The Social CancerA Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere from the Spanish of José Rizal
by Charles Derbyshire
Translator’s Introduction
I
“We
travel rapidly in these historical sketches. The reader flies in his
express train in a few minutes through a couple of centuries. The
centuries pass more slowly to those to whom the years are doled out day
by day. Institutions grow and beneficently develop themselves, making
their way into the hearts of generations which are shorter-lived than
they, attracting love and respect, and winning loyal obedience; and then
as gradually forfeiting by their shortcomings the allegiance which had
been honorably gained in worthier periods. We see wealth and greatness;
we see corruption and vice; and one seems to follow so close upon the
other, that we fancy they must have always co-existed. We look more
steadily, and we perceive long periods of time, in which there is first a
growth and then a decay, like what we perceive in a tree of the
forest.”
FROUDE, Annals of an English Abbey.
Monasticism’s
record in the Philippines presents no new general fact to the eye of
history. The attempt to eliminate the eternal feminine from her natural
and normal sphere in the scheme of things there met with the same
certain and signal disaster that awaits every perversion of human
activity. Beginning with a band of zealous, earnest men, sincere in
their convictions, to whom the cause was all and their personalities
nothing, it there, as elsewhere, passed through its usual cycle of
usefulness, stagnation, corruption, and degeneration.
To
the unselfish and heroic efforts of the early friars Spain in large
measure owed her dominion over the Philippine Islands and the Filipinos a
marked advance on the road to civilization and nationality. In fact,
after the dreams of sudden wealth from gold and spices had faded, the
islands were retained chiefly as a missionary conquest and a
stepping-stone to the broader fields of Asia, with Manila as a depot for
the Oriental trade. The records of those early years are filled with
tales of courage and heroism worthy of Spain’s proudest years, as
[vi]the missionary fathers labored with unflagging zeal in disinterested
endeavor for the spread of the Faith and the betterment of the
condition of the Malays among whom they found themselves. They won the
confidence of the native peoples, gathered them into settlements and
villages, led them into the ways of peace, and became their protectors,
guides, and counselors.
In those times the cross and
the sword went hand in hand, but in the Philippines the latter was
rarely needed or used. The lightness and vivacity of the Spanish
character, with its strain of Orientalism, its fertility of resource in
meeting new conditions, its adaptability in dealing with the dwellers in
warmer lands, all played their part in this as in the other conquests.
Only on occasions when some stubborn resistance was met with, as in
Manila and the surrounding country, where the most advanced of the
native peoples dwelt and where some of the forms and beliefs of Islam
had been established, was it necessary to resort to violence to destroy
the native leaders and replace them with the missionary fathers. A few
sallies by young Salcedo, the Cortez of the Philippine conquest, with a
company of the splendid infantry, which was at that time the admiration
and despair of martial Europe, soon effectively exorcised any idea of
resistance that even the boldest and most intransigent of the native
leaders might have entertained.
For the most part, no
great persuasion was needed to turn a simple, imaginative, fatalistic
people from a few vague animistic deities to the systematic iconology
and the elaborate ritual of the Spanish Church. An obscure Bathala or a
dim Malyari was easily superseded by or transformed into a clearly
defined Diós, and in the case of any especially tenacious “demon,” he
could without much difficulty be merged into a Christian saint or devil.
There was no organized priesthood to be overcome, the primitive
religious observances consisting almost entirely of occasional orgies
presided over by an old woman, who filled the priestly offices of
interpreter for the unseen powers and chief eater at the sacrificial
feast. With their unflagging zeal, their organization, their elaborate
forms and ceremonies, the missionaries were enabled to win the
confidence of the natives, especially as the greater part of them
learned the local language and identified their lives with the
[vii]communities under their care. Accordingly, the people took kindly
to their new teachers and rulers, so that in less than a generation
Spanish authority was generally recognized in the settled portions of
the Philippines, and in the succeeding years the missionaries gradually
extended this area by forming settlements from among the wilder peoples,
whom they persuaded to abandon the more objectionable features of their
old roving, often predatory, life and to group themselves into towns
and villages “under the bell.”
