CHAPTER X

FILIPINO INDOLENCE

The Indio that had startled the Spanish colony in Manila by daring to call the Philippines “my fatherland” proved his loyalty to the country he adored by serving it with a discriminating zeal. He would have been more picturesque if he had been well galvanized by Chauvin, but less useful. His mind, though powerful, could work in only one way, which was in orderly motions. These prevented him from dwelling so much on his country’s wrongs that he forgot his country’s faults. For this reason, and because he could have no heated bearings in his mental processes, he was Filipinas’s greatest asset. In “Noli Me Tangere” he showed that he understood well the native defects (products of the System) and would spare them no more than he spared the friars. But it was for his countrymen’s good that he rebuked them, like a wise father correcting his children; and whatever might be his employments he never forgot two great vital visions, Filipinas fast bound in the prison-house and education tardily on its way to set her free.

With the same purpose of helping this good angel the sooner to smite the prison locks, he now set himself an unusual task. He was to master French; not after the fashion of the schools, for that he already had, nor for the mere pleasure of acquiring it, but to be able to write in it as if it were his native tongue. He knew what he was about in this; if his novels should fail to arouse the Filipinos he was determined to appeal to Europe in behalf of his country, and he conceived that he could best do this in French. Therefore with indefatigable ardor he pursued the French verb and the other phenomena of Gallic speech into their remotest fastnesses. He took what might be called post-postgraduate work in these arid excursions, employing the help of unusual scholars and including colloquial French with French of the Academy. When we come upon the fact that at the end of these labors he was able to prepare as a text-book for French students a volume of French exercises [122] we may perceive that his success was out of the ordinary.

In Paris when the exposition of 1889 came on he was struck with the fact that in that vast and imposing procession of the children of earth his own people, whom he felt and knew to be as worthy as the others, had no place. Therefore he organized an international league to make known to the world the facts about the Filipinos and to refute the slanders that Spanish writers had sown thickly in European literature. He called this society the “Association Internationale des Philippinistes.” Dr. Blumentritt was president, Dr. Rost vice-president, and Dr. Planchut of Paris one of the directors. [123] If Rizal was a nationalist, he was also an internationalist; a fact that must be already apparent in these annals. No doubt, being wise about other things, he was not deceived into thinking that internationalism could come by any other than the nationalist route. The first of the declared objects of his Association Internationale was to summon an international congress. Others were to study the Philippines historically and scientifically, to create a Philippine library and museum of Philippine objects, to publish books on Philippine topics, and to arouse public interest in these objects.

That the world looked with some disdain upon his people, that under the spell of the Spanish pen it ignored the honorable record of Philippine culture and the stirring Philippine history, were thorns that gave his mind no rest. None knew so well as he that this misprision was rankly unjust. In the face of almost universal opinion in Europe, he knew that the Malay mind, though different, was not inferior; he knew that what it wanted was no more than the sunlight and free air. In all ways the general verdict was askew: the Filipinos were not even innately lazy, as hundreds of writers had asserted, hundreds still repeated, and doubtless other hundreds will continue to parrot for years to come. He knew that lazy people could never have made the progress the Filipino had made before the evil day of the Spanish flag. The respect he had for the latent powers of his countrymen sprang from research and not from prejudice. It was true enough, but not a truth that he could keep refrigerated in scientific abstractions. It burned and struggled in him like something fighting to get free, and he relieved himself of an intolerable protest by writing (for “La Solidaridad”) a brochure on the subject.

“The Indolence of the Filipino” [124] it is called, and, if he had written nothing else, thoughtful men would still admire him for the cool, masterly marshaling of his reasonings in this. He purposes to deal with the truth. “Let us calmly examine the facts,” he says in beginning, “using on our part all the impartiality of which a man is capable who is convinced that there is no redemption except upon solid bases of virtue.” Two pages later he says:

Examining well, then, all the scenes and all the men that we have known from childhood, and examining the life of our country, we believe that indolence does exist there. The Filipinos, who can measure up with the most active peoples in the world, will doubtless not repudiate this admission, for it is true that in the Philippines one works and struggles against the climate, against nature, and against man. But we must not take the exception for the general rule, and should rather seek the good of our country by stating what we believe to be true. We must confess that indolence does actually and positively exist there, only that, instead of holding it to be the cause of the backwardness and the troubles of the country, we regard it as the effect of the troubles and the backwardness, by the fostering of a lamentable predisposition.... [125]

The predisposition exists. Why should it not?

