.21 On this Rizal’s observations are shrewd and witty, but he sometimes allowed his joy over the vindication of his people and of his own theories about them to sweep him out of that coolly scientific attitude he usually maintained about such things. For this he may be forgiven. He was sensitive, he was proud; he had suffered for the unjust disparagement of his race; he was dealing with evidence that the Filipino stock was as good as any other, as much entitled to development in its own way.

While he was making these studies he found relaxation in athletics. He screwed together some of his regularly apportioned time to get into the fields and [159]play. He learned to box and to play cricket; he had long been an expert fencer.22 At cricket he was so good that it seems a pity baseball came so late into his country; it is a game that would have exactly suited his tastes and inclinings. In the combination of alert mentality and swift physical action that baseball requires must be something peculiarly attractive to the Filipino, for do but observe the astonishing records he has made at it, exciting the admiration of the most experienced judges. Rizal had never forgotten the training in physical exercise he had received from his uncle; he still loved to fence, to ride, to run, to take long, swift walks. His faith was all in the mental health that is fortified by physical well-being; when all his mental enginery had been working full tilt he found ease in the open air, in quick motion and the trees and flowers. His body was as supple as a wrestler’s, and in support of his theories of reciprocal mental and physical soundness it is to be remarked that in all his life he seems never to have been seriously ill.

In London he found congenial company in the household of Dr. Antonio Regidor, a Filipino that had suffered exile in the Cavite frenzy of 1872. Dr. Regidor had three charming daughters. Rizal’s ideas of life and conduct may be gathered from the fact that when, after a time, he discovered that one of these young ladies was forming an attachment for him, instead of being elated he was much troubled in his mind and concluded that in such circumstances the best thing he could do was to take himself out of the young lady’s [160]sight. For once the paths of duty and expediency fell together. By this time he had completed his work at the museum and he now departed for Paris.

There, Juan Luna,23 the Filipino painter, with whom Rizal had formed a close friendship while both were in Madrid, 1882 to 1885, had now made his home and Rizal seems to have rejoiced to renew his associations with his talented countryman. It is certain that the stupidity of race prejudice, which has so many other and blacker wrongs to answer for, has deprived this man of a certain part of his just reward. Yet he was a great painter, the winner of prizes in many European competitions, and an artist that Paris delighted to honor.24 A contemporary and fellow Filipino, Hidalgo, was hardly less successful; so seldom are their achievements counted in any summary of the Malay that most unjustly America is still unaware of them. Rizal usually spent his Sundays in Luna’s studio, sometimes fencing, sometimes talking art, of which he was still, for all his troubles, distractions, and complex activities, the steadfast worshiper. [161]

Though all this time out of the sight of his enemies in Manila, he seems never to have been out of their minds; authoritative evidence that in his novel he had told the truth about them. Theirs was a hatred not unmixed with reasonable fears of his popularity and of his powerful pen. They waited until he was at a safe distance before they moved against him, and then in a way that verified the ancient adage concerning the union of the essential qualities of bully and coward. They struck at him through his family, left now without defense.

His sister Lucia was married to Mariano Herbosa, who in Manila had been Rizal’s dear friend. Herbosa died soon after Rizal’s departure, and his death gave to the friars an opportunity for a revenge as uncouth and revolting as far-fetched. On the ground that Herbosa had not received final absolution before his death, they ordered his body to be dug up and cast out of the church where it had been buried.1 To the family of a sincere Catholic this involved an almost insupportable grief, an almost maddening wrong. That they might give to their action the semblance of legality the friars had telegraphed the archbishop at Manila [162]that Rizal’s brother-in-law had died after neglecting his church duties and abandoning the confessional.2 Then they hypocritically asked what they should do in the case, knowing full well that on such a presentation only one response was possible. Protests and appeals by the family won no mitigation of the harsh sentence; they are said to have been stifled or diverted on the way, so that the archbishop never saw them; and the wife and children must bear the taunts their impotence invited as well as the indignity to the memory of husband and father. It appears that the charges against Herbosa were mere inventions; he had with fidelity performed all his religious duties.

No one connected even remotely or nominally with the bold delineator of friar government was safe; through the persecution of his relatives he himself could be made to suffer. His brother Paciano was now banished to Mindoro on some blown-up charge of thinking sedition. The pretext was nothing; anything would serve, from barratry to simony. Another brother-in-law was still available, Manuel Hidalgo by name. Him the authorities caught on a charge of sacrilege. A child of his had died of cholera, and he had buried it without the ceremonies of the church. The civil law prescribed in cholera cases immediate burial, and the health-officers demanded it. A poor man in such an emergency might well have been distracted between conflicting decrees of church and state. It seems that in other such cases when the head of the family obeyed the civil precepts he heard nothing of sacrilege. But they were not brothers-in-law of Rizal. [163]Pounce, came the church upon the wretched offender. The next thing he knew he was deported.3

Next two of Rizal’s sisters fell into the same net. Sedition and sacrilege were handy offenses. They could be preferred against anybody for anything.

His father was the next victim. In his case the plain purpose was ruin, to be achieved by means suggested to ill minds through an out-cropping of one man’s childish malice. Mr. Mercado raised prize turkeys. The intendant, or manager, of the Dominican estate, which claimed ownership in all the land in the region of the Mercado homestead, had a nice taste in these birds when skilfully cooked, and it was his pleasing habit to demand from time to time gifts of the choicest of the Mercado turkeys to adorn his own table. The time came when it was no longer possible thus to propitiate the petty tyrant; disease had carried off the firstlings of the flock, and what were left were absolutely needed to replenish the breed.

From homely incidents like these we see the Philippines as they were and illuminate again the unforgettable pages of Rizal’s stories. The intendant made no secret of his purpose to revenge himself; they had at least the virtue of candor, these little satraps. He conceived that his immortal dignity had suffered because he had been refused turkeys when there were no turkeys, and nothing would ease the sting of that burning wrong but retribution. When the next rent-day came, Mr. Mercado found that his rent had been doubled. He paid the increase and made no complaint. The next rent-day he found that again the rate had [164]been doubled. This likewise he paid without protest. When the next rent-day came and he found the rate was again increased he made the fatal blunder of appealing to the courts.4

Aggrieved members of the governing class must have joyed to learn of so excellent an opportunity to salve their hurts, also, in this medicament of revenge. Here was the father of the hated José Rizal delivered into their hands. They took the case from the justice of the peace at Calamba, in whose jurisdiction it rightfully belonged, and sent it before a judge whose decision they must have felt sure they could control. There had now become involved in the case a question of broader moment. Mr. Mercado’s sturdy resistance had heartened the other tenants to revive the ancient and unsettled issue of the title to the lands. For many years careful men had held that the Dominicans, who assumed to own all this region and to collect all rents from it, had no right to any of it. The select judge before whom came these questions lost no time in deciding them against Mercado and the other tenants. Mercado appealed, and thereby precipitated one of the strangest incidents of the story.

Of a sudden appeared at Calamba a battery of artillery and a company of soldiers, who ostentatiously took possession of the town as if it had been in a state of armed revolt. At this the inhabitants blinked and gasped, for nowhere on earth lay a more peaceable community. They were not left long in doubt as to what was toward. The commandant of the troops [165]issued a curt order to Mercado and the other tenants involved in the litigation to remove within twenty-four hours all their buildings from the land they had occupied. An appeal was pending, a fact that in all civilized countries would have been sufficient to stay proceedings until the appeal could be decided. It was of no such validity here. To comply with the savage order was physically impossible; there were not hands enough in Calamba nor in all the country around. At the end of the next day the agents of the authorities set fire to all the houses, and among them perished from human sight and treasuring the house where José Rizal was born.5

Across this repulsive story glowers a face permanently evil in history. The governor-general that connived at these barbarities where he did not order them was Emiliano Weyler, immortal in the records of Cuba as “The Butcher,” accused of deeds there so horrible they can never be put into print, accused in the Philippines of huge peculations as well as stupid cruelties, a man that seemed to delight in cruelty as other men delight in kindness. It was he that thought, “in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things,” of the expedient of overawing Calamba and the courts with artillery and martial law upon the heads of the litigants; it was he that had made the most show of a violent hatred of Rizal and furnished the proof that the persecution of Francisco Mercado was revenge upon Francisco Mercado’s son. When Weyler transferred his rule of blood and iron to Cuba, he left in the official archives evidence of the real nature of the [166]proceedings. He can have had no suspicion that he was preparing evidence of his own iniquity to be given to the world through the nation he most hated. His papers were still in the archives August 13, 1898, when Manila surrendered to Dewey and Merritt. Among them was a copy of a letter he had sent at this time to certain of the friar landlords, expressing his full sympathy with them and (with a characteristic touch) the pleasure he had in serving them against the tenantry.6

In the spot from which it had been thus evicted the Mercado family had lived for many years. There could have come upon these kinsfolk of Rizal no sterner test of their fortitude. Before it they went their way undaunted. At Los Baños was a small house to which Mr. Mercado had title. There he led his family to a refuge and continued his fight against the friars.