The tactics employed in
the conquest and the subsequent behavior of the conquerors were true to
the old Spanish nature, so succinctly characterized by a plain-spoken
Englishman of Mary’s reign, when the war-cry of Castile encircled the
globe and even hovered ominously near the “sceptered isle,” when in the
intoxication of power character stands out so sharply defined: “They be
verye wyse and politicke, and can, thorowe ther wysdome, reform and
brydell theyr owne natures for a tyme, and applye ther conditions to the
manners of those men with whom they meddell gladlye by friendshippe;
whose mischievous maners a man shall never know untyll he come under
ther subjection; but then shall he parfectlye parceve and fele them: for
in dissimulations untyll they have ther purposes, and afterwards in
oppression and tyrannye, when they can obtain them, they do exceed all
other nations upon the earthe.”1
In the working out of
this spirit, with all the indomitable courage and fanatical ardor
derived from the long contests with the Moors, they reduced the native
peoples to submission, but still not to the galling yoke which they
fastened upon the aborigines of America, to make one Las Casas shine
amid the horde of Pizarros. There was some compulsory labor in
timber-cutting and ship-building, with enforced military service as
rowers and soldiers for expeditions to the Moluccas and the coasts of
Asia, but nowhere the unspeakable atrocities which in Mexico,
Hispaniola, and South America drove mothers to strangle their babes at
birth and whole tribes to prefer self-immolation to the living death in
the mines and slave-pens. Quite differently from the case in America,
where entire islands and districts were depopulated, to bring on later
the curse of negro slavery, in the Philippines the fact appears that the
[viii]native population really increased and the standard of living was
raised under the stern, yet beneficent, tutelage of the missionary
fathers. The great distance and the hardships of the journey precluded
the coming of many irresponsible adventurers from Spain and, fortunately
for the native population, no great mineral wealth was ever discovered
in the Philippine Islands.
The system of government
was, in its essential features, a simple one. The missionary priests
drew the inhabitants of the towns and villages about themselves or
formed new settlements, and with profuse use of symbol and symbolism
taught the people the Faith, laying particular stress upon “the fear of
God,” as administered by them, reconciling the people to their
subjection by inculcating the Christian virtues of patience and
humility. When any recalcitrants refused to accept the new order, or
later showed an inclination to break away from it, the military forces,
acting usually under secret directions from the padre, made raids in the
disaffected parts with all the unpitying atrocity the Spanish soldiery
were ever capable of displaying in their dealings with a weaker people.
After sufficient punishment had been inflicted and a wholesome fear
inspired, the padre very opportunely interfered in the natives’ behalf,
by which means they were convinced that peace and security lay in
submission to the authorities, especially to the curate of their town or
district. A single example will suffice to make the method clear: not
an isolated instance but a typical case chosen from among the mass of
records left by the chief actors themselves.
Fray
Domingo Perez, evidently a man of courage and conviction, for he later
lost his life in the work of which he wrote, was the Dominican vicar on
the Zambales coast when that Order temporarily took over the district
from the Recollects. In a report written for his superior in 1680 he
outlines the method clearly: “In order that those whom we have assembled
in the three villages may persevere in their settlements, the most
efficacious fear and the one most suited to their nature is that the
Spaniards of the fort and presidio of Paynaven2 of whom [ix]they have a
very great fear, may come very often to the said villages and overrun
the land, and penetrate even into their old recesses where they formerly
lived; and if perchance they should find anything planted in the said
recesses that they would destroy it and cut it down without leaving them
anything. And so that they may see the father protects them, when the
said Spaniards come to the village, the father opposes them and takes
the part of the Indians. But it is always necessary in this matter for
the soldiers to conquer, and the father is always very careful always to
inform the Spaniards by whom and where anything is planted which it may
be necessary to destroy, and that the edicts which his Lordship, the
governor, sent them be carried out .... But at all events said Spaniards
are to make no trouble for the Indians whom they find in the villages,
but rather must treat them well.”3
This in 1680: the
Dominican transcriber of the record in 1906 has added a very
illuminating note, revealing the immutability of the system and showing
that the rulers possessed in a superlative degree the Bourbonesque trait
of learning nothing and forgetting nothing: “Even when I was a
missionary to the heathens from 1882 to 1892, I had occasion to observe
the said policy, to inform the chief of the fortress of the measures
that he ought to take, and to make a false show on the other side so
that it might have no influence on the fortress.”