A hot climate requires of the individual quiet and rest, just as cold invites to labor and action. For this reason the Spaniard is more indolent than the Frenchman, the Frenchman more indolent than the German. The Europeans themselves that so liberally reproach the residents of the colonies (and I am not now speaking of the Spaniards but of the Germans and English themselves), how do they live in tropical countries? Surrounded with a numerous train of servants, never going about but riding in a carriage, needing servants not only to take off their shoes for them but even to fan them! And yet they live and eat better, they work for themselves, they look for riches, they hope for a future, free and respected, while the poor colonist, the indolent colonist, is badly nourished, has no hope, toils for others, and works under force and compulsion!

Perhaps the reply to this will be that the white men are not made to stand the severity of the climate. A mistake! A man can live in any climate, if he will only adapt himself to its requirements and conditions.

What kills the Europeans in hot countries is the abuse of liquors, the attempt to live according to the nature of his own country under another sky and another sun. We inhabitants of hot countries live well in northern Europe whenever we take the precautions the people there take. Likewise Europeans can endure the torrid zone if they will but rid themselves of their prejudices.

The fact is that in tropical countries violent work is not a good thing as it is in cold countries. In tropical countries it is death, destruction, annihilation. Nature knows this and has therefore made the earth in tropical countries more fertile, more productive, as a compensation. An hour’s work under that burning sun, in the midst of the pernicious influence springing from nature in activity, is equal to a day’s work in a temperate climate. It is just, then, that the earth should yield a hundredfold! [126]

Moreover, do we not see the active European, who has gained strength during the winter, who feels the fresh blood of spring boil in his veins, do we not see him abandon his labors during the few days of his variable summer, close his office—where the work is not, after all, violent, where, in many cases, it amounts to talking and gesticulating in the shade or near a luncheon stand—do we not see him flee to watering-places where he sits idle in the cafés or idly strolls about? What wonder then that the inhabitant of tropical countries, worn out and with his blood thinned by the continuous and excessive heat, is reduced to inaction! Who is the indolent one in the Manila offices? Is it the poor clerk who comes in at 8 in the morning and leaves at 4 in the afternoon with only his umbrella, who copies and writes and works for himself and for his chief, or is it the chief, who comes in a carriage at 10 o’clock, leaves before 12, reads his newspaper while smoking and, with his feet cocked up on a chair or a table, gossips about all his friends?

Man is not a brute; he is not a machine. His object is not merely to produce; in spite of the pretensions of some Christian whites who would make of the colored Christian a kind of motive-power somewhat more intelligent and less costly than steam. [127]

Rizal found that in regard to indolence the Philippines were like a patient with a long continued disease. The doctor attributes the failure of his medicines to the debility of the patient’s system, and the patient ascribes his debilitated condition to the doctor’s remedies. He followed his illustration by remarking that, as in the case of a desperate illness, so in the government of the Philippines, the attendants seemed to lose their heads and, instead of seeking the causes of the disease to remove them, devoted themselves to attacking the symptoms, with here blood-letting (taxation), there a plaster (forced labor), and there a sedative (trifling reform).

Every new arrival proposes a new remedy: one, seasons of prayer, the relics of a saint, the viaticum, the friars; another, a shower-bath; still another, with pretensions to modern ideas, a transfusion of the blood [that is to say, an agricultural colony of Europeans]. It’s nothing, only the patient has eight million indolent red corpuscles [Filipinos]; some few white corpuscles in the form of an agricultural colony will get us out of the trouble.... [128]

Yes, transfusion of blood, transfusion of blood! New life, new vitality! Yes, the new white corpuscles that you are going to inject into its veins, the new white corpuscles that were a cancer in another organism, will withstand all the depravity of the system, will withstand the blood-letting that it suffers every day, will have more stamina than all the eight million red corpuscles, will cure all the disorders, all the degeneration, all troubles in the principal organs.

Be thankful if they do not become coagulations and produce gangrene; be thankful if they do not reproduce the cancer!