Rizal was in London when the news reached him of the petty vengeance wreaked upon the body of his brother-in-law. There had been launched some months before by the Filipino colony in Madrid a semimonthly magazine called “La Solidaridad,” the object of which was to arouse and unify the Filipinos and wrest reforms from the Spanish Government. With impunity it could be published in Madrid but could not have lived a day in Manila, a fact sufficiently indicating the power and value of publicity. Spain, with the eyes of Europe upon her, did not dare to do at home the things she did daily in the Philippines; dared not to do them [167]or dared not to avow them. Distance, creating an impenetrable screen, created also in effect a transition from the modern to the antique world. There was much freedom of the press in Spain, a freedom, as we have remarked, partly sustained by the incessant threat of rebellion in Barcelona. Therefore, as a singular fact and almost comically incongruous, “La Solidaridad,”7 with its acrid criticism of the Spanish Government, circulated freely in Spain and was not allowed to enter the Philippines. One of its editors was Marcelo H. del Pilar, a resolute and restless man, type of the intransigent, the indomitable and professional revolutionist. Before long he and Rizal quarreled,8 for he was all for revolution by physical force and Rizal was always asserting its futility. A few years later del Pilar died on his way home to start his long meditated uprising. Untimely was his death if any man’s ever was. He would have reached the Philippines to find in full swing a revolution wherein his tireless energies and fiery spirit would have found an outlet at which men might have wondered.

But before they quarreled Rizal had written much for del Pilar and “La Solidaridad;” poems, articles, editorials, all directed toward Philippine reforms. When he heard of the indignity put for his sake upon the name and clay of Herbosa, he took up his pen and poured out for his journal an account of the incident and his feelings about it that scalded the church authorities [168]with a flood of the short, hot sentences he knew so well how to write—scoriæ and hot lava from the volcano. When the news of the attack upon his father came he was living in Ghent, whither he had retired to write his new novel “El Filibusterismo.” The effect upon him of the persecution of his family is to be observed in the work he was doing at the time; in one place he makes direct reference to it. He has been telling the story of Cabesang Tales, a peaceful Filipino farmer, driven to brigandage by the extortions of the friars and the savageries of the Civil Guards. Then he says, with mingled rage and sarcasm:

[169]

It is the bitter sarcasm of a soul stung beyond endurance with the sense of great wrong.

As a work of fictional art, “El Filibusterismo” is not equal to “Noli Me Tangere.” It is likely that Rizal knew this and as likely that he cared not, having now another purpose than to tell a story powerfully. He is working with rather less of a connected story and rather less of the clear dramatic prevision. The fates of such characters as he left unrelated in “Noli Me Tangere” he follows to the end, but on the way stops to picture lives and conditions not vitally interwoven with the climacteric. Yet in one way this book is the superior in interest, for it reveals the change that had been coming over him in these two years. Slowly there had been erased in his creed the belief in the good intentions of Spain; slowly (and reluctantly, no doubt) he had come to face the thought that to appeal to Spain for reforms was useless and the Filipinos must achieve by their own efforts the changes that would lead to their redemption. That these efforts must be of a peaceful character was a sheet-anchor of faith to which he still clung, or tried to cling, and yet there is evidence that he felt it dragging as more and more the hopeless stupidity of Spain was revealed to him.10 [170]

Evidence of the change in his essential point of view may be found even in the dedication of the new book. It is boldly and uncompromisingly to the men that, perishing on Bagumbayan Field, in 1872, the gored victims of the System, made their names immortal.

[171]

Here is a foretaste of the strange, new, and passionate bitterness that was coming upon him, not heretofore discernible in his writings nor in his life, the nettle smart of a growing disillusion. Something there is, too, that in another man would surely savor of cynicism. “You may or may not have been patriots,” “You may or may not have cherished sentiments for justice and for liberty,” are phrases not of a piece with his old-time faith. The wormwood that flavors these few lines is perceptible throughout the book. In “Noli Me Tangere” the stern arraignment of the friars and the Spanish officers is modulated with many good-natured pictures of Philippine life, with descriptions of the beautiful Philippine country-side, and with gentle fun-making of popular follies. In the sequel11 there are no relieving touches. It is hot metal always overflowing and burning whatever it touches. [172]

Sixteen years after Jagor printed his almost unheeded prophecy, other men less gifted might have seen that his views on Philippine evolution were soundly based. The conditions existing in the Islands could not last much longer. Six or seven discontented millions could not continue to be overawed with soldiery and great guns and managed upon a plan they hated. No matter how assiduously they might be kept from all weapons more deadly than jack-knives and toothpicks, the existing state could not endure. The mere physical fact of the United States, forging ahead upon a totally different principle, would be an influence that soon or late would overturn these sagging bulwarks of antiquity. What was to be the future of the Islands? For a long time the students of Barcelona tried to settle this question, sometimes with debate and sometimes with vociferation. Thence with similar futility it spread to Madrid and elsewhere, and finally Rizal took it up in a series of articles entitled “The Philippines a Century Hence.”1 [173]

What he thought about Philippine independence he here set down as plainly as the law and the Spanish Government would allow. That any one should try to muddle his views on this subject is strange enough when he left thus a testament reasonably explicit in its text and still more in its deductions. Although much latitude was allowed to public discussion in the Spain of that day, plotting to overthrow Spanish rule in the Philippines was still sedition, and under that term the police sometimes included much that was extraneous—in Spain, as elsewhere. Rizal had no fear for himself on this occasion nor any other, but one can easily understand that he wished to save “La Solidaridad” from the ash-can. Hence with admirable skill he steers as close as he can to the forbidden line and yet escapes it.

Against one bugaboo of the timid, and even to this day a favorite device of the crafty, he brought to bear a destructive logic. It was urged that if the Philippines were free they would instantly be snapped up by some powerful and greedy neighbor. The functions of a shield against these ravenous wild beasts, a function later supposed to be performed unselfishly by the United States, was then imagined to fall to the lot of mighty Spain. But for her frowning guns and men-of-war, behold the Philippines a breakfast any morning for Japan or for Great Britain! In those days there were a few Filipinos that were impressed with these fantasies, or said to be; in later times the superior white man often seemed strangely infected with them. To one inclined to take them seriously Rizal’s words might have been commended then, or may be now. [174]

It appears that he had been applying to his country the lessons of the American Revolution.

As to England, she has already enough of colonies in the Orient, and she is too wise to imperil her equilibrium by adding more. She does not wish to run the risk of losing her great empire in India for the sake of the comparatively poorer Philippine Archipelago. If England had even thought of taking the Philippines, she would never have retired from Manila after she had captured it in 1763; she would have retained that great vantage-point and so would have spread her power from Island to Island until all should be hers. For her the game was not worth the candle, and is not. Singapore, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, mean much more to British trade and the empire than the Philippines could ever mean, and she has no idea of risking these great possessions for the sake of a domain so dubious and restless as these Islands. For all reasons of common sense and commercial advantage, England would look with favor upon a state of independence that would open the Philippine ports to British trade. [175]

There is, besides, in England a feeling always growing that the country has gone too far in imperialism and expansion, that the colonies have already begun to weaken the mother-country and there must be no additions to them.

He proceeds next to discuss the probable policies of Germany, China, Holland, Japan, and the United States toward Philippine independence. None of them, in his view, would feel any temptation to interfere with it or to seize the Islands for itself. But, in any event, he says:

He recounts then some of the existing evils in his country and inquires what, if one can imagine another century of such servitude, the Philippines will be reduced to in that time? But without circumlocution he warns the Government that the servitude cannot possibly continue. Unless the prudence of the Government provides remedies that are real, the grievances now accumulating will have but one result.

He points out the fact that so far in Philippine history the revolts have been sporadic and largely local. [177]Earnestly he warns the Government that this cannot continue. Very different would be the uprising of the whole people against a state of unendurable misery, and toward such an uprising the policy of the Government is driving. It is to be remembered, he says, that factors in the problem exist now that never existed before. First, the native spirit has awakened and common misfortune is drawing together all the children of the Islands. Second, the growth of intelligence at home and abroad is fatal to the existing order. All those Filipinos that the cruelty and stupidity of the Government have driven abroad have learned there the rhythm of the march of mankind and are transmitting it home. It is a class that rapidly increases. If it is the brain of the country now, it will in a few years be the country’s nervous system, and of impact upon those nerves let the Government beware.