Thus
it stands out in bold relief as a system built up and maintained by
fraud and force, bound in the course of nature to last only as long as
the deception could be carried on and the repressive force kept up to
sufficient strength. Its maintenance required that the different
sections be isolated from each other so that there could be no growth
toward a common understanding and coöperation, and its permanence
depended upon keeping the people ignorant and contented with their lot,
held under strict control by religious and political fear.
Yet
it was a vast improvement over their old mode of life [x]and their
condition was bettered as they grew up to such a system. Only with the
passing of the years and the increase of wealth and influence, the ease
and luxury invited by these, and the consequent corruption so induced,
with the insatiable longing ever for more wealth and greater influence,
did the poison of greed and grasping power enter the system to work its
insidious way into every part, slowly transforming the beneficent
institution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into an incubus
weighing upon all the activities of the people in the nineteenth, an
unyielding bar to the development of the country, a hideous anachronism
in these modern times.
It must be remembered also that
Spain, in the years following her brilliant conquests of the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, lost strength and vigor through the corruption
at home induced by the unearned wealth that flowed into the mother
country from the colonies, and by the draining away of her best blood.
Nor did her sons ever develop that economic spirit which is the
permanent foundation of all empire, but they let the wealth of the
Indies flow through their country, principally to London and Amsterdam,
there to form in more practical hands the basis of the British and Dutch
colonial empires.
The priest and the soldier were
supreme, so her best sons took up either the cross or the sword to
maintain her dominion in the distant colonies, a movement which, long
continued, spelled for her a form of national suicide. The soldier
expended his strength and generally laid down his life on alien soil,
leaving no fit successor of his own stock to carry on the work according
to his standards. The priest under the celibate system, in its better
days left no offspring at all and in the days of its corruption none
bred and reared under the influences that make for social and political
progress. The dark chambers of the Inquisition stifled all advance in
thought, so the civilization and the culture of Spain, as well as her
political system, settled into rigid forms to await only the inevitable
process of stagnation and decay. In her proudest hour an old soldier,
who had lost one of his hands fighting her battles against the Turk at
Lepanto, employed the other in writing the masterpiece of her
literature, which is really a caricature of the nation.
There
is much in the career of Spain that calls to mind the [xi]dazzling
beauty of her “dark-glancing daughters,” with its early bloom, its
startling—almost morbid—brilliance, and its premature decay. Rapid and
brilliant was her rise, gradual and inglorious her steady decline, from
the bright morning when the banners of Castile and Aragon were flung
triumphantly from the battlements of the Alhambra, to the short summer,
not so long gone, when at Cavite and Santiago with swift, decisive havoc
the last ragged remnants of the once world-dominating power were blown
into space and time, to hover disembodied there, a lesson and a warning
to future generations. Whatever her final place in the records of
mankind, whether as the pioneer of modern civilization or the buccaneer
of the nations or, as would seem most likely, a goodly mixture of both,
she has at least—with the exception only of her great mother,
Rome—furnished the most instructive lessons in political pathology yet
recorded, and the advice to students of world progress to familiarize
themselves with her history is even more apt today than when it first
issued from the encyclopedic mind of Macaulay nearly a century ago.
Hardly had she reached the zenith of her power when the disintegration
began, and one by one her brilliant conquests dropped away, to leave her
alone in her faded splendor, with naught but her vaunting pride left,
another “Niobe of nations.” In the countries more in contact with the
trend of civilization and more susceptible to revolutionary influences
from the mother country this separation came from within, while in the
remoter parts the archaic and outgrown system dragged along until a
stronger force from without destroyed it.