He comes then to the central fact he has undertaken to establish. Here it is in the teeth of the plausible assertions of prejudice and the selfish interests that depreciate the natives:

Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic, but not a hereditary malady.

The Filipinos have not always been what they are. Witnesses to this statement are all the historians of the first years after the discovery of the islands. [129]

Long before the coming of the Spaniards the Malayan Filipinos had an organized and outstretching commerce, foreign as well as domestic. A Chinese writer of the thirteenth century has recorded their intimate commercial relations with China, the probity and zeal of the Filipino merchants, the great extent of the trade they carried on. They exported cotton, cloth, pearls, tortoise-shell, betel-nuts, and other commodities the making or preparing or gathering of which meant industry.

Pigafetta, a Spanish writer with Magellan, speaks of the great variety of the island products. The natives worked mines, produced and wrought in metals, made ingenious and effective weapons, wove silk into their artistic dresses, and even made false teeth of gold. Their agricultural products were of kinds not to be had without labor.

The early Spaniards reported the Filipinos to be daring and indefatigable sailors, whose fleets of merchantmen covered the waters of the Islands and made far voyages, even regularly to Siam. Filipino soldiers fought in the wars of other countries. In 1539 they took part in the wars of Sumatra, and it was their valor that overthrew there a renowned potentate, the sultan of Atchin.

Magellan’s people testified that industriously the Filipinos tilled the soil, each man having his own field. It was a wealthy country: food-stuffs were abundant, the natives were well fed. Legaspi’s expedition (about 1591) reported again on their large variety of products, including manufactures of iron, porcelain and cloth. Nowhere was to be noted poverty or savagery; business had attained to an excellent growth. The natives knew something about the rest of the world; there were even among them, before a Spanish ship had ever anchored in Philippine waters, men that knew the Spanish language, having no doubt acquired it in their travels. When Cebu, a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants, was burned with all its food-supplies, its people did not suffer hunger, because the surrounding country quickly and intelligently organized to meet the emergency with abundant relief.

All the histories of those first years, in short, abound in long accounts about the industry and agriculture of the natives: mines, gold-washings, looms, farms, barter, naval construction, raising of poultry and stock, weaving of silk and cotton, distilleries, manufactures of arms, pearl fisheries, the civet industry, the horn and hide industry, etc., are things encountered at every step, and, considering the time and the conditions in the Islands, prove that there was life, there was activity, there was movement. [130]

He cites de Morga to show that indolence came upon the Filipinos after the Spanish domination and was not conspicuous before that time. De Morga’s seven years as lieutenant-governor of Manila should have instructed him about this, when he says that the natives under the Spaniards lost some of the trades in which they had been most successful. They had even forgotten much about farming, the raising of poultry, of live stock, of cotton, about the weaving of cloth as they used to weave it in their paganism and for a time after their country had been conquered.

Other Spaniards of that period bore witness to the same decline; and generations later a German traveler, observing the differences between the habits of the natives under Spanish rule and of those that were still unsubdued, asked if the industrious free peoples would not in their turn become indolent when Christianity and Spain should be forced upon them. “The Filipinos,” Rizal justly concludes from these testimonies, “in spite of the climate, in spite of their few needs (they were less then than now), were not the indolent creatures of our time.” [131]

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

A fatal combination of causes, he finds.

First, the continual wars and the insurrections that were provoked by Spanish cruelty. When there was no civil strife abroad in the Philippines, able-bodied men were drafted to fight for Spain in Borneo or Indo-China; or there were huge expeditions, usually failures, that took away thousands of the best young men and never returned them. He quotes the Spanish writer, Gaspar de San Agustin, showing how one formerly populous town had been greatly shorn of inhabitants because, being noted as sailors and oarsmen, the Government took them for foreign service. [132] In this way, the island of Panay, which had fifty thousand families when the Spaniards came, had been reduced to fifteen thousand.

Ten years after the Legaspi expedition, that is to say, in 1581, sixty years after Magellan’s “discovery,” the islands had lost one third of the total population. [133]

Of course, it was the young, the hardy, the capable, the industrious that went by this route to further the cold schemes of Spanish ambition.

Under such a drain faded the moral and material resources of the people.