One of two things, he concludes, is certain. Spain will grant sweeping reforms in the islands, establishing there the liberties and advantages that all civilized people view as birthrights. Or the islands will declare their independence, after staining themselves and Spain with blood. To check the advance of the Filipinos to this crisis Spain has in effect but three weapons. First, the brutalizing effect upon the masses of a caste system; the high caste, as always, alined with the Government. Second, the supremacy of a theocratic class in the Philippine structure, acting to overawe the natives, as in the Dutch colonies the aristocratic class frightens them. Or, third, the impoverishment of the country, the encouragement of tribal discord, and the gradual destruction of the inhabitants. [178]

Already these expedients have been tried enough to prove them worthless for Spain’s ultimate use.

One little fact that he points out might well be remembered by all imperialists. Where the aborigines of a seized country, as in Australia, succumb and disappear before the alien civilization, that makes one situation for the invader. Where the inhabitants, as in the Philippines, adapt themselves to the invader’s civilization, show they can maintain themselves under it, increase in numbers and in restlessness, bettering the instruction they receive, the situation for the alien sovereignty is different and not wholesome.

Still his hope clung to peaceful agitation as the means of improvement.

Retana says that Rizal was one that abhorred violent revolution in his mind and desired it in his heart.

This might easily be. At the time Rizal was studying abroad, many cities such as London, Paris, Hong-Kong, Macao, as well as Madrid, contained small colonies of Filipinos, being chiefly the exiles of 1872 and Cavite. Among them it was customary to circulate pamphlets breathing out destruction to Spanish rule in the Philippines, and so on. These the authors were usually wise enough not to sign, the chief purpose of their labors being, apparently, not so much to launch expeditions for the overthrow of the citadel of oppression as to cheer the hearts of exile with verbal fireworks. One of these came out in March, 1889, in Hong-Kong, but widely circulated wherever there were Filipinos. It is a race that, like the others, has good men and bad, men that go erect and those that crawl. One [179]of the latter species, a creature of Weyler of the Red Hands, was then living in Hong-Kong and felt called upon to answer the inflammatory appeals of his countrymen. Perhaps he was not much of a Filipino; perhaps he was, in the bulk, Spaniard. At least he said in his document that Spain’s rule in the Philippines was the grandest specimen of colonial wisdom ever known and replete with good things for the people. As to the friars, he said that no possible objection existed to them, for they were kind, gentle, fond of the people, and wholly given to good works. So he warned his countrymen to pay no attention to ribald persons that wrote otherwise, for they but walked the straight road to destruction.

Copies of this unique production made their way to Europe and in the end to Paris, where Rizal was then living. In October of that year, 1889, appeared in Paris a rejoinder to sycophancy that set on edge the teeth of every Filipino in Europe. It was unsigned, but to the colonies the authorship seemed unmistakable. Only one Filipino could write like that; only one Filipino could wither with such disdainful sarcasm the apologist for the wrongers of his country.

The manifesto closes with this paragraph:

The judgment of the Filipinos in Europe could hardly have been wrong. There is every reason to hold with them that the writer of this fierce cry of warning was Rizal. [181]

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.

With the same purpose of helping this good angel the sooner to smite the prison locks, he now set himself an unusual task. He was to master French; not after the fashion of the schools, for that he already had, nor for the mere pleasure of acquiring it, but to be able to write in it as if it were his native tongue. [182]He knew what he was about in this; if his novels should fail to arouse the Filipinos he was determined to appeal to Europe in behalf of his country, and he conceived that he could best do this in French. Therefore with indefatigable ardor he pursued the French verb and the other phenomena of Gallic speech into their remotest fastnesses. He took what might be called post-postgraduate work in these arid excursions, employing the help of unusual scholars and including colloquial French with French of the Academy. When we come upon the fact that at the end of these labors he was able to prepare as a text-book for French students a volume of French exercises1 we may perceive that his success was out of the ordinary.

In Paris when the exposition of 1889 came on he was struck with the fact that in that vast and imposing procession of the children of earth his own people, whom he felt and knew to be as worthy as the others, had no place. Therefore he organized an international league to make known to the world the facts about the Filipinos and to refute the slanders that Spanish writers had sown thickly in European literature. He called this society the “Association Internationale des Philippinistes.” Dr. Blumentritt was president, Dr. Rost vice-president, and Dr. Planchut of Paris one of the directors.2 If Rizal was a nationalist, he was also an internationalist; a fact that must be already apparent in these annals. No doubt, being wise about [183]other things, he was not deceived into thinking that internationalism could come by any other than the nationalist route. The first of the declared objects of his Association Internationale was to summon an international congress. Others were to study the Philippines historically and scientifically, to create a Philippine library and museum of Philippine objects, to publish books on Philippine topics, and to arouse public interest in these objects.

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. [184]

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). [187]

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:

Long before the coming of the Spaniards the Malayan Filipinos had an organized and outstretching commerce, foreign as well as domestic. A Chinese [188]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 [189]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.

Other Spaniards of that period bore witness to the same decline; and generations later a German traveler, [190]observing the differences between the habits of the natives under Spanish rule and of those that were still unsubdued, asked if the industrious free peoples would not in their turn become indolent when Christianity and Spain should be forced upon them. “The Filipinos,” Rizal justly concludes from these testimonies, “in spite of the climate, in spite of their few needs (they were less then than now), were not the indolent creatures of our time.”10

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

A fatal combination of causes, he finds.

First, the continual wars and the insurrections that were provoked by Spanish cruelty. When there was no civil strife abroad in the Philippines, able-bodied men were drafted to fight for Spain in Borneo or Indo-China; or there were huge expeditions, usually failures, that took away thousands of the best young men and never returned them. He quotes the Spanish writer, Gaspar de San Agustin, showing how one formerly populous town had been greatly shorn of inhabitants because, being noted as sailors and oarsmen, the Government took them for foreign service.11 In this way, the island of Panay, which had fifty thousand families when the Spaniards came, had been reduced to fifteen thousand.

Ten years after the Legaspi expedition, that is to say, in 1581, sixty years after Magellan’s “discovery,” the islands had lost one third of the total population.12 [191]

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. [192]

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.” [193]

Fourth, taxes and the cruelty of the Government. De los Rios Coronel cites “the natives that were executed, those that left their wives and children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those that were sold into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them,” among the elements disappearing from the population. There were also, it appears from San Agustin, to be added “those flogged to death, women crushed to death by their heavy burdens, those that sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many that are executed or left to die of hunger, those that eat poisonous herbs, and the mothers that kill their children in bearing them.”14 It is not an exhilarating picture; to believe it we must remind ourselves that it is limned by Spaniards: it can have no impulse to a hostile exaggeration.

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 [194]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.

Even when actual slavery was not enforced upon the native, the returns for his labor and efforts were so meager and uncertain he had no longer an incentive to work. There was a kind of padrone or contractor called the encomendero to whom the people of a district were virtually delivered over that he might extract from them all available profit and steer back to Spain with both pockets stuffed with the gold he had wrung from their toil. Usually this person had no other interest than to make his exit as early as possible and as heavily laden, to the which ends conscience should be no hindrance. He robbed the natives of produce where he could not steal labor; he used false measures in buying and selling. The unhappy Filipinos [195]had no appeal. In one town where a particularly brutal encomendero exacted additional tribute by using a steelyard twice as long as it should have been, they rose and tried to kill him—it appears, unfortunately, without success.15

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.

Rizal points out that while in his time the pirates had ceased from troubling and the Dutch colonists were at rest, the other causes of the Filipino uneasiness went on undiminished to a loud chorus of denunciation from the elements responsible for these evils. As usual, names had shifted, the essentials of exploitation were unchanged. The encomendero was no longer the commanding figure in the process of extracting and [196]coining the toilers’ sweat; it was now the local governor, the friar, or both, but the machinery in use was the same. He quotes a French traveler of his own time that observed with astonishment the operations of a typical governor in whose hands “the high and noble functions he performs are nothing more than instruments of gain. He monopolizes all the business and instead of developing the love of work, instead of stimulating the natives to overcome the too natural indolence, he with the abuse of his powers thinks only of destroying all competition that may trouble him or attempt to participate in his profits. It matters little to him that the country is impoverished, without commerce, without industry, if only the governor is quickly enriched.”16

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.” [197]

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.

Agriculture is the natural business of the Islands. Hebetudinous government in Rizal’s time did nothing to encourage or even to defend it. The farmer went his way, preyed upon by the most villainous system of interest pillage so far disclosed in human affairs,17 and the Government gave him never so much as a friendly word. When crops failed, when typhoons wrought huge destruction, when the plague of locusts turned some great green valley to naked desolation, the Government [198]looked on indifferently and sent another tax collector.

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.