Nowhere was
the crystallization of form and principle more pronounced than in
religious life, which fastened upon the mother country a deadening
weight that hampered all progress, and in the colonies, notably in the
Philippines, virtually converted her government into a hagiarchy that
had its face toward the past and either could not or would not move with
the current of the times. So, when “the shot heard round the world,”
the declaration of humanity’s right to be and to become, in its
all-encircling sweep, reached the lands controlled by her it was coldly
received and blindly rejected by the governing powers, and there was
left only the slower, subtler, but none the less sure, process of
working its way among the people [xii]to burst in time in rebellion and
the destruction of the conservative forces that would repress it.
In
the opening years of the nineteenth century the friar orders in the
Philippines had reached the apogee of their power and usefulness. Their
influence was everywhere felt and acknowledged, while the country still
prospered under the effects of the vigorous and progressive
administrations of Anda and Vargas in the preceding century. Native
levies had fought loyally under Spanish leadership against Dutch and
British invaders, or in suppressing local revolts among their own
people, which were always due to some specific grievance, never directed
definitely against the Spanish sovereignty. The Philippines were shut
off from contact with any country but Spain, and even this communication
was restricted and carefully guarded. There was an elaborate central
government which, however, hardly touched the life of the native
peoples, who were guided and governed by the parish priests, each town
being in a way an independent entity.
Of this halcyon
period, just before the process of disintegration began, there has
fortunately been left a record which may be characterized as the most
notable Spanish literary production relating to the Philippines, being
the calm, sympathetic, judicial account of one who had spent his manhood
in the work there and who, full of years and experience, sat down to
tell the story of their life.4 In it there are no puerile whinings, no
querulous curses that tropical Malays do not order their lives as did
the people of the Spanish village where he may have been reared, no
selfish laments of ingratitude over blessings unasked and only
imperfectly understood by the natives, no fatuous self-deception as to
the real conditions, but a patient consideration of the difficulties
encountered, the [xiii]good accomplished, and the unavoidable evils
incident to any human work. The country and the people, too, are
described with the charming simplicity of the eyes that see clearly, the
brain that ponders deeply, and the heart that beats sympathetically.
Through all the pages of his account runs the quiet strain of peace and
contentment, of satisfaction with the existing order, for he had looked
upon the creation and saw that it was good. There is “neither haste, nor
hate, nor anger,” but the deliberate recital of the facts warmed and
illumined by the geniality of a soul to whom age and experience had
brought, not a sour cynicism, but the mellowing influence of a ripened
philosophy. He was such an old man as may fondly be imagined walking
through the streets of Parañaque in stately benignity amid the fear and
respect of the brown people over whom he watched.
But
in all his chronicle there is no suggestion of anything more to hope
for, anything beyond. Beautiful as the picture is, it is that of a
system which had reached maturity: a condition of stagnation, not of
growth. In less than a decade, the terrific convulsions in European
politics made themselves felt even in the remote Philippines, and then
began the gradual drawing away of the people from their rulers—blind
gropings and erratic wanderings at first, but nevertheless persistent
and vigorous tendencies.
The
first notable influence was the admission of representatives for the
Philippines into the Spanish Cortes under the revolutionary governments
and the abolition of the trade monopoly with Mexico. The last galleon
reached Manila in 1815, and soon foreign commercial interests were
permitted, in a restricted way, to enter the country. Then with the
separation of Mexico and the other American colonies from Spain a more
marked change was brought about in that direct communication was
established with the mother country, and the absolutism of the hagiarchy
first questioned by the numbers of Peninsular Spaniards who entered the
islands to trade, some even to settle and rear families there. These
also affected the native population in the larger centers by the spread
of their ideas, which were not always in conformity with those that for
several centuries the friars had been inculcating into their wards.
Moreover, there was a not-inconsiderable portion [xiv]of the population,
sprung from the friars themselves, who were eager to adopt the customs
and ideas of the Spanish immigrants.