Second, we are to remember the ravages of the pirates. Before the days of Magellan these audacious plunderers had with avidity pursued their calling in Philippine waters, but what is not generally known is that their activities greatly increased under the Spanish domination. The Spaniards encouraged the pirates, not to prey upon Spanish settlements, but to terrorize remote populations, to make them amenable to Spanish rule, in some instances to disclose what weapons the natives had that these might be snatched from them, and sometimes merely to be rid of objectionable communities. As the pirates did a thriving commerce in slaves, to eliminate, with their help, the undesirable was easy. De Morga says:

The boldness of these people of Mindanao [pirates] did great damage to the Visayan Islands, as much by what they did in them as by the fear and fright that the natives acquired; because the natives were in the power of the Spaniards, who held them subject and tributary and unarmed, in such manner that they did not protect them from their enemies nor leave them means with which to defend themselves as they did when there were no Spaniards in the country. [134]

Rizal lays the emphasis of capitals upon this last phrase, which indeed seems powerful evidence, coming from such a source.

The pirates came every year, sometimes five times, sometimes ten, and an average visit cost the Islands more than eight hundred persons.

Gaspar de San Agustin tells of an Island near Cebu that by 1608 the pirates had almost depopulated and points to the fact that the natives had no defense.

Third, forced labor. This was a grievous matter: again and again it drove the Filipinos to revolt, but the Spaniards would learn nothing and to the last clung to a thing certain to wreck them. Its evils were first manifest in the ship-building enterprises the Spaniards undertook. They found the Filipinos among the best natural ship-builders in the world, having constructed, as before noted, some of the largest vessels then afloat. Other great vessels were planned by the Spaniards, and to get out quickly the needed timbers they compelled thousands of natives to work without pay and to provide their own food; a viler than ordinary form of slavery. To get out the masts for one galleon, six thousand natives were employed for three months, finding their own subsistence. Trees large enough to furnish these masts grew only in the interior; the labor of moving them through jungle and over mountains was enormous. Fernando de los Rios Coronel says that “the surrounding country had to be depopulated” in the ship-building work and that the natives furnished the timbers “with immense labor, damage, and cost to themselves.” San Agustin says that “the continual labor of cutting timber for his Majesty’s shipyards” was a great cause of the decline in population because it hindered people “from cultivating the very fertile plain they have.”

Fourth, taxes and the cruelty of the Government. De los Rios Coronel cites “the natives that were executed, those that left their wives and children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those that were sold into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them,” among the elements disappearing from the population. There were also, it appears from San Agustin, to be added “those flogged to death, women crushed to death by their heavy burdens, those that sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many that are executed or left to die of hunger, those that eat poisonous herbs, and the mothers that kill their children in bearing them.” [135] It is not an exhilarating picture; to believe it we must remind ourselves that it is limned by Spaniards: it can have no impulse to a hostile exaggeration.

The fields once cleared ceased to be cultivated; the towns once flourishing lost population and trade. The Filipino was launched on a backward career. Because,

Fifth, there was the psychological or spiritual fruitage of all this lethargy.

Worse than all the others and the culminating cause, this was. The Filipino’s spirit sank under the alien yoke. It appears that he no longer cared; what was there to care for? Spanish polity offered him in exchange for his lost liberty here only the prospect of salvation in another life. The bargain was not stimulating. Salvation depended in no degree upon terrestrial industry; the idle were saved equally with the

## active. We think, besides, that a racial spring was touched too fine to

be suspected by the trampling soldiers that Spain sent over to walk upon these bowed necks. The Malay responds to kindness; under blows, compulsion, or superior brute force he retires within himself into a sullen apathy. This now fell upon the native wherever the Spanish flag waved and to the extent that the Spanish methods prevailed. To go beyond Rizal’s able treatise and to record what even he could not have expected, the Americans, when their day came, noted with astonishment that the Filipinos of the South were more active, industrious, and resilient than their brothers in the North, although this was to reverse the usual order of nature. Some Americans ascribed the Southerner’s advantage to his religion and credited to Mohammedanism a virtue it hardly possessed. The real explanation, which abundantly confirms Rizal’s thesis, is that the Southerner had never gone under the lethal yoke of the Spanish conception of society.