Take the best of these schools, or so-called schools, and at their best. “They amount,” says Rizal, “to five or ten years each of 150 days at most, in which the youth comes in contact with those very priests that boldly proclaim that it is an evil for the natives to know Castilian [Spanish], that the native should not be separated from his carabao,18 that he should not have any further aspirations, and so on; five to ten years in which the majority of the students have grasped nothing more than that no one understands what the books say, not even the professors themselves, perhaps; [199]and these five to ten years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole life, that preachment which lowers the dignity of man, which by degrees brutally deprives him of the sentiment of self-esteem, that eternal, stubborn, constant labor to bow the native’s neck, to make him accept the yoke, to place him on a level with the beast.

“Deprive a man, then, of his dignity, and you not only deprive him of his moral strength but you also make him useless even for those that wish to make use of him. Every creature has its stimulus, its main-spring. Man’s is his self-esteem. Take it away from him and he is a corpse, and he that seeks activity in a corpse will encounter only worms.”19

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

Without this no people can realize the good that is potential within them, no people can ever attain to the self-expression that is their due, and no people will ever manifest their normal activities. “A man in the Philippines is only an individual—he is not a member of a nation. He is forbidden and denied the right of association, and is therefore weak and sluggish. The Philippines is an organism whose cells seem to have no arterial system to irrigate it or nervous system to communicate its impressions.… The result of this is that if a prejudicial measure is ordered, no one protests: all goes well apparently until later the evils are felt. Another blood-letting and as the organism has neither nerves nor voice the physician proceeds in the [200]belief that the treatment is not injuring it. It needs a reform, but as it must not speak, it keeps silent and remains with the need.”20

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 [201]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. [202]

More than the persecutions launched against his family disturbed Rizal in the news he was receiving now from Manila. The fire of discontent was rising among the people of the Philippines; the letters of his friends foreshadowed an explosion. Not revolution by peaceful means was at hand but another civil war. He determined to go to Madrid that he might talk with the Filipinos there about these storm-signals and at the same time lodge with the Spanish Government a formal protest against the eviction of the family from its Calamba property.

At Madrid he found the situation much changed in the five years of his absence. In the Filipino colony the feeling had gained that from such a Government nothing was to be won by appeals and agitation. For an illustration men pointed to Cuba. Petitions, reasonings, arguments, beseechings wrought nothing. Whatever Cuba had gained was tribute to its sword. Against this Rizal still counseled. Even in such a crisis he could not rid his mind of the doctrine of fitness for self-government, and so long as he reasoned more than he allowed himself to feel, he could not compromise with his overmastering horror of war.

In this, again, he had outstripped the current thought of his age. A world without war was then the dream [203]of a few enthusiasts, looking to another generation or to some mystic transformation in the chemistry of human blood; what were called practical men went on devising new torpedoes and more powerful explosives for the next conflict. In his own way, different from theirs, he was himself as truly a practical man as ever lived, and a warless humanity was no dream to him; he thought he could see it close at hand. He thought he could see his fellow-men of all lands surrendering the lunacy of combat for a rational settlement of international troubles by agreement and arbitration. Out of the reflexes of his own thought and spirit he was instructed that the hour for this transformation had come.

Up to that time, certainly, the lessons of history, his favorite study, were against him. There can be no doubt that a condition of oppression or general injustice is in essence a condition of violence, and so far in the human story half-emancipated man has found no way to end one condition of violence except by means of another. “It will have blood, they say, blood will have blood,” might have been written across the gates of every house of tyranny. The hope that the frightful wrongs laid upon the Filipinos could be an exception to this primordial rule was alluring to a soul like Rizal’s. We can see now that in the existing stage of civilization it was no better founded than the other deceptive notion that the sufferings of the common people of France under the Ancient Régime could have had any result but retribution in kind. As a matter of strict fact, the Reign of Terror was established years before Dr. Guillotin thought of his device [204]of “a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history.” It was in reality assured by the fathers of many innocent and well meaning ladies and gentlemen whose heads it rolled into the Seine—a painful thought, but historically indisputable. The fierce philosophy of these records Rizal could not assimilate; the poet in him revolted at the ugliness of hatred; he had too genuine a love of his own kind to tolerate cruelty. Whether in the mass or toward individuals he could not endure it. These seem to constitute the only set of facts his mind was unable to absorb. He could in four weeks master a language and could not in a lifetime well comprehend the caveman’s logic of blows.

This amiable strabismus half blinded him to what was really impending in his own country. The truth was that the System was slowly forcing a revolt there; not intentionally, but after the manner of all drunken power. To lay bare the iniquities of that System was to send against it the torch and ax. Every page of “Noli Me Tangere” was in effect a call to battle. He never suspected this, but fact it was nevertheless. To imagine, as he at one time imagined, that intrenched greed would without a struggle surrender its privileges and lay by the cracking of its whips was to imagine that which never was nor shall be. The reversion to primitive standards was inaugurated, not by Filipino revolutionists, but by the System itself, which, denying justice, left to the harassed multitudes nothing but revolution.

At this crux of his story, when he appeared at Madrid [205]as the champion of an impossible peace, and the eyes and hearts of all his countrymen were turning to him, the time may be good to describe the man that had already wielded so tremendous a power.

He was then in his thirty-first year. The first impression one had of him was of wholesome vigor and physical well-being. He was of rather slender build, but all of muscle and sinew compact, for he never remitted his exercises. In height, he was five feet, four inches; coming of what seems to Occidental eyes an undersized people. From long hours at his desk he had contracted a slight stoop. His handsome face retained its fine boyish oval, but rugged character and unshakable firmness were now stamped upon it, and an expression of melancholy. His eyes were still remarked for their brightness. His hands were small and shapely, his feet noticeably small.1

His voice was low in pitch, of a noble tonality, and so strangely vibrant that one hearing it at its best never forgot it. One of his rules was never to raise it; he spoke always with an identical restraint. With such a voice and with his flow of apt and picturesque language he was equipped for public speaking, in which he had made on several occasions a rather marked success; yet he always thought lightly of the art of oratory and refused to pursue it.

Whether among his friends or in his writings he had ordinarily little to say about himself, and there is but one recorded instance when he seemed to give way to [206]the bitter recollections that must at times have assailed him. On this occasion he said to a friend in London with whom he was walking:

“I have traveled around the world. I have studied the important nations by personal and direct observation. I have noted well all the races that have contributed to human progress. I speak all their languages and others. And yet,” he added with a melancholy smile, “I am to the friars merely a vulgar half-breed.”

At Madrid, one of his intimates from the Islands was Teodoro Sandiko, later to be a leader among his people and an honored member of the Philippine Senate. In a letter recalling their association, Senator Sandiko once wrote:2

[207]

Wherever he went, he seemed without effort to make friends of all men that came near him. Set down in a steamer full of strangers, he would be noted at once by every passenger and before dinner was served would be on good terms with most of the persons on board, crew included. Yet, strange to say, he seldom smiled, usually seemed distrait in the midst of others’ mirth, and was sometimes lost in gloomy musing, when he seemed all unaware of his surroundings. In the opinion of his friends, he had almost no self-consciousness; certainly, all his life he hated affectations and never lost a chance to scorch them with his terrible sarcasm; for this man of the world, ordinarily so suave and courteous that he won good will even among his enemies, had certain reserve funds of censuring speech he could make as bitter as gall. Whether he sat, walked, stood, talked, or listened he was always natural, always composed, and always the sure master of himself. When he went through the United States he noticed that the men there conversed without gesticulating, contrary to the practice of the Spaniards and most Europeans. On reflection he deemed the practice to lend strength to utterance and thereafter made it a rule to keep his hands still while he talked.

The image of a man that seldom smiled and yet so easily won his fellows to like him seems out of the drawing of nature and yet in this case is essentially true. There was in Rizal’s face something almost irresistibly winning. Good will looked out of it and warm human sympathy and a kind of downright sincerity that found a way to the notice of even the dullest. It seemed to one studying him attentively [208]that on the original lines of a being all love, gentleness, and meditation had been stamped later a great melancholy and a great and high resolve. Lowly men seemed to understand instinctively something in him they could never have formulated nor described, something friendly and good; and men of learning turned with a similar impulse to a mind that showed itself so wealthy and still so unpretending.

He loved music, was a good judge of it, and composed it readily and well. He loved flowers as all other things beautiful—of course, being an artist born and the instinct ineradicable in him! That charming poem of his, “The Flowers of Heidelberg”3 was written in the intervals between his pursuits of the most advanced discoveries and driest facts in ophthalmology, surgery, ethnology, entomology, anthropology, and the penning of some of the fiercest passages of condensed wrath to be found in any language. It is likely that he saw nothing grotesque in these abrupt transitions; perfectly sincere men have little time for such nice questionings. If we regard the making of poetry as the serious business of his soul, which it was, his chief intellectual relaxation was chess, of which, by the time of his second visit to Madrid, he had become a notable player.4

He had as little vanity as any man conscious of his powers could reasonably have. Yet he was always careful of his appearance and took pains to dress well, after the most modest taste. Even when he was poverty-stricken in Berlin and living on a daily bowl of [209]coffee and piece of bread, he would allow himself no laxity in his attire.