The suppression of
many of the monasteries in Spain in 1835 caused a large influx of the
disestablished monks into the Philippines in search for a haven, and a
home, thus bringing about a conflict with the native clergy, who were
displaced from their best holdings to provide berths for the newcomers.
At the same time, the increase of education among the native priests
brought the natural demand for more equitable treatment by the Spanish
friar, so insistent that it even broke out into open rebellion in 1843
on the part of a young Tagalog who thought himself aggrieved in this
respect.
Thus the struggle went on, with stagnation
above and some growth below, so that the governors were ever getting
further away from the governed, and for such a movement there is in the
course of nature but one inevitable result, especially when outside
influences are actively at work penetrating the social system and making
for better things. Among these influences four cumulative ones may be
noted: the spread of journalism, the introduction of steamships into the
Philippines, the return of the Jesuits, and the opening of the Suez
Canal.
The printing-press entered the islands with the
conquest, but its use had been strictly confined to religious works
until about the middle of the past century, when there was a sudden
awakening and within a few years five journals were being published. In
1848 appeared the first regular newspaper of importance, El Diario de
Manila, and about a decade later the principal organ of the
Spanish-Filipino population, El Comercio, which, with varying
vicissitudes, has continued down to the present. While rigorously
censored, both politically and religiously, and accessible to only an
infinitesimal portion of the people, they still performed the service of
letting a few rays of light into the Cimmerian intellectual gloom of
the time and place.
With the coming of steam navigation
communication between the different parts of the islands was
facilitated and trade encouraged, with all that such a change meant in
the way of breaking up the old isolation and tending to a common
understanding. Spanish power, too, was for the moment more firmly
established, and Moro piracy in Luzon and the Bisayan [xv]Islands, which
had been so great a drawback to the development of the country, was
forever ended.
The return of the Jesuits produced two
general results tending to dissatisfaction with the existing order. To
them was assigned the missionary field of Mindanao, which meant the
displacement of the Recollect Fathers in the missions there, and for
these other berths had to be found. Again the native clergy were the
losers in that they had to give up their best parishes in Luzon,
especially around Manila and Cavite, so the breach was further widened
and the soil sown with discontent. But more far-reaching than this
immediate result was the educational movement inaugurated by the
Jesuits. The native, already feeling the vague impulses from without and
stirred by the growing restlessness of the times, here saw a new world
open before him. A considerable portion of the native population in the
larger centers, who had shared in the economic progress of the colony,
were enabled to look beyond their daily needs and to afford their
children an opportunity for study and advancement—a condition and a need
met by the Jesuits for a time.
With the opening of the
Suez Canal in 1869 communication with the mother country became
cheaper, quicker, surer, so that large numbers of Spaniards, many of
them in sympathy with the republican movements at home, came to the
Philippines in search of fortunes and generally left half-caste families
who had imbibed their ideas. Native boys who had already felt the
intoxication of such learning as the schools of Manila afforded them
began to dream of greater wonders in Spain, now that the journey was
possible for them. So began the definite movements that led directly to
the disintegration of the friar régime.
In the same
year occurred the revolution in the mother country, which had tired of
the old corrupt despotism. Isabella II was driven into exile and the
country left to waver about uncertainly for several years, passing
through all the stages of government from red radicalism to absolute
conservatism, finally adjusting itself to the middle course of
constitutional monarchism. During the effervescent and ephemeral
republic there was sent to the Philippines a governor who set to work to
modify the old system and establish [xvi]a government more in harmony
with modern ideas and more democratic in form. His changes were hailed
with delight by the growing class of Filipinos who were striving for
more consideration in their own country, and who, in their enthusiasm
and the intoxication of the moment, perhaps became more radical than was
safe under the conditions—surely too radical for their religious guides
watching and waiting behind the veil of the temple.