Even when actual slavery was not enforced upon the native, the returns for his labor and efforts were so meager and uncertain he had no longer an incentive to work. There was a kind of padrone or contractor called the encomendero to whom the people of a district were virtually delivered over that he might extract from them all available profit and steer back to Spain with both pockets stuffed with the gold he had wrung from their toil. Usually this person had no other interest than to make his exit as early as possible and as heavily laden, to the which ends conscience should be no hindrance. He robbed the natives of produce where he could not steal labor; he used false measures in buying and selling. The unhappy Filipinos had no appeal. In one town where a particularly brutal encomendero exacted additional tribute by using a steelyard twice as long as it should have been, they rose and tried to kill him—it appears, unfortunately, without success. [136]

De San Agustin gives these practices as the reason why the gold-mines of Panay, once “very rich,” had ceased to be worked; the natives preferred to live in poverty rather than to work under the conditions imposed upon them. Exploitation was the business of the Spaniard (from the governor down), and the only business that seems to have been attended to with diligence. To get rich quickly and to get home to spend the money was the real inspiration, an impulse not unknown in other parts of the earth where with his trusty rifle the white man has imposed his peculiar civilization upon his dark-skinned brother. In some places the dark brother under these ministrations lies down and dies; in the Philippines he ceased to work except under the lash or when he was fomenting an insurrection. Reviewing these facts the superior wisdom supposed to lurk mysteriously under the white skin seems to require much explanation.

Rizal points out that while in his time the pirates had ceased from troubling and the Dutch colonists were at rest, the other causes of the Filipino uneasiness went on undiminished to a loud chorus of denunciation from the elements responsible for these evils. As usual, names had shifted, the essentials of exploitation were unchanged. The encomendero was no longer the commanding figure in the process of extracting and coining the toilers’ sweat; it was now the local governor, the friar, or both, but the machinery in use was the same. He quotes a French traveler of his own time that observed with astonishment the operations of a typical governor in whose hands “the high and noble functions he performs are nothing more than instruments of gain. He monopolizes all the business and instead of developing the love of work, instead of stimulating the natives to overcome the too natural indolence, he with the abuse of his powers thinks only of destroying all competition that may trouble him or attempt to

## participate in his profits. It matters little to him that the country

is impoverished, without commerce, without industry, if only the governor is quickly enriched.” [137]

The whole story deserves the attention of mankind; the debacle and its causes. It is a simulacrum of exploitation and exploitation’s fatal results.

To do business in the Philippines, as we understand business, was almost impossible, year of grace 1890, so numerous were the obstacles, documents, papers, signatures, tangles of red tape to be unwound, officers to be bribed. If there is no commerce, how can there be industry? If there is no industry what shall the masses of people do but idle? “The most commercial and most industrious countries have been the freest,” says Rizal; “France, England, and the United States prove this. Hong-Kong, while it is not worth the most insignificant of the Philippines, has more commercial movement than all these Islands together because it is free and well governed.”

The Spanish aristocrats in the Islands contributed to the general impulse to indolence. They posed as superior persons and exalted models, yet they did no work and despised all that labored. The vice of gambling, which the Spaniards deliberately encouraged in the natives, added to the general stagnation; not only cock-fighting (officially protected and a source of government revenue) but other gaming. It is a passion to which the Malay blood seems peculiarly susceptible, as the Chinese are to opium-smoking. Under government encouragement gambling became almost a native obsession wherever the Spanish rule was strongest. Having taught them to gamble, the Spaniards denounced the Filipinos as a race of gamblers; but this was again a species of injustice of which the Spaniard had no monopoly. It is easy to instance white communities that refuse to allow colored men to perform any but menial offices and then despise them as a race of menials. As to this practice in the United States of America, for example, reference may profitably be had to the pointed comments of Mr. George Bernard Shaw.

Agriculture is the natural business of the Islands. Hebetudinous government in Rizal’s time did nothing to encourage or even to defend it. The farmer went his way, preyed upon by the most villainous system of interest pillage so far disclosed in human affairs, [138] and the Government gave him never so much as a friendly word. When crops failed, when typhoons wrought huge destruction, when the plague of locusts turned some great green valley to naked desolation, the Government looked on indifferently and sent another tax collector.

It would not even seek a market for the insular products.