Once he wrote of some pupils of his that he was teaching them to behave like men.5 It was a point of weight with him. His conception of a man was one that had at all times himself in full command. This virtue he had practised assiduously from those old days at the Ateneo when first he perceived its splendors; and now he was so truly captain of his own soul that, as we have seen, he could endure privations, subdue appetites, and urge himself along his road by the sheer force of his will. He was the greater part of his life desperately poor; yet if he had been willing to practise his profession for gain a great fortune was within his grasp. In whatsoever conditions he found himself he still tried to adhere to that plan he had adopted at the Ateneo of apportioning his day according to a schedule. He was more careful of his time than a miser of his gold; he would waste no hour. To his friends he admitted that when he sat silent in company and seemed to be moody he was composing his next article for “La Solidaridad” or a new chapter in one of his books. He was the least superstitious of men, but for years he had a presentiment that he would die by shooting. Once crossing Bagumbayan Field he pointed to the place of execution and said to a companion, “On that spot I shall some day be put to death by a firing-squad.” As a final light upon a singular character, it is to be noted that he was not oppressed by this foreboding. It was accompanied in his mind, as nearly as one can discern, with a conviction [210]that the cause for which he stood must have its victims, and to this extent and no farther showed in him the fatalism supposed to be a distinctive trait of the Malay.

He was ordinarily so calm, so self-contained, so much the example of the reasoning man and the like, that it seems highly incongruous to think of him as a duelist; yet twice he challenged to mortal combat. It appears that under his coolly borne exterior there was fire, and even his beautiful faith in the supremacy of reason had not eradicated all the Old Adam from his blood. He seems never to have thought that the violence he contemplated was nothing but a minute specimen of the war-making he denounced, nor that in sending challenges he reverted from his most cherished doctrines. Perhaps if the inconsistency had been pointed out to him then it would not have disturbed him, and certainly it is a hobgoblin that need not disturb us now. If the queer bundle of nerves that is called man never presented a greater irrelevancy, admiration for him need molt no feather. Both of the quarrels, if so they might be called, that brought out the fighting instinct in the gentle artist-student resulted from incidents in Madrid when he returned there in 1890. W. E. Retana, who had been press-agent in Manila for the friars, was now a Madrid journalist and printed in his newspaper a vicious and baseless attack upon Rizal wherein he sought, doubtless, to revenge the friars on the author of “Noli Me Tangere.” Without delay Rizal sent him a challenge. Mr. Retana seems to have had no appetite to go afield; he published a retraction and apology and the quarrel [211]ended.6 Rather oddly, Retana, who had been in Manila the bitter foe of the Filipino cause and of all its champions (though possibly on a commercial basis), became, after this incident, first the friend and then the biographer of Rizal.

The other altercation was with Antonio Luna,7 afterward a famous commander in the army of the Philippine Republic. About a woman of Rizal’s acquaintance Luna made an unworthy remark, and Rizal sent him a challenge. Having possibly regained sobriety meanwhile, Luna withdrew the remark and apologized for it, whereupon the quarrel was made up without mortal arbitrament. In his chivalrous and unsullied attitude toward women Rizal was true to the finest traditions of his race. Among the faults of the Filipinos, lechery is assuredly not included. Except the Irish, no other people on earth have a higher conception of chastity and sex morality, nor adhere to it with greater tenacity. Retana wrote that Rizal had “a truly upright moral sense.” It was but an inadequate tribute. He was a champion of righteousness; his religion was like Wendell Phillips’s, “a battle not a dream.” When he wrote, “The good of my country, that is all I pursue,” he was not making platform epigrams but telling what the records confirm.

We have spoken of the purity of his conduct; at least as wonderful is the fact that he left so little [212]trace of a selfish aim. Other men with great work to do have had all of his indifference to wealth; what classifies him as above all these is his far rarer indifference to the nobler ambitions for fame and power that have beset so many others in his position and wrecked so many good causes. He sought no place, looked for no honor, cared for applause as little as finite man could be expected to care, seemed to have no yearning for ease nor for pleasure. The lust of the eyes, and that fatal lure, the joy of warming oneself in the sun of one’s own glory tripped him not. We may admit that the balance to be drawn from these facts is not wholly a human figure; one looks for the faults that have disfigured so many other national heroes and the things that laurel-bearing biographers labor deftly to conceal. There seems to be nothing to conceal about this man. And if the tale of his virtues seems at times overwrought so that we might be relieved to find somewhere that he swore, was easily angered, or chewed tobacco or fought a cabman, we are to remember that as his ideals bore him to unusual heights, so it was an unusual condition that forced him early in life to surrender every purpose but the emancipation of his country. And when we have made all allowances for the power of this ambition that swept him along, the fact will remain and be inevitable in the records that here was a strange figure to walk in upon us in the nineteenth century from the ends of the earth.

There remains to be noted a singular fact about that leadership of his people, forced upon him as we have noted, and not of his designing or plotting. With his [213]prestige and the popularity that was the certain consequence of a success so gratifying to the hurt national pride, he had but to make a gesture to his countrymen and they would have followed him over the smoking ruins of Malacañan or any other place, fighting with bolos if they could come by no rifles. It was a temptation to dramatics on the world stage that few men could have resisted. What reality of stern virtue, worthier of a legendary age than of his own times, was in this man may be gaged from the fact that he not so much resisted the temptation as ignored it. Perhaps to him it was no temptation; at least he may be thought of as living in his inner and real self, where such things weighed nothing. The time demanded from a revolutionary leader a proclamation and loud cheers; he met it with a learned treatise on taxation and how taxation might be improved. Bitter are the penalties that attend a dark skin! But for his complexion the world would class him with its purest and best, with Washington and William the Silent, Phocion and Brutus, Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and the rest of the scanty band that, having great tasks thrust upon them, forgot themselves and their tenements of clay to think only of the Common Good.

As to how José Rizal would stand such a test applied to his career and all of it, take this testimony of Retana, who from antecedent probability at least would invent no extravagance of praise. Even in his youth, said Retana, every injustice, every crime, every wrong, struck home to his sensibilities. He walked with unsmirched garments through a world filled with the reek of a sordid time and the cruelty that man [214]works upon man, trying to make a protest against all oppressions and busy to the end with the troubles of his fellows but not with his own.

To this sketch of his moral self, not less engaging than his physical portraiture, remains to be added one line. Pursued indefatigably by bigotry and prejudice, he was himself of a singular tolerance. The wrongs of his people he resented with towering indignation, and his own he viewed with an astonishing calm. To the gibes and sneers and taunts of his foes he had but the one habitual response:

“To understand all is to forgive all!” [215]

For Spanish or Filipino ears, “filibuster” has nothing of the comic or disreputable suggestion that it bears to the American. In the Philippines of Rizal’s day it denoted a person opposed to the existing régime, an insurgent, whether advocating peaceful or violent means of separation from Spain. “El Filibusterismo” means a movement for Philippine independence.

In this novel again, the chief figure is Ibarra, the hero of “Noli Me Tangere.” It was Elias, not Ibarra, that was struck with the bullets of the Civil Guards when they were pursuing his banca; Ibarra escaped unhurt. He made his way out of the country and now returns after some years, disguised and under an assumed name, to seek the revenge upon which all this time his heart has been brooding. The difference between the Ibarra that refused Elias’ prayer to lead the people and this Ibarra become now hopeless of any peaceful remedy betrays once more the change we have already noted as coming over Rizal’s most cherished convictions and in spite of himself. A struggle was going on between what he still wished to believe and what his judgment told him was inevitable, and in the conflict he grew in hardihood. From the savage vengeance that pursued his sisters, brothers, [216]father, and mother when it had failed to reach him, he was beginning to learn how idle was the hope to win reform by merely ladylike appeals. Yet the book was not of purpose any signal to popular revolt. What he intended was solemn warning. So far the Filipino has stood and asked for justice, still patient, still holding out the friendly hand. Wronged hearts will not always accept scurvy affronts; men will not always put up with kicks when they ask fair play. This Filipino whom you despise and trample on nineteen years in twenty and who, in the twentieth, throws you into a panic, is not the human dish-cloth you are pleased now to imagine him. He has in him the capacity for a great and memorable revenge, and upon your heads he will pull down your structure if you do not hear him.

Other characters of the first book reappear in this. Father Salvi, the lascivious friar whose machinations brought about Ibarra’s downfall; Capitán Tiago, Doña Victorina, and Basilio, the son of Sisa. Ibarra calls himself Mr. Simoun. His pretended business is that of a traveling merchant of jewelry and laces; his real occupation is to spy out the land, to lay plots against the governing class that ruined him, and, if possible, to release Maria Clara from her convent prison. The narrative is chiefly concerned with these plots and their failure; but behind them always seems to show a grim figure telling Government that such plots will not always fail.