In
January, 1872, an uprising occurred in the naval arsenal at Cavite,
with a Spanish non-commissioned officer as one of the leaders. From the
meager evidence now obtainable, this would seem to have been purely a
local mutiny over the service questions of pay and treatment, but in it
the friars saw their opportunity. It was blazoned forth, with all the
wild panic that was to characterize the actions of the governing powers
from that time on, as the premature outbreak of a general insurrection
under the leadership of the native clergy, and rigorous repressive
measures were demanded. Three native priests, notable for their
popularity among their own people, one an octogenarian and the other two
young canons of the Manila Cathedral, were summarily garroted, along
with the renegade Spanish officer who had participated in the mutiny. No
record of any trial of these priests has ever been brought to light.
The Archbishop, himself a secular5 clergyman, stoutly refused to degrade
them from their holy office, and they wore their sacerdotal robes at
the execution, which was conducted in a hurried, fearful manner. At the
same time a number of young Manilans who had taken conspicuous part in
the “liberal” demonstrations were deported to the Ladrone Islands or to
remote islands of the Philippine group itself.
This
was the beginning of the end. Yet there immediately followed the
delusive calm which ever precedes the fatal outburst, lulling those
marked for destruction to a delusive security. The two decades following
were years of quiet, unobtrusive growth, during which the Philippine
Islands made the greatest economic progress in their history. But this
in itself was preparing the final catastrophe, for if there be any fact
well established in human experience it is that with [xvii]economic
development the power of organized religion begins to wane—the rise of
the merchant spells the decline of the priest. A sordid change, from
masses and mysteries to sugar and shoes, this is often said to be, but
it should be noted that the epochs of greatest economic activity have
been those during which the generality of mankind have lived fuller and
freer lives, and above all that in such eras the finest intellects and
the grandest souls have been developed.
Nor does an
institution that has been slowly growing for three centuries, molding
the very life and fiber of the people, disintegrate without a violent
struggle, either in its own constitution or in the life of the people
trained under it. Not only the ecclesiastical but also the social and
political system of the country was controlled by the religious orders,
often silently and secretly, but none the less effectively. This is
evident from the ceaseless conflict that went on between the religious
orders and the Spanish political administrators, who were at every turn
thwarted in their efforts to keep the government abreast of the times.
The
shock of the affair of 1872 had apparently stunned the Filipinos, but
it had at the same time brought them to the parting of the ways and
induced a vague feeling that there was something radically wrong, which
could only be righted by a closer union among themselves. They began to
consider that their interests and those of the governing powers were not
the same. In these feelings of distrust toward the friars they were
stimulated by the great numbers of immigrant Spaniards who were then
entering the country, many of whom had taken part in the republican
movements at home and who, upon the restoration of the monarchy, no
doubt thought it safer for them to be at as great a distance as possible
from the throne. The young Filipinos studying in Spain came from
different parts of the islands, and by their association there in a
foreign land were learning to forget their narrow sectionalism; hence
the way was being prepared for some concerted action. Thus, aided and
encouraged by the anti-clerical Spaniards in the mother country, there
was growing up a new generation of native leaders, who looked toward
something better than the old system.
It is with this
period in the history of the country—the [xviii]author’s boyhood—that
the story of Noli Me Tangere deals. Typical scenes and characters are
sketched from life with wonderful accuracy, and the picture presented is
that of a master-mind, who knew and loved his subject. Terror and
repression were the order of the day, with ever a growing unrest in the
higher circles, while the native population at large seemed to be
completely cowed—“brutalized” is the term repeatedly used by Rizal in
his political essays. Spanish writers of the period, observing only the
superficial movements,—some of which were indeed fantastical enough, for
“they,
Who in oppression’s darkness caved have dwelt,
They are not eagles, nourished with the day;
What marvel, then, at times, if they mistake their way?”
—and
not heeding the currents at work below, take great delight in
ridiculing the pretensions of the young men seeking advancement, while
they indulge in coarse ribaldry over the wretched condition of the great
mass of the “Indians.” The author, however, himself a “miserable
Indian,” vividly depicts the unnatural conditions and dominant
characters produced under the outworn system of fraud and force, at the
same time presenting his people as living, feeling, struggling
individuals, with all the frailties of human nature and all the
possibilities of mankind, either for good or evil; incidentally he
throws into marked contrast the despicable depreciation used by the
Spanish writers in referring to the Filipinos, making clear the
application of the self-evident proposition that no ordinary human being
in the presence of superior force can very well conduct himself as a
man unless he be treated as such.
