BUHR A a35015 0181 384 8b O s~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~ii~ ii~ iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii a, ~Z ~~ aai 21 1~ i' ~ f r 1 -'L a' jrI ~~ j; i ik ~r,~ ~ "1: '" ~* ~~ ~i P.-r.-.,, haI* 1 ~~ i j F~. *. ~ ,r i ~.,, r w J, a - r~" t 1&I ri. u c. rlir r II ~4 1u, r. i! C. a a r, ~ ~ r tmua i 9 ~ CIQ V) jp% )i Eg*-,rla s g r. I~; ~~~ - --- —-- - --------— --- 4Noi-3 * /(9-) V)D _,::3 _s -F <. ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~-. I %~~~~PI~~~~~~ THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS ' i _ _ __ _ __ ___ THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS THE STORY OF JOSE RITZAL POET, PATRIOT AND MARTYR BY CHARLES EDWARD RUSSELL AND E. B. RODRIGUEZ Illuutrateb witb ]Dbotoorapbe I THE CENTURY CO. NEW YORK AND LONDON 1923 Copyright, 1923, by THE CENTURY CO. Printed In U. S. A. / - / *). I A TO THE MEMORY OF APOLINARIO MABINI PHILOSOPHICAL DEMOCRAT GALLANT SOLDIER OF THE COMMON GOOD PREFATORY NOTE The great storehouses of knowledge about this extraordinary being are W. E. Retana's "Vida y Escritos del Dr. Jose Rizal" and the "Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal," by Professor Austin Craig of the Philippines University. Neither is accessible to the general American 'public. Retana's ponderous volume has never been translated. Professor Craig's work was published in Manila but not in the United States and is to be found in only a few of the public libraries. Prefixed to Charles Derbyshire's excellent translation of Rizal's "Noli Me Tangere" is a biographical sketch, all too brief, of the author of the novel, but even this is denied to most American readers, for it, too, is published only in Manila. The notes that Rizal left about himself, few, fragmentary, and sternly reticent, throwing a faint light upon his psychology and character but next to nothing upon the stirring events of his life, are known only in the Philippines. In an English magazine article published in 1902, Sir Hugh Clifford, formerly governor of Ceylon, reviewed and estimated this strange career, but no more than in outline. Three American magazines in the space of twenty-five years have devoted each a page or so to the same subject. Buried in that monumental work, Blair and Robertson's "Philippine Islands," is liberal store of information about the vii viii * * p111 PREFATORY NOTE historic background of the events hereinafter to be set forth, though few readers seem to avail themselves of even this assistance. John Foreman's well known book with the same title has an interesting chapter about Rizal and his fate. An abbreviated translation of "Noli Me Tangere," published in New York in 1900, contained a short account of his life and a version of his last poem. These, with fugitive references, are virtually the sum of the Rizal material the most resolute searcher has hitherto been able to find on American shelves. Retana's work is interesting and abounding in pertinent facts, but so overloaded with documents and so prone to febrile exhilaration that it could never be adapted to general circulation. Unluckily, too, it is not always free from prejudice and not always accurate. Professor Craig was the ideal investigator. With indefatigable patience he went over the entire drama, beginning with the arrival of Lam-co in the Philippines more than two hundred years before, and tracing the family to Rizal's own day. He visited most of the places where Rizal had lived; he interviewed relatives, friends, acquaintances; he searched records, he compared documents, he weighed testimonies; he wrote with sympathy, he overstepped not the due bounds of reserve; and he produced a book that so far as it goes is a model of honest inquiry. The present work is founded chiefly upon his discoveries and Retana's, carefully compared, checked by reference to the writings of Derbyshire and to Rizal's own diary, notes, and scant narrative; checked also by the corrections of Dr. De Tavera and others, PREFATORY NOTE ix and augmented by later revelations. Where a discrepancy has appeared in these records the authors have sought the best obtainable advice and tried to follow the best of the accepted authorities. In a few instances (since there are gaps in the story now unlikely to be filled) it has been necessary to adopt the version of an incident or the explanation of an act that seemed the most natural to a man in Rizal's situation and the best adjustable to his character and convictions. Every recurrent "Rizal day" in the Philippines brings out thoughtful studies of the national hero, additional reminiscences, or the results of original research work, all by native writers. Of this abundant material the authors have availed themselves, and thus have been able to enlarge or to correct many episodes. The authors are under obligations to the direction of the Philippine Library at Manila, which most generously put at their disposal all of its great collection of literature and objects relating to Rizal; to Mr. Fernando Canon for his interesting personal reminiscences; to the Hon. Jaime C. de Veyra, late resident commissioner from the Philippines to the United States, long a collector of Rizaliana, for rich material as well as for unstinted and invaluable assistance; to the Hon. Isauro Gabaldon, present resident commissioner, for sympathetic encouragement; to Senator Sandiko for useful data; to Miss Sevilla for her investigations concerning Leonora Rivera; and to many good friends in Manila and elsewhere that have contributed suggestions and corrected errors. Mr. Benito Soliven's masterly summary of Rizal's work in X PREFATORY NOTE science and Dr. Eliseo Hervas's estimate of Rizal's place as a poet have been most helpful. Of Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera's admirable treatise "El Caracter de Rizal" (Manila, 1918) free use has been made. Mr. Paiina's '"Mario el Doctor Rizal Cristianamente" has been carefully studied. For the historical part of the narrative the authors have consulted chiefly Fernandez, Foreman, Barrows, and the great work of Blair and Robertson. The citations from "Noli Me Tangere" and "El Filibusterismo" in the ensuing pages are from the translations by Charles Derbyshire, both published by the Philippine Education Company, Manila, 1912. To understand Rizal and his strange story it is necessary to understand the environment into which he was born and against which he protested. As any description written now of Spanish rule as it really was in the Philippines would seem to American readers of these days improbable or even fantastical, the needed background is supplied, so far as possible, in Rizal's own words. Aside from the human interest that would at any time attend a life so tragic, certain chief reasons have seemed to the authors sufficient to justify the appearance now of such a book: 1. The hope to make available to American readers the story of the great man and national hero of the people the United States has undertaken to lead to national independence. 2. At a time when race antagonisms seem to have been revived and emphasized, the fundamental truths about the universal household are naturally obscured. PREFATORY NOTE xi Lest we forget how foolish, in the end, are the pretended racial superiorities, it may be well to take note of this brown man that revealed a genius so great, a mind so strangely resourceful, so wide a range in achievement, so unusual a character, while performing a service so momentous. Of a race too lightly esteemed by Caucasians, he left a record of which the foremost Caucasian people might justly be proud. 3. When the tide is running backward through the world and some men scoff at democracy and some men doubt it, there may be profit in turning to the story of this long-drawn-out struggle against autocracy to observe once more how inevitable, against all oppositions or frantic arguings, is the democratic advance. 4. A temporary fashion of detraction having left not even Lancelot brave nor Galahad clean, it may be worth while to revive the fact that, after all, men have lived on this earth that had other than merely selfish aims and felt other than merely sensual impulses, and find an example in this Malay. 5. When the world is resounding with the echoes of a terrible war, and hatreds seem to possess the souls of men, it may be well to consider the career and influence of one that sought reforms by peaceful means, repudiated force, and chose for his motto a sentiment broad enough to cover all human failings and cure most human hurts: To understand all is to forgive all. C. E. R. New York, June 25, 1923. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAQB I A PEOPLE'S WRONGS......... 3 II SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS.....28 III FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY..... 51 IV VOICES OF PROPHECY.......... 78 V "NOLI ME TANGERE"......... 97 VI LEONORA RIVERA.......... 118 VII AGAIN IN THE PHILIPPINES........130 VIII THE GRAPES OF WRATH. 161 IX PHILIPPINE INDEPENDENCE....... 172 X FILIPINO INDOLENCE.....181 XI WHAT MANNER OF MAN.........202 XII "EL FILIBUSTERISMO"..........215 XIII THE SAFE-CONDUCT..........233 XIV THE EXILE OF DAPITAN....246 XV THE KATIPUNAN..........267 XVI "I CAME FROM MARTYRDOM UNTO THIS PEACE". XVII RESULTS AND INFLUENCES....... APPENDICES......... A RIZAL BIBLIOGRAPHY....... INDEX............... 289.. 314.. 337. 371. 383 1 ILLUSTRATIONS eS Rizal.Frontispiece House at Calamba in which Rizal was born.32 Ateneo De Manila.64 iv ts from Rizal's travel notes and sketches through Europe 81 -,VVing-s by Rizal.112 original cover of the great novel, "Noli Me Tangere"..129..ograph of an oil painting of his sister by Rizal.Miss -'turnina Rizal..144 ~',V)d carving by Rizal.1161 tpture by Rizal when a mere student, "The Power of Science ver Death"..176 cinants from Rizal's Library..208 ~3outline of the constitution of the "Liga Filipina" 240 i al's cell at Fort Santiago..257 eciesof Rizal's modeling when an exile at Dapitan, both.ielf-explanatory.264 Ftotograph. of the original of "My Last Farewell".. 304 The Rizal Monument at the Luneta decorated for Rizal Day, December 30.321 Afloat, Rizal Day, December 30, 1922.328 -~ -wii _:;_ ii ip,: i I, vvrr I _ r: -. — 7 — -,7 -;- - -,-,- - - I - I I q 7 1- - I- -?- i- -- ~11 — - - - - -1- - _ - _ I I -.; 1-1 1_. I ", I I - -- I I -,-, -, - 1- 1 7 V - r -; i7- ~ T- 1 -. -~ IT.= 7 - -.-. - -- I I - 7 I - 1-1 I I - - - 7 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS CHAPTER I A PEOPLE S WRONGS I 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. Ore 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 honor availed to save Father 1Craig, p. 83; Derbyshire, p. xvi. Blair and Robertson, "The Philippine Islands," VoL LII, p. 170. 3 4 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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.1 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 ' Noli Me Tangere, " Chap. LVII. A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 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 Malacafian 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 'THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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,l 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 Bifnan, 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. Created after one of the many insurrections and contributing to the causes of the insurrection of 1872. Craig, p. 80. A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 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.' About the same time the urfortunate 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 Binfan lived Jose Alberto Realonda (formerly Alonzo), a half-brother of Mrs. Mercado..Craig, pp. 86-87, 8 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS IIe 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; Jose Alberto himself had been at school in Calcutta, spoke English well, and had traveled widely. It was at his home in Bifian that Sir John Bowring,l 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 Jose 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 'Born 1792, died 1872. He was once governor of Hong-Kong. A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 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 bat 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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 net to assault with his cane both the unlucky guard that had shown her lenity and the owner of the house that had received her.1 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 attor1 Craig, p. 88. A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 11 ney, 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS She was alleged by the judge-prosecutor-tribunal to have committed theft.1 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, Jose 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 Jose 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 a 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, The ease with which false accusations could be manufactured, as Rizal showed afterward in his novels, was a valid asset in Spanish supremacy. A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 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.' 