The book starts with a gibe at the people with whose tardiness to respond to progressive ideas Rizal was becoming impatient. [217]

As before, Rizal uses with photographic accuracy the materials of Philippine life that had passed under his own observation. The wanderings of Simoun the jeweler give him the needed occasions; he hangs upon them startling pictures of actual conditions, the power of the friars, the brutality and cowardice of the governing class, the terrible wrongs of the people; even the story of Maria Clara’s parentage he had from an incident in his own neighborhood. Poverty, chastity,1 and obedience were the oath of the degenerate successors to a noble race of Christianity’s pioneers. [218]How lightly they regarded the second item in this creed he had shown in “Noli Me Tangere.” As to poverty, their corporations had become the wealthiest institutions in the Islands. He is now about to show how they had obtained the wealth that made their power supreme and pervasive.

Tandang Selo is a native wood-cutter that by industry and self-denial has saved a little money. He has a son, Tales, industrious and thrifty like himself. Tales works for a rich landowner and saves enough to buy two carabaos, to marry, and to accumulate a capital of several hundred pesos. He has ambition; he wishes to rise in the world. There is the jungle, unclaimed, untilled, but fertile. With his father, his wife, and children he goes into it, clears away the forest, and makes tillable fields.

To cut for the first time the jungle turf is supposed to release a dangerous malaria. Of this, Tales’s wife and eldest child fall ill and die. The others continue to plant and to cultivate.

As they begin to harvest the first crop, an agent of the friars appears, notifies them that the land belongs to one of the orders, and levies on the crop for the rent.

Tales has every reason to believe that the claim is fraudulent, but he is only an Indio; the courts are organized against him and his people, and he pays tribute rather than risk a lawsuit.

The next year the crops are good and the friars double the rent.

Nevertheless the family works hard and saves a little money. The desire of the father’s heart is to send his eldest daughter, Juli, to school in Manila. [219]Next year the rent is again increased, and the hope of education begins to fail.

When the rent has risen from thirty to two hundred pesos, Tales refuses to pay the latest increase. Then the friars’ agent tells him to prepare to be evicted, for another tenant will come and till the fields Tales has won from the jungle.

Tales applies to the courts for relief and is at once despoiled of his savings to pay the fees; likewise to satisfy the cormorants that batten upon every court proceeding.

The farm is exposed to the raids of the tulisanes, or robbers. The invisible government has energy enough to play eavesdropper upon its own people, but makes scarcely an effort to restrain the banditti that hover in all the forests and often descend upon the towns, even large towns.

To protect his fields from these vultures, Tales patrols them with a shot-gun and so terrifies the friars’ agents and the new tenant that the benevolent intention of turning him into the road must be abandoned until the lawsuit shall be decided.

Under the code his case is unassailable. Even by their own charter the friars cannot own land. The judges know that this is so, but one of their number loses his place for giving a decision in favor of a native; the rest have no desire to share his fate and so to go back to Spain humiliated as well as impoverished. They advise Tales to surrender and pay what is demanded of him. The fighting blood of the Malay is up within him: he stands in his place and demands that the friars produce some evidence of ownership—[220]title-deeds, documents, papers, anything. None of these have the friars to show; their claim here, as so often in such cases, rests upon the tradition of a concession. Nowhere else would such a plea, unsupported and unwitnessed, be seriously considered in a court of justice. In the Philippines it outweighs everything else, and the judges decide in favor of the friars.

Tales with his gun continues to patrol his land. The friars obtain a decree from the governor-general ordering all arms to be surrendered, and so they take away the shot-gun. Tales patrols his fields with a bolo.

The bolo is taken from him on the pretext that it is too long and therefore comes within the prohibition of the decree about arms. Tales patrols his fields with an ax.

Then the tulisanes come and capture him and hold him for five hundred pesos ransom.

To get the money, Juli sells herself into slavery in the neighboring town. It is not called by that name, her servitude; but that is what it amounts to.

She is engaged to a young man whom she dearly loves. The sale of herself is likely to end her chance of marriage.

With the money so raised, her father is ransomed. He comes home to find the friars’ agent and the new tenant walking over the fields that with so much labor the Tales family has cleared.

Tales steals a revolver and joins the tulisanes. That night the friars’ agent and the new tenant and the new tenant’s wife are murdered.2 [221]

The substance of this story, as you perceive, is taken from the experiences of the tenants of Calamba, among them Rizal’s own folk.

There is terrible irony in a description of how the governor-general governs; how he transacts business and promotes the welfare of the Islands. He has been on a hunting expedition in which he has shot nothing and returns ill tempered to Los Baños, where he has his bath, drinks his cocoanut milk, and sits down to a game of cards with three friars. From this reasonable occupation his chief secretary tries to divert his attention to matters of public business. This annoys the governor-general.

“The petition about sporting arms,” suggests the secretary.

“Forbidden!” says the governor-general and goes on playing. The secretary tries to intimate that this is not wise. He only arouses the wrath of the executive.

The schoolmaster at Tiani has petitioned for a better location for his school. The old store-room he is using has no roof: he has bought with his own funds books and pictures, and he wishes them not to be ruined.

“I’ve heard several complaints against this schoolmaster,” says his Excellency. “I think the best thing would be to suspend him.”

“Suspended!”3 says the secretary.

“In the future,” says the governor-general, “all that complain will be suspended.” [222]

The well known fact is developed that there are not nearly enough school-houses. Somebody suggests that the cockpits might be used for schools when not needed for the more exalted purpose to which they are dedicated. Horror meets the proposal to interfere, for the sake of mere education, with reasonable sport and with the Government’s revenue.

It is probably the worst Government in the world.

At the end of the card game the secretary whispers to his Excellency that that woman is around again, the daughter of Cabesang Tales, with her petition. When Tales fled to the tulisanes the authorities, true to form, arrested his aged father in his stead and now hold him in prison.

You can see that it is cartoon-making with a vengeance. The mirth is savage. It gives one the shivers. This man taught the methods of peace and rejected every suggestion that reform could be won by physical violence. Yet the way he was walking is clear. In ten [223]years if he had kept on he would himself have been leading an insurrection. It has always been so; in the cloister the sweet gentle spirit dreaming of oppression overcome by reason, and in the streets rude weapons beating off the shackles.

As Simoun the jeweler, Ibarra brings dramatic vengeance upon the head of Father Salvi. In Manila is an American prestidigitator who is exhibiting the trick known as the talking head. In this instance the head is supposed to be that of an ancient Egyptian. In the midst of gruesome settings to enhance the effect, it tells to an audience in which Salvi is seated the story of Maria Clara, disguised as an event of four thousand years ago. Salvi, conscience-stricken, falls in a fit.5

Simoun’s purpose from the beginning has been to excite the people to an uprising by which he hopes to win his revenge on friars and Government alike and to free Maria Clara from the nunnery where she has been virtually a prisoner since Ibarra’s arrest, as told in “Noli Me Tangere.” The actual situation in the Islands is illuminated by picturing Simoun as telling some persons that the insurrection is desired by the governor-general to free himself from the friars, and telling others that the friars are planning it to rid themselves of the governor-general. In the chaos through which the social order was drifting, either story was plausible. Simoun in his ceaseless intriguing has manœuvered within his power Quiroga, an influential Chinaman, also a type in those days, who has secret and unseemly dealings with the Government. [224]Through this connection Simoun is able to have his rifles passed through the custom-house as some of Quiroga’s illicit importations. He spreads his nets and lays his plans, tutors his accomplices, distributes his arms, and when all is ready for his explosion he is stunned with the news that so far as Maria Clara is concerned it is too late. She is dead in the convent.

There are two other love-stories in the book, both unhappy, both reflexes of Rizal’s own great unhappiness.

One is of Basilio and Juli. Basilio is the son of Sisa, the native woman in “Noli Me Tangere,” driven insane by misfortunes and persecutions; Juli is the daughter of Cabesang Tales, driven into brigandage by the exactions of the friars.

So slight a thing as a frolic of students brings Basilio and Juli to their tragedy. Some of the students have a supper. It is innocent and insignificant, but the spies watch it. That night pasquinades are pasted upon the doors of the university, pasquinades that the nervous authorities deem seditious. To overwrought minds the bad verses and cheap jocularity of these compositions indicate that the treason must be connected with the students’ supper. Therefore, arrest all the students. The order includes Basilio, who had not attended the fiesta, and whose rooms when searched yield nothing but text-books on medicine.

In the rural region where Juli is living, terrible reports are current as to the fate of these students. At one moment they are condemned to be shot; at another the sentence has already been carried out. Then comes news that with the help of influential and [225]wealthy relatives they hope to escape the death-penalty; all except Basilio, who has no wealthy friends nor influence of any kind.