“Add to this lack of material inducement,” says Rizal, “the absence of moral stimulus, and you will see how he who is not indolent in that country must needs be a madman or at least a fool.”

The injustice with which the native was treated everywhere, merely because of his birth and his color, atrophied his energies; such were the windings and curlings of the vile snake of racial antipathy. Let the Filipino with whatsoever effort achieve whatsoever prize in fair competition with a white man, and the wreath he had won by worth would be snatched from him by trickery or plain theft. Why, then, should he strive?

But still worse were the evils of what was called by way of euphony the educational system maintained under this dispensation.

Take the best of these schools, or so-called schools, and at their best. “They amount,” says Rizal, “to five or ten years each of 150 days at most, in which the youth comes in contact with those very priests that boldly proclaim that it is an evil for the natives to know Castilian [Spanish], that the native should not be separated from his carabao, [139] that he should not have any further aspirations, and so on; five to ten years in which the majority of the students have grasped nothing more than that no one understands what the books say, not even the professors themselves, perhaps; and these five to ten years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole life, that preachment which lowers the dignity of man, which by degrees brutally deprives him of the sentiment of self-esteem, that eternal, stubborn, constant labor to bow the native’s neck, to make him accept the yoke, to place him on a level with the beast.

“Deprive a man, then, of his dignity, and you not only deprive him of his moral strength but you also make him useless even for those that wish to make use of him. Every creature has its stimulus, its main-spring. Man’s is his self-esteem. Take it away from him and he is a corpse, and he that seeks activity in a corpse will encounter only worms.” [140]

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

Without this no people can realize the good that is potential within them, no people can ever attain to the self-expression that is their due, and no people will ever manifest their normal activities. “A man in the Philippines is only an individual—he is not a member of a nation. He is forbidden and denied the right of association, and is therefore weak and sluggish. The Philippines is an organism whose cells seem to have no arterial system to irrigate it or nervous system to communicate its impressions.... The result of this is that if a prejudicial measure is ordered, no one protests: all goes well apparently until later the evils are felt. Another blood-letting and as the organism has neither nerves nor voice the physician proceeds in the belief that the treatment is not injuring it. It needs a reform, but as it must not speak, it keeps silent and remains with the need.” [141]

Thus of the possible contribution of these people the world was deprived because a grotesquely unintelligent tyranny stifled the expression of their natural forces. It is the office of absolutism to try to make men think alike. This absolutism tried to keep them from thinking at all.

Once the Filipino was active, alert, industrious, prosperous. Now he had become inert, often inept, indifferent, poor. For these transformations, behold here the reasons. They are enough.

With more than one purpose we have dwelt at length upon this remarkable treatise. It shows Rizal’s mind, how clear and strong, and his thinking, how firm and sure. It shows how logically he arranged his ideas to a climax, a faculty that marks all his writings. It shows how well based upon reading and reason, no less than upon observation, was his faith in the Filipino people. Not from mere instinct nor from racial prejudice, he felt that here was a great and suppressed power. We dwell upon it also because it offers an unequaled picture of the Philippines after three hundred years of alien rule and indicates the appalling boundaries of the task that he had single-handed undertaken. Courage is the quality that mankind has elected most to honor. Surely the courage of battle-fields is little compared with the supreme courage of a man that looking level-eyed upon such terrific difficulties as are outlined here sets himself to the one business of combating and overcoming them.

One other reflection pertains to this chapter, profoundly suggestive to any mind that will give heed to it. After all these generations of a system so elaborately designed to annihilate their spirits and chloroform their energies, the Malays of the Islands were still unerased. A few years after Rizal’s so able plea for them had been written they were in arms beating back the best troops of the oppressor. Thirty years later, under changed auspices, they were giving to the world a conspicuous example of intelligent and successful self-government. No sooner was applied to them the stimulus of a measure of freedom than the old reproach of indolence began to fail.

In thirty years they had demonstrated the truth of all this man had said of them. Sympathetic insight proved to be better than the solemn platitudes of wise men reasoning backward. As you see the Filipino now, said the wise men, so he must be always. Indolence—it is of the race and incurable! With a dash of his pen Rizal sent all this seven ways. He knew the heart of Filipinas; the wise men knew only what had been written by somebody who had read what somebody else had deduced about her.

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