The friar orders,
deluded by their transient triumph and secure in their pride of place,
became more arrogant, more domineering than ever. In the general
administration the political rulers were at every turn thwarted, their
best efforts frustrated, and if they ventured too far their own security
threatened; for in the three-cornered wrangle which lasted throughout
the whole of the Spanish domination, the friar orders had, in addition
to the strength derived from their organization and their wealth, the
Damoclean weapon of control over the natives to hang above the heads of
both governor and [xix]archbishop. The curates in the towns, always the
real rulers, became veritable despots, so that no voice dared to raise
itself against them, even in the midst of conditions which the humblest
indio was beginning to feel dumbly to be perverted and unnatural, and
that, too, after three centuries of training under the system that he
had ever been taught to accept as “the will of God.”
The
friars seemed long since to have forgotten those noble aims that had
meant so much to the founders and early workers of their orders, if
indeed the great majority of those of the later day had ever realized
the meaning of their office, for the Spanish writers of the time delight
in characterizing them as the meanest of the Spanish peasantry, when
not something worse, who had been “lassoed,” taught a few ritualistic
prayers, and shipped to the Philippines to be placed in isolated towns
as lords and masters of the native population, with all the power and
prestige over a docile people that the sacredness of their holy office
gave them. These writers treat the matter lightly, seeing in it rather a
huge joke on the “miserable Indians,” and give the friars great credit
for “patriotism,” a term which in this connection they dragged from
depth to depth until it quite aptly fitted Dr. Johnson’s famous
definition, “the last refuge of a scoundrel.”
In their
conduct the religious corporations, both as societies and as
individuals, must be estimated according to their own standards—the
application of any other criterion would be palpably unfair. They
undertook to hold the native in subjection, to regulate the essential
activities of his life according to their ideas, so upon them must fall
the responsibility for the conditions finally attained: to destroy the
freedom of the subject and then attempt to blame him for his conduct is a
paradox into which the learned men often fell, perhaps inadvertently
through their deductive logic. They endeavored to shape the lives of
their Malay wards not only in this existence but also in the next. Their
vows were poverty, chastity, and obedience.
The vow of
poverty was early relegated to the limbo of neglect. Only a few years
after the founding of Manila royal decrees began to issue on the subject
of complaints received by the King over the usurpation of lands on the
part of the [xx]priests. Using the same methods so familiar in the
heyday of the institution of monasticism in Europe—pious gifts, deathbed
bequests, pilgrims’ offerings—the friar orders gradually secured the
richest of the arable lands in the more thickly settled portions of the
Philippines, notably the part of Luzon occupied by the Tagalogs. Not
always, however, it must in justice be recorded, were such doubtful
means resorted to, for there were instances where the missionary was the
pioneer, gathering about himself a band of devoted natives and plunging
into the unsettled parts to build up a town with its fields around it,
which would later become a friar estate. With the accumulated incomes
from these estates and the fees for religious observances that poured
into their treasuries, the orders in their nature of perpetual
corporations became the masters of the situation, the lords of the
country. But this condition was not altogether objectionable; it was in
the excess of their greed that they went astray, for the native peoples
had been living under this system through generations and not until they
began to feel that they were not receiving fair treatment did they
question the authority of a power which not only secured them a peaceful
existence in this life but also assured them eternal felicity in the
next.
With only the shining exceptions that are
produced in any system, no matter how false its premises or how decadent
it may become, to uphold faith in the intrinsic soundness of human
nature, the vow of chastity was never much more than a myth. Through the
tremendous influence exerted over a fanatically religious people, who
implicitly followed the teachings of the reverend fathers, once their
confidence had been secured, the curate was seldom to be gainsaid in his
desires. By means of the secret influence in the confessional and the
more open political power wielded by him, the fairest was his to
command, and the favored one and her people looked upon the choice more
as an honor than otherwise, for besides the social standing that it gave
her there was the proud prospect of becoming the mother of children who
could claim kinship with the dominant race. The curate’s “companion” or
the sacristan’s wife was a power in the community, her family was
raised to a place of importance and influence among their own people,
while she and her ecclesiastical [xxi]offspring were well cared for. On
the death or removal of the curate, it was almost invariably found that
she had been provided with a husband or protector and a not
inconsiderable amount of property—an arrangement rather appealing to a
people among whom the means of living have ever been so insecure.
That
this practise was not particularly offensive to the people among whom
they dwelt may explain the situation, but to claim that it excuses the
friars approaches dangerously close to casuistry. Still, as long as this
arrangement was decently and moderately carried out, there seems to
have been no great objection, nor from a worldly point of view, with all
the conditions considered, could there be much. But the old story of
excess, of unbridled power turned toward bad ends, again recurs, at the
same time that the ideas brought in by the Spaniards who came each year
in increasing numbers and the principles observed by the young men
studying in Europe cast doubt upon the fitness of such a state of
affairs. As they approached their downfall, like all mankind, the friars
became more open, more insolent, more shameless, in their conduct.
The
story of Maria Clara, as told in Noli Me Tangere, is by no means an
exaggerated instance, but rather one of the few clean enough to bear the
light, and her fate, as depicted in the epilogue, is said to be based
upon an actual occurrence with which the author must have been familiar.
The
vow of obedience—whether considered as to the Pope, their highest
religious authority, or to the King of Spain, their political
liege—might not always be so callously disregarded, but it could be
evaded and defied. From the Vatican came bull after bull, from the
Escorial decree after decree, only to be archived in Manila, sometimes
after a hollow pretense of compliance. A large part of the records of
Spanish domination is taken up with the wearisome quarrels that went on
between the Archbishop, representing the head of the Church, and the
friar orders, over the questions of the episcopal visitation and the
enforcement of the provisions of the Council of Trent relegating the
monks to their original status of missionaries, with the friars
invariably victorious in their contentions. Royal decrees ordering
inquiries into the titles to the estates of the men of poverty and those
providing for the education of [xxii]the natives in Spanish were merely
sneered at and left to molder in harmless quiet. Not without good
grounds for his contention, the friar claimed that the Spanish dominion
over the Philippines depended upon him, and he therefore confidently set
himself up as the best judge of how that dominion should be maintained.
Thus
there are presented in the Philippines of the closing quarter of the
century just past the phenomena so frequently met with in modern
societies, so disheartening to the people who must drag out their lives
under them, of an old system which has outworn its usefulness and is
being called into question, with forces actively at work disintegrating
it, yet with the unhappy folk bred and reared under it unprepared for a
new order of things. The old faith was breaking down, its forms and
beliefs, once so full of life and meaning, were being sharply examined,
doubt and suspicion were the order of the day. Moreover, it must ever be
borne in mind that in the Philippines this unrest, except in the parts
where the friars were the landlords, was not general among the people,
the masses of whom were still sunk in their “loved Egyptian night,” but
affected only a very small proportion of the population—for the most
part young men who were groping their way toward something better, yet
without any very clearly conceived idea of what that better might be,
and among whom was to be found the usual sprinkling of “sunshine
patriots” and omnipresent opportunists ready for any kind of trouble
that will afford them a chance to rise.
Add to the
apathy of the masses dragging out their vacant lives amid the shadows of
religious superstition and to the unrest of the few, the fact that the
orders were in absolute control of the political machinery of the
country, with the best part of the agrarian wealth amortized in their
hands; add also the ever-present jealousies, petty feuds, and racial
hatreds, for which Manila and the Philippines, with their medley of
creeds and races, offer such a fertile field, all fostered by the
governing class for the maintenance of the old Machiavelian principle of
“divide and rule,” and the sum is about the most miserable condition
under which any portion of mankind ever tried to fulfill nature’s
inexorable laws of growth.