There is in the town where Juli lives a friar, Father Camorra, of great power in the Government. An old woman urges Juli to go to the convento6 and beg the intercession of Father Camorra. A word from him will be enough to save Basilio’s life. Juli knows well enough what is the real nature of the sacrifice demanded of her; so many a Filipino girl has walked or been dragged along that road to destruction. The reports about the students grow worse. At last it appears that Basilio has been condemned to death and in twenty-four hours will stand before the firing-squad. Not a hope remains except through the intercession of Father Camorra. The old woman beseeches; still Juli refuses. At last she is forced to the door of the convento. That night a woman, screaming wildly, throws herself from an upper window of the house. When help comes to her she is dead. The body is recognized as that of Juli.7

Basilio escapes the executioner. When he learns of the fate of Juli he joins Simoun, the disguised Ibarra, who has tried in vain to interest him in the plans for a revolution.

The other story concerns Isagani, type of the educated and ambitious young Filipino, and Paulita, type of the exquisite native beauty. Isagani is deeply in love. Nevertheless, he puts fidelity to his country above even the idol of his heart. He is a leader among [226]the discontented students. They do not think of sedition but only of reforms peacefully achieved, the Rizal idea of progress. An opportunity arising, Isagani speaks with the greatest frankness to Father Fernandez, a Dominican friar, and one of the instructors at the university. Their conversation gives the author a chance to expose the defects in the system of higher education—so called. He does more than expose it; he blasts and withers it.8 Isagani never hesitates to speak his opinions about these things, though always professing perfect loyalty. He is arrested with the other students in the dog-day fit that has seized upon the authorities. At the news the relatives of Paulita insist that she shall cast over a lover so notorious and so dangerous. It is Rizal and Leonora again. Paulita yields to them; she allows herself to be engaged to Isagani’s rival and the date is fixed for her wedding. It is the date that Simoun selects for the consummation of his plot. Basilio agrees to help him.

Paulita’s relatives are rich; they have invited the most eminent persons in the colony, including the governor-general himself. Simoun, the wealthy jeweler, will be there. He has arranged with bands of tulisanes and certain discontented peasants to gather on that date to attack the city. An explosion like the firing of a cannon is to be their signal.

The guests come bearing or sending beautiful gifts. Simoun presents a lamp of strange and beautiful design—burning. In it is a charge of dynamite sufficient to blow up the house and all in it. This will furnish the signal for the attack. He has told this to Basilio. [227]Outside the house of festival, Isagani lingers, hoping to catch one farewell glimpse of the sweetheart he has lost. Basilio sees him and tries to lead him away before the explosion. Isagani refuses to move. In despair Basilio tells him what is afoot about the lamp. Isagani, overwhelmed with horror at the thought that the woman he loves is about to perish, runs into the house, seizes the lighted lamp, throws it into the river, and follows it there before any one has a chance to stop him.9

Great excitement follows, in which something of the plot is revealed; and Simoun is unmasked, but not until he has had a chance to escape. He is pursued and wounded. He dies in the house of a Filipino family where he has found refuge. On his death-bed he confesses to a priest his real name and story.10

“God will forgive you, Señor Simoun,” says the priest. “He knows that we are fallible. He has seen that you have suffered, and in ordaining that the chastisement of your faults should come as death from the very ones you have instigated to crime, we can see His infinite mercy. He has frustrated your plans one by one, the best conceived, first by the death of Maria Clara, then by a lack of preparation, then in some mysterious way. Let us bow to His will and render Him thanks!”

Nothing could be plainer: Rizal is enforcing with a final warning the lesson of his book.

So Ibarra dies with his revenge unaccomplished, and the priest takes the box in which the dead man’s great wealth is supposed to be contained and without opening it throws it into the sea.

Only an artist would have thought of such an ending. [233]

Failure was all he reaped at Madrid in his efforts to win some measure of justice for his family, a fact that hardly could have astonished him then and seems but normal now. In the seats of authority was no man that loved justice so much as he feared the huge political machine set up by the friars and administered (through particularly appropriate selection) by the ruffian Weyler. Early in 1891, Rizal returned to Paris, where he revisited his former friends, and so passed to Ghent. There he settled himself to the finishing of “El Filibusterismo” and worked without further interruption until the book was done and on its way to the publisher.

Powerful influences now seemed to draw him again to the East; it is likely that but for his book he would have gone thither direct from Madrid when he learned how little help he might expect from the gross and inert government. The situation of his family caused him a harrowing anxiety.1 It was for his sake that they were subjected to the abominable persecutions of the petty tyrants of the existing System. His soul revolted at the idea that they should be thus tormented while he was safely out of the range of his enemies’ venom. After his consultations with the Filipinos in Madrid the gloomy outlook in the Philippines was [234]more than before a burden on his thought. He must have known that this time, as he had forecasted in his writings, revolt would be more than local. He could hardly hope to be allowed to land in the Islands, but Hong-Kong was a convenient point from which to watch developments and to put forth his influence; and as to his family he began to have a purpose that if carried out would take them beyond the power of Spanish officers to hector and to wound. In October, 1891, he sailed for Hong-Kong, where he hoped to establish himself in his profession, to gather his family, and to be ready to help his countrymen with the cautionary wisdom of which he held them to be most in need.

His hopes of professional success were better founded than he knew. Almost at once he stepped into a large practice. This is not the usual experience of new physicians in a new field, but his fame as an oculist had gone before him. For the first time in his life he had unpledged money in his purse. He sent to the Philippines for his sister Lucia, who happened then not to be in jail nor exiled nor pinioned to the miseries of procrastinating law-courts, and in her company he tasted something of the novelty of ease. The project he had half formed about the rescue of his harassed relatives took him in the following spring to Borneo. As it seemed to him virtually certain that his enemies would continue to pursue any one known to be near or dear to him, and there was no career for them in Hong-Kong, he purposed to found a new homestead for them under another flag. They were [235]a numerous family, and inasmuch as the peculiar ideas of revenge we have found to be current in the Spanish colony made his second cousin or his great-grandmother a quite feasible substitute for himself in the way of vicarious atonement, it was necessary to remove them all. In North Borneo the British authorities offered him on attractive terms an area of fertile land adapted to his purposes. He went to look at it, found it in all respects suitable, and resolved to carry out his plan of a Rizal family refuge.2

From his happy country of those days not a soul could depart without the sanction of the Government. To secure this for anybody connected with him would be hard enough; even for an individual and a temporary absence like Lucia’s it was hard. How much harder it would be to rescue a whole tribe, and all so hated! Revenge was not so to be cheated, nor the account of “Noli Me Tangere” left unsettled. If passports were to be had at all, a personal explanation and appeal offered the best chance. This he determined to attempt, if he could have some reasonable promise of safety, being more inclined to go because thereby he might again see his father and mother.

It was the Philippines in one of the recurrent spasms of reform that he must now approach—sure sign in itself that a storm was brewing. A new governor-general, one Eulogio Despujol, expert, as was afterward proved, in the unctuous shaking of hands and the agile escape from promises, had arrived with much éclat and promulgated a liberal program. Rizal wrote [236]to him, asking for permission and a safe-conduct to visit Manila.

In reply he received through the Spanish consul at Hong-Kong a passport and an unequivocal assurance of his safety in the Philippine Islands. So equipped, he sailed with his sister Lucia, June 26, 1892.3

For this he has been much criticized on the ground that to return to Manila was inconsistent with his former experiences there and virtual deportation thence. If any one had been furnished with convincing knowledge of the duplicity of the Philippine Government, surely it was Rizal. By the same token, it was said, he knew well the murderous attitude of the governing class toward him, and to go deliberately to the thrusting of his head into those jaws was madness. These, again, are but the strictures of ignorance. Rizal returned to the Philippines under a compelling sense of duty. At whatsoever cost to himself he must try to rescue his family from the tireless pursuit of the Interests he had offended, and the North Borneo project was clearly the way to achieve this. But it was a plan about which the Government would be certain to object. If nothing else were handy, there was always the argument that it would draw inhabitants of the Islands into an alien territory, and this reasoning could be met only by face to face encounter with the governor-general.

But Rizal was never deceived as to the nature of the trap into which he was walking. Weighing all the chances he knew he was not likely to emerge alive. Therefore, he prepared and left with a friend two [237]documents4 to be made public if his enemies should succeed in killing him.