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 Bifian, was converted to Christianity, and was baptized in 1697, taking the name of Domingo. At Bifnan 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 Malay 2 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, twenty1 Rizal, in his "Boyhood Story,"' merely says her innocence was shown and she was released. It was Dr. Craig that, investigating the facts on the spot, came upon the incident of the dance and the pardon. At the time Rizal could hardly have published it. 'Retana, p. 15; Craig, Chap. II. 14 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS five years later, to be the victim of the strange story of persecution and villainy here related. The seventh of her children, Jose, 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 A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 15 the flogging-rods.; 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 Jose 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 1 Rizal, " Childhood Impressions," p. 1. 16 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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 wis 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 dis A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 17 appointed 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.1 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 About seven thousand in all, including rocks and reefs. 18 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS with which most martyrdoms seemed easy. Thus in a naive 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 Jose 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.1 "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 In " El Progreso Material," " The National Forum, "' July, 1922. A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 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 coordination, 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 indif 20 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS ferent and indolent,' 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.2 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. 1 To be discussed in a later chapter. Craig and Benitez, ' Philippine Progress Prior to 1898.' A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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 friars 1 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 1 Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and the Recollect Fathers. Compare Barrows, "History of the Philippines," p. 121. A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 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 Malacafian, 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS fight a clerical mob in his own palace, and fell dead, sword in hand, across the body of his son.1 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 Fernandez, "A Brief History of the Philippines," p. 136. A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 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 darkskinned 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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.' 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 1The Philippine Independence Mission of 1922 estimated the number at one hundred, great and small. A PEOPLE'S WRONGS 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.l They but completed the tale of three hundred years of government with the iron fist. Barrio: hamlet. Most Philippine farmers live gregariously. CHAPTER II SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 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 Jose 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 28 SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 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. Jose 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 Jose Rizal; his father had been and was always thereafter known as Francisco Mercado, his mother as Dofia 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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 Claveria 1 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 ABneid, with which Jose 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. Jose 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 I From 1844 to 1850. He was one of the reforming governor-generals and left a name more revered than the others. Retana, pp. 14-15. 8 Craig, pp. 61, 63. SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 31 taught him at her knee.' 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.2 With other accomplishments she knew and loved good 'poetry, could make it herself, and early taught Jose 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. Jose 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. The advice and warnings sounded feebly in my ears [he wrote]. What I thought of most was the death of the heedless moth. But in the depths of my heart I did not blame it. My mother's care had not quite the result she intended. Years have passed since then. The child has become a man. He has crossed the most famous rivers of other countries. He has studied beside their broad streams. Steamships have carried him across seas and oceans. He has Derbyshire. College of Santa Rosa. 32 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS climbed mountains much higher than the Makiling of his native province, up to perpetual snow. He has received from experience bitter lessons, much more bitter than that sweet teaching which his mother gave him. Yet, in spite of all, the man still keeps the heart of a child. He still thinks that light is the most beautiful thing in creation, and that it is worth a man's sacrificing his life for.' 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.2 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 Jose 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 'Rizal's "Boyhood Story," "The First Reading Lesson." Craig, p. 78. The House at Calamba in which Rizal was born I; it d~ t t 1 E CI SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 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 Jose 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: I had some slight notions of the morning sun and of my parents. That is as much as I can recall of my baby days. The training I received from my earliest infancy is perhaps what formed my habits, just as a cask keeps the odor of its first contents. I recall clearly my first gloomy nights, passed on the azotea 1 of our house. They seem as yesterday! They were nights filled with the poetry of sadness and seem near now because at present my days are so sad. On moonlight nights, I took my supper on the azotea. My nurse, who was very fond of me, used to threaten to leave me to a terrible but imaginary being like the bogy of the Europeans if I did not eat. lAzotea: the roof of the porch of a Philippine house, usually at the rear. 34 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS He had nine sisters and one brother. Of his father he says that he was a model parent.1 "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." At nightfall, my mother had us all sayi our prayers together. Then we would go to the azotea,, or to a window from which we could see the moon. There my nurse would tell us stories. Sometimes sad and sometimes gay, they were always oriental in their imagination. Dead people, gold and plants on which diamonds grew were all mixed together. When I was four years of age, I lost my little sister, Concha, and for the first time my tears fell because of love and sorrow. Till then I had shed them only for my own faults. These my loving, prudent mother well knew how to correct. 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." We saw no restraint put upon brutality. Those whose duty it was to look out for the public peace committed acts of violence and other excesses. They were the real outlaws, 1His "Boyhood Story," p. 4. SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 35 and against such lawbreakers our authorities were powerless. His father looked carefully to the beginnings of Jose'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 Binfan, where his uncle Jose 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. Jose wrote of his experiences there: My brother left me after he had presented me to the schoolmaster, who, it seemed, had been his own teacher. He was a tall, thin man, with a long neck and a sharp nose. His body leaned slightly forward. His shirt was of sinamay,l woven by the deft fingers of Batangas women. He knew Latin and Spanish grammar by heart. And his severity, I believe now, was too great. This is all I can remember of him. His class-room was in his own house and only some thirty meters away from my aunt's house [where Jose was lodged]. When I entered the class-room for the first time, he said to me: "You, do you speak Spanish?" "A little, sir," I answered. $Sinamay: a native cloth woven of abaca (hemp) and sometimes of the fiber that is called "'pineapple." 36 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS "Do you know Latin?" "A little, sir," I again answered. Because of these answers, the teacher's son, who was the worst boy in the class, began to make fun of me. He was some years my elder and had an advantage in height, yet we had a tussle. Somehow or other, I don't know how, I got the better of him. I bent him down over the class benches. Then I let him loose, having hurt only his pride. 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. I do not wish to take up the time with telling of the beatings I got, nor shall I attempt to say how it hurt when I received the first ruler-blow on my hand. I used to win in the competitions, for no one happened to be better than I. Of these successes I made the most. In spite of the reputation I had of being a good boy, rare were the days in which my teacher did not call me up to receive five or six blows on the hand. There was near-by an aged painter. Jose used to haunt his studio and learned much there about the secrets of pictorial art. He continues: My manner of life was simple. I heard mass at four if there was a service so early, or studied my lesson at that hour and went to mass afterward. Then I went into the yard and looked for mabolos.l Then came breakfast, which generally consisted of a plate of rice and two dried sarMabolo: the date-plum, a reddish fruit, looking something like an apple, but turnip-shaped. SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 37 dines. There was class-work till ten o'clock, and after luncheon a study period. In the afternoon there was school from two o'clock until five. Next, there would be play with my cousins for a while. Study and perhaps painting took up the remainder of the afternoon. By and by came supper, one or two plates of rice with a fish called ayungin. In the evening we had prayers and then, if there was moonlight, a cousin and I would play in the street with the others. Fortunately, I was never ill while away from home. From time to time, I went to my own village. How long the trip seemed going and how short coming back! 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.1 In Manila, though not at the Ateneo, he had been preceded by his elder brother Paciano, long a student at the College of San Jose, 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 Jose as a notorious patriot; because The Jesuits were not one of the four orders that figure so conspicuously in this story. They had been banished from the Philippines as from Spain in 1767, and all their insular property, valued at 3,320,000 pesos, was confiscated by the Government. In 1852 another royal decree allowed them to return, but they never regained their former prominence and power. 38 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS he spoke with some freedom against the tyranny that blasted his country the authorities refused to allow him to pass his examinations.1 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.2 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 Jose 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 Jose 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 Craig, p. 82. 2 Craig, p. 83: Derbyshire, p. xvi; Fernandez, p. 226. SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 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.1 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 Jose 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 Retana, pp. 18, 19. 40 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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.' 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 acSee Dr. Blumentritt's article, Appendix D. SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 41 cepted 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 fAsiatic 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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.' 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 1Dr, Blumentritt; see Appendix ), SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 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 graybeard 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS it if ever we find it. In his day, in his nation, then intellectually dragged along at the moldering chariotwheels 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, SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 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.' 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 twoI "Blackwobd 's," November, 1902, p. 620. 46 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS fold 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 Jose 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 SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 47 Ateneo, "even then," he says, "I felt that unhappiness was in store for me." 1 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. Father Jose Bech was a tall man, thin and somewhat stooping, but quick in his movements. His face was ascetic, yet animated. The eyes were small and sunken, the nose sharp and Grecian. His thin lips curved downward. He was a little eccentric, at times being out of humor and intolerant and at other times amusing himself by playing like a child. Some of my schoolmates were interesting enough to warrant mentioning them by name. A boy, or rather a young man from my own province, Florencio Gavino Oliva, was of exceptional talents but only average application. The " Boyhood Story," p. vi. 48 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS same was true of Moises Santiago. He was a mathematician and penman. Also it was true of Gonzalo Manzano. The last named then held the position of Roman Emperor. 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 Jose, with pious resignation.' 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 1 ' Boyhood Story, p. 19. SCHOOL-DAYS AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS 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.' 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 With a girl older than he was and already engaged to another. She seems to have been something of a flirt. A few years afterward he wrote (apparently for himself) an account of his feelings and sufferings in those days. Mariano Ponce, his friend and confidant, published the document in the "Revista Filipina," December, 1916. It shows Rizal to have been a poetical and dreamy lover. When he discovered the hopeless nature of his attachment he wandered alone in the woods, given up tn a melancholy conviction of misfortune, but recovered in time to fall Xn love again and learn the reality of his forebodings. 50 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS of Edmoynd 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. CHAPTER III FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 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 TennysoR'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 51 52 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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: The class-room was a spacious rectangular hall with large grated windows that admitted an abundance of light and air. Along the two sides extended three wide tiers of stone covered with wood, filled with students arranged in alphabetical order. At the end opposite the entrance, under a print of St. Thomas Aquinas, rose the professor's chair on a level platform with a little stairway on each side. With the exception of a beautiful blackboard in a narra [wood] frame, scarcely ever used, since there was still written on it the viva that had appeared on the opening day, no furniture, either useful or useless, was to be seen. The walls, painted white and covered with glazed tiles, to prevent scratches, were entirely bare, having neither a drawing nor a picture, nor even an outline of any physical apparatus. The students had no need of any; no one missed the practical instruction in an extremely experimental science; for years and years it has been so taught, and the country has not been upset but continues just as ever. Now and then some little instrument descended from heaven and was ex FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 53 hibited to the class from a distance, like the monstrance to the prostrate worshipers-look, but touch not! From time to time when some complacent professor appeared, one day in the year was set aside for visiting the mysterious laboratory and gazing from without at the puzzling apparatus arranged in glass cases. No one could complain, for on that day there were to be seen quantities of brass and glassware, tubes, disks, wheels, bells, and the like-the exhibition did not get beyond that, and the country was not upset.... This was the professor who that morning called the roll and directed many of the students to recite the lesson from memory, word for word. The phonographs got into operation, some well, some ill, some stammering, and received their grades. He who recited without an error earned a good mark, and he who made more than three mistakes a bad mark. A fat boy with a sleepy face and hair as stiff and hard as the bristles of a brush yawned until he seemed about to dislocate his jaws, and stretched himself with his arms extended as if he were in his bed. The professor saw this and wished to startle him. "Eh, there, sleepy-head! What's this? Lazy, too; so it 's sure you don't know the lesson, ha?" This question, instead of offending the class, amused them and many laughed; it was a daily occurrence. But the sleeper did not laugh; he arose and, with a bound, rubbed his eyes, and, as if a steam-engine were turning the phonograph, began to recite: "The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces intended to produce by the reflection of light the images of the objects placed before said surfaces. From the substance that forms these surfaces they are divided into metallic mirrors and glass mirrors — " 54 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS "Stop, stop, stop!" interrupted the professor. "Heavens, what a rattle! We were at the point where the mirrors are divided into metallic and glass, eh? Now if I should present to you a block of wood, a piece of kadmagon for instance, well polished and varnished, or a slab of black marble well burnished, or a square of jet, which would reflect the images of objects placed before them, how would you classify those mirrors?" Whether he did not know what to answer or did not understand the question, the student tried to get out of the difficulty by demonstrating that he knew the lesson; so he rushed on like a torrent: "The first are composed of brass or an alloy of different metals, and the second of a sheet of glass, with its two sides well polished, one of which has an amalgam of tin adhering to it." "Tut, tut, tut! That 's not it! I say to you, 'Dominus vobiscum,' and you answer me with, 'Requiescat in pacel' " The worthy professor then repeated the question in the vernacular of the markets, interspersed with cosas and abas at every moment. The poor youth did not know how to get out of the quandary; he doubted whether to include kamagon with the metals, or the marble with the glasses, and leave the jet as a neutral substance, until Juanito Pelaez maliciously prompted him: "The mirror of kacmagon among the wooden mirrors." The incautious youth repeated this aloud, and half the class was convulsed with laughter. "A good sample of wood you are yourself!" exclaimed the professor, laughing in spite of himself. "Let 's see from what you would define a mirror-from a substance per se, in quantum est superficies, or from the substance upon which the surface rests, the raw material, modified by the FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 55 attribute 'surface,' since it is clear that, surface being an accidental property of bodies, it cannot exist without substance-what do you say?" "I? Nothing!" the wretched boy was about to reply, for he did not understand what it was all about, confused as he was by so many surfaces and so many accidents that smote cruelly on his ears, but a sense of shame restrained him. Filled with anguish and breaking into a cold perspiration, he began to repeat between his teeth: "The name of mirror is applied to all polished surfaces- " "Ergo, per te, the mirror is the surface," angled the professor. "Well, then, clear up this difficulty. If the surfaoe is the mirror, it must be of no consequence to the 'essence' of the mirror what may be found behind this surface, since what is behind it does not affect the 'essence' that is before it, id est, the surface, qume super faciem est, quia vocatur superficies, facies ea quae supra videtur. Do you admit that or do you not admit it?" The poor youth's hair stood up straighter than ever, as though acted upon by some magnetic force. "Do you admit it or do you not admit it?" "Anything! Whatever you wish, Padre," was his thought, but he did not dare to express it from fear of ridicule. That was a dilemma indeed and he had never been in a worse one. He had a vague idea that the most innocent thing could not be admitted to the friars but that they, or rather their estates and curacies, would get out of it all the results and advantages imaginable. So his good angel prompted him to deny everything with all the energy of his soul and refractoriness of his hair, and he was about to shout a proud nego, for the reason that he who denies everything does not compromise himself in anything, as a certain lawyer had once told him; but the evil habits of disregarding the dictates of one's own conscience, of having 56 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS little faith in legal folk, and of seeking aid from others where one is sufficient unto himself were his undoing. His companions, especially Juanito Pelaez, were making signs to him to admit it, so he let himself be carried away by his evil destiny and exclaimed, "Concedo, Padre," in a voice as faltering as if he were saying, "In mrnus tuas commendo spiritnu meum." "Concedo antecedentem," echoed the professor, smiling maliciously. "Ergo, I can scratch the mercury off a looking-glass, put in its place a piece of bibinka, and we shall still have a mirror, eh? Now what shall we have?"... Another pupil is questioned. "What 's your name?" the professor asked him. "Placido," was the curt reply. "Aha! Placido Penitente, although you look more like Placido the Prompter-or the Prompted. But, Penitent, I 'm going to impose some penance on you for your promptings." Pleased with his play on words, he ordered the youth to recite the lesson; and the latter, in the state of mind to which he was reduced, made more than three mistakes. Shaking his head up and down, the professor slowly opened the register and slowly scanned it while he called off the names in a low voice. "Palencia - Paloma - Panganiban - Pedraza - Pelado -Pelaez —Penitente, aha! Placido Penitente, fifteen unexcused absences- " Placido started up. "Fifteen absences, Padre?" "Fifteen unexcused absences," continued the professor, "so that you only lack one to be dropped from the roll." "Fjteen absences, fifteen absences," repeated Placido in amazement. "I have never been absent more than four times, and, with to-day, perhaps five." FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 57 "Jesso, jesso, monseer,"/ replied the professor, examining the youth over his gold eye-glasses. "You confess that you have missed five times, and God knows if you have missed oftener. Atqui, as I rarely call the roll, every time I catch any one I put five marks against him; ergo, how many are five times five? Have you forgotten the multiplication-table? Five times five?" "Twenty-five." "Correct, correct! Thus you have still got away with ten, because I have caught you only three times. Huh, if I had caught you every time-Now how many are three times five?" "Fifteen." "Fifteen, right you are!" concluded the professor, closing the register. "If you miss once more-out of doors with you, get out! Ha, now a mark for the failure in the daily lesson." He again opened the register, sought out the name, and entered the mark. "Come, only one mark," he said, "since you hadn't any before." "But, Padre," exclaimed Placido, restraining himself, "if your Reverence puts a mark against me for failing in the lesson, your Reverence owes it to me to erase the one for absence that you have put against me for to-day. " His Reverence made no answer. First, he slowly entered the mark, then contemplated it with his head on one side-the mark must be artistic-closed the register, and asked with great sarcasm, "AbM, and why so, sir?" "Because I can't conceive, Padre, how one can be absent from the class and at the same time recite the lesson in it. Your Reverence is saying that to be is not to be." "Naki, a metaphysician, but a rather premature one! So you can't conceive of it, eh? Sed patet experientiw and The professor speaks these words in the vulgar dialect. 58 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS contra experientiam negantem, fusilibus est arguendtm, do you understand? And can't you conceive with your philosophical head that one can be absent from the class and not know the lesson at the same time? Is it a fact that absence necessarily implies knowledge? What do you say to that, philosophaster? " This last epithet was the drop of water that made the full cup overflow. Placido enjoyed among his friends the reputation of being a philosopher, so he lost his patience, threw down his book, arose, and faced the professor. "Enough, Padre, enough! Your Reverence can put all the marks against me that you wish, but you have n't the right to insult me. Your Reverence may stay with the class; I can't stand any more." Without further farewell, he stalked away. The class was astounded; such an assumption of dignity had scarcely ever been seen, and who would have thought it of Placido Penitente? The surprised professor bit his lips and shook his head threateningly as he watched him depart. Then in a trembling voice he began his preachment on the same old theme, delivered, however, with more energy and more eloquence. It dealt with the growing arrogance, the innate ingratitude, the presumption, the lack of respect for superiors, the pride that the spirit of darkness infused in the young, the lack of manners, the absence of courtesy, and so on. From this he passed to coarse jest and sarcasm.... So he went on with his harangue until the bell rang and the class was over. The 234 students, after reciting their prayers, went out as ignorant as when they went in, but breathing more freely, as if a great weight had been lifted from them. Each youth had lost another hour of his life and with it a portion of his dignity and self-respect, and in exchange there was an increase of discontent, of aversion to FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 59 study, of resentment in their heart. After all this ask for knowledge, dignity, gratitude! Just as the 234 spent their class hours, so the thousands of students that preceded them have spent theirs, and, if matters do not mend, so will those yet to come spend theirs, and be brutalized, while wounded dignity and youthful enthusiasm will be converted into hatred and sloth.I 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 '" El Filibusterismo," Chap. XIII. Derbyshire's translation. 60 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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: After the vacation, in that memorable year of my mother's release, I again had my lodgings in the Walled City.... My mother had not wanted me to return to Manila, saying that I already had a sufficient education. Did she have a presentiment of what was going to happen to me? Can it be that a mother's heart gives her double vision? My future profession was still unsettled. My father wanted me to study metaphysics, so I enrolled in that course. But my interest was so slight that I did not even buy a copy of the text-book. A former schoolmate, who had finished his course three months before, was my only intimate friend. He lived in the same street that I lived in. On Sundays and other holidays, this friend used to call for me and we would spend the day at my great-aunt's house in Trozo. My aunt knew his father. When my youngest sister entered La Concordia College, I used to visit her, too, on the holidays. Another friend had a sister in the same school, so we could go together. I made a pencil sketch of his sister from a photograph she lent me. On December 8, the festival of La Concordia, some other students and I went to the college. It was a fine day, and the building was gay with decorations of banners, lanterns, and flowers. Shortly after that I went home for the Christmas holidays. On the same steamer was a Calamba girl that had been a pupil in Santa Catalina College for nearly five years. Her father was with her. We were well acquainted, but her schooling had made her bashful. She kept her back to me while we talked. To help her pass the time, I asked about her school and studies, but I got hardly more than "yes" and FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 61 "no" answers. She seemed to have almost, if not entirely, forgotten her Tagalog. When I walked into our house in Calamba, my mother at first did not recognize me. The sad cause was that she had almost lost her sight. My sisters greeted me joyfully, and I could read their welcome in their smiling faces. But my father, who seemed to be the most pleased of all, said least.... There I tied the horse by the roadside and for a time watched the water flowing through the irrigation ditch. Its swiftness reminded me how rapidly my days were going by. I am now twenty years old and have the satisfaction of remembering that in the crises of my life I have not followed my own pleasure. I have always tried to live by my principles and to do the heavy duties I have undertaken.1 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 ' Boyhood Story ": v. 62 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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; Jose painted in its place a banner that all men declared to be better than the original1 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. I Craig, p. 92. FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS This was on "Education" and contained exquisite imagery, while it showed an unmistakable grasp of melodic resource.1 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 "Travelsiin the Philippines," 2 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 1 These poems are printed by Retana, pp. 26-29. A translation of one of them is attempted for the first time in the Appendix A of this work. 'London, 1875. IN-~ ~ ~ ~~~~~~~~~~~TH AENO E ANL T~he -schaijl attwnded by RiJ ii-0 in M nanila v~lhere he woan scvcral prizes in 11tor.-Ittre FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 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.1 In proportion as the navigation of the west coast of America extends the influence of the American element over the South Sea [wrote this prophet], the captivating, magic power that the great republic exercises over the Spanish colonies will not fail to make itself also felt in the Philippines. The Americans are evidently destined to bring to a full development the germs originated by the Spaniards. Conquerors of modern times, they pursue their road to victory with the assistance of the pioneer's ax and plow, representing an age of peace and commercial prosperity in contrast to that bygone and chivalrous age whose champions were upheld by the cross and protected by the sword... With regard to permanence, the Spanish system cannot for a moment be compared with that of America. While each of the Spanish colonies, in order to favor a privileged class by immediate gains, exhausted still more the already enfeebled populace of the metropolis by the withdrawal of the best of its ability, America, on the contrary, has attracted to itself from all countries the most energetic element, which, once on its soil and freed from all fetters, restlessly progressing, has extended its power and influence still farther and farther. The Philippines will escape the action of the two great neighboring powers [the United States and Great Britain] all the less for the fact that neither they [the Philippines] nor their metropolis find their condition of a stable and well-balanced nature. 1 Craig, p. 95. 66 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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.' 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 Craig, pp. 696-98. FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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 FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 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 metier 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.1 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." 2 Rizal won it with a poem entitled "To the Philippine Youth." s 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 pasRizal 's "Boyhood Story." Retana, p. 31. 'See Appendix A. 70 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS sion that moved him, while he suggested the Filipinas that might be.1 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! 2 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 xaively 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 Grandiosol" "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 1Craig, pp. 109-110. 2 'Fair hope of my fatherland." FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 71 poem was the first voice and wise articulation of their protest.1 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 innovationhere 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.2 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 See Appendix A. 2Craig, p. 109i. 72 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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, 1877,1 matriculated at the ancient university of Santo Tomas.2 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 It was founded in 1603, only thirty-three years after the capture of Manila and the beginning of the Spanish domination, ' Retana. FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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.' 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, Craig, p. 109; Retana, pp. 34-35. FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 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 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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 FIRST CONTACTS WITH THE ENEMY 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. t. 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; a sister gave him a diamond ring to pawn. To outwit official suspicion, Jose 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.2 His father's sore difficulties, to be described later, were then beginning. Mr. Mercado continued to send money regularly to Jose through Mr. Rivera, the detour being necessary to protect himself. I Craig, p. 111; Retana, pp. 56 and 57. CHAPTER IV VOICES OF PROPHECY HAT 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 78 VOICES OF PROPHECY 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 'Craig, p. 117; Retana, p. 59; Derbyshire, p. xxvii. 80 THE HERO OF THE FILIPINOS 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 cafes, 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 LEA~VES 3FR6(} ZRfiAL'S TRAVELt NOTES AND SKETlCHES THROUGH EUROPE At the 1e4t