The first of these was addressed “To the Filipinos” and constituted his farewell to the people he had served so loyally, and a last confession of his faith. Men still study it for other reasons than he imagined. It is not only an expression of his professed creed but a revelation of his soul and inmost thinkings on life and death. He shows here that in his mind he had made no stranger of the great mystery but had looked upon it and without misgivings. There is no bravado in his attitude toward it; he is unafraid because he has come to the logical conclusion that there is nothing about death to be afraid of. When he shall go and how do not concern a man, but only that his death shall mean something for the general cause. In this spirit he begins his letter:5

The other document was a letter addressed to his parents, brothers, and sisters. In it he said:

It was his destiny to be betrayed and lied to. He went forth with the faith of the Government pledged to his safety. No sooner had the ship that bore him from Hong-Kong hoisted her anchors than the Spanish consul cabled to Governor-General Despujol that the victim was in the trap;7 whereupon in Manila an accusation was filed against him of treason and sacrilege. It appeared that Rizal’s forebodings about his fate were not fanciful; he was going into a den of wolves. When he and his sister landed at Manila, a customs officer searched their baggage and pretended to find among Lucia’s possessions a package of treasonable documents. The device is as old as tyranny and must have suggested to La Fontaine one of his most famous fables. Here is the officer showing certain papers and saying he found them in this trunk or that valise. Who is to gainsay him? The victim protests that she never saw the documents before. What is her statement worth against the skilled vociferations of the officer? Rizal was right. In a country operated [240]as Spain operated the Philippines every man’s life was at the mercy of any power that was able and wished to take it.8

In this instance the treasonable stuff was found, official superservice asserted, in certain pillow-cases that Lucia had in her trunk. When all was done, it consisted of a brief circular or tract entitled “The Poor Friars.” Among reasoning men and enlightened systems of society, treason is held to be a crime directed against Government; other offenses may be committed by individuals against individuals, but for these the police and the ordinary criminal code are enough. The incendiary document Lucia was alleged to have brought in said nothing against the Government. This is the fact that will strike the modern reader as strangest of all. How can there be other treason or other sedition than against Government? Yet in all this document is not a word against anybody or thing except the friars and even as to the friars speaks of but one order, and that in terms adults might smile at but assuredly would never care to reread. Lest it should be thought that any part of the description of the Insular Government attempted in these pages is extravagant, here is the whole of this ferocious document:

Government in the Philippines had sunk so low that this could be deemed seditious.

Nevertheless, for some days thereafter the trap was not sprung upon the victims. Rizal with his sister went about the city, visiting old friends. More than once he called upon Governor-General Despujol and was rather astonished to find that his footing seemed to be secure upon the dark and slippery precincts of [243]Malacañan. In his usual frank way he discussed with the governor-general the brand-new program of reforms, commending most of their features and hoping for the best, as was likewise his habit. Despujol, responding to all this, seemed equally ingenuous. No one would have suspected that while he stressed so much gracious hospitality he was but waiting for the most convenient season to strike to death the man before him. Rizal pleaded in behalf of his persecuted relatives. Despujol promised immunity for the father, but not for the brother or sisters. Afterward he was willing to concede even these favors. They discussed Rizal’s project of a settlement in North Borneo, and the governor-general applied his veto. For this he gave the expected reasons but never once the real one. He objected to taking people out of the colony but said nothing about the wrath of the friars if he should let their victims escape unhurt.

Rizal had long known well enough that the lack of unity among the Filipinos was chief reason why they were enslaved and to keep up this condition chief point in Spanish policy. “Divide and rule”—the good old formula of the exploiter in all ages. To combat this he proposed an organization that would bring together the most promising elements among his people; a plan for it he had with him when he landed. It included the full working constitution of a society to be called La Liga Filipina, or Philippine League, of which the objects were declared to be to better economic conditions, to spread education, to advance the Philippine youth, and to defend by legal means [244]persons oppressed, wronged, or unjustly accused. He now called together his friends,10 explained the purposes of the league, and began to enroll members.

The real nature and front-parlor origin of this association11 were of a nature to occasion in these days only a mild surprise that anybody could object to it, as may be observed from the following precepts Rizal prepared for his fellow-members:

[246]

About this was nothing sinister, illegal, revolutionary, affrighting, or incendiary, but the Spanish colony chose to view it with alarm. If Rizal had organized a prayer meeting or a branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association these nervous folk would have seen in it only treason, stratagems, and spoils. On the Filipinos the effect was different. To the deliberate judgment of the intelligentsia the plan of the league appealed as the first practical suggestion of relief through peaceful agitation. With a novel sensation of hope, they took it to their bosoms.1 Rapidly the membership increased; at last there was a promise of union and directed effort. And then the powers that stood behind the puppet governor-general and manipulated his movements decided that the ripe time had come to spring the trap; before this dangerous man should have back of him an organization able to realize his dreams he must be put to silence. Despujol sent for Rizal, leaped upon him as if from a machine with the leaflet, “The Poor Friars,” that men said had been found in Lucia’s baggage, and without trial or hearing ordered him to prison. From the spot where he stood in the governor-general’s office a guard [247]took him to Fort Santiago and thrust him into a cell. Another generation will not believe that this was done; and even in our own era, in which invasions of personal rights at times of great public excitement are not unknown, an act of such rank and impudent despotism seems improbable. There was not even a pretense of any legal proceeding, no warrant, no magistrate, no commitment. “Take this man to jail!” commands the governor-general. With an obedient start the guard sweeps away the prisoner, helpless in a square of rifles. It is enough to cause us to wonder if democracy and liberty are or can be more than veneer upon any old frame of European monarchy and whether time, in this conception of human society, must not necessarily stand stock-still.

At Santiago guard was mounted2 upon the mild reformer and man of peace as if he had been some ferocious bandit captured red-handed and likely to burst his bars. Sentinels stood day and night over his cell door; no communication was allowed with his friends; and grown men in the official service went through the theatrics of pretending that there was danger of an attempt to rescue him.

The next day a decree was issued ordering his exile to Dapitan, a town on the northeastern coast of the island of Mindanao. Upon what charge? The charge of sacrilege and sedition made against him the day he sailed from Hong-Kong, reinforced with Lucia’s damnable pillow-cases. On these he had been adjudged guilty offhand, as one would drown cats or blind puppies. He was not even allowed to know who [248]were his accusers; for that matter, he did not even know that he was accused. “This fellow has committed sacrilege and sedition,” says some one in the ear of the governor-general. “Exile him,” replies the governor-general, and signs the order committing him to a living death. It is like the scene between the governor-general and his secretary in “El Filibusterismo”; if a man may have foreknowledge of his fate, Rizal had glimpsed this in his novel.

There was the matter of the safe-conduct, the promise of protection, given by this same governor-general, under which Rizal had left Hong-Kong. It seems to have been not a feather-weight against the Interests that cried for his blood. There need be no mystery as to the source of these perfidies. Exile was the price Rizal paid for writing “Noli Me Tangere”; the powers that now pushed him upon the savage coast of Mindanao as an outcast sent there to die was the power of the friars, enraged by these pictures of themselves. They demanded Rizal’s blood; Despujol seems to have been incapable of the firing-squad and only wicked enough to consent to exile.

A chorus of protest rose from the civilized world as soon as men learned of this latest assault by a stupidly malignant Government upon the foundation principles of modern liberty. In hugger-mugger Rizal might be snatched away to banishment, but the time had gone by when such things could continue to be hid. It was speedily known throughout Europe that he had been decoyed from Hong-Kong by promises now shown to have been deliberate inventions; that the governor-general had violated his own safe-conduct; that, even [249]if Lucia had possessed a seditious document, proceedings should have lain against her and not against Rizal; that in any society above that of the jungle he would have had a hearing or some form of trial. Some such storm of resentment seems to have been foreseen by Despujol. For the issue of the “Official Gazette” that announced Rizal’s banishment he had prepared a long article defending the Government’s course and describing Rizal as a dangerous person. But he sufficiently betrayed himself by writing to the governor of Santiago prison a personal letter instructing him to take every precaution that Rizal should not see this number of the “Gazette,” and beyond this in cowardice and infamy it seemed hardly possible to go.3

For three days the victim of the aroused wrath of the governing class lay in prison, being still denied any communication with friend or relative. Then at night he was hustled aboard a steamer and started for Dapitan.

So far as we can determine now, even in these conditions he lost nothing of that serenity that has made him so admirable to some investigators and so inexplicable to others. “Sustained and soothed by an unfaltering trust” seems to have been literally the state of this brown man from the ends of the earth. Many a white man far less tried might have envied his self-possession. Dwell with some patience and care, if you will, upon this his own record of his arrest and deportation and see if you do not deem this remarkable that in such conditions not a complaint, not a suggestion [250]of resentment or of bitterness, not a hint of fear occurs in his narrative. It is a plain, blunt story written only for his friends. Here if anywhere he would have exhibited wrath; and the story reads with a kind of chill, so perfect is the unconcern. You can hardly say it reads as if it were written about the sufferings of somebody else. For anybody else in the like conditions this man would have made protest. Concerning himself he had nothing to say except to record the facts. Here is what his memorandum says of all this: