August 13, 1898, the Spanish flag came down from Page 262Fort Santiago in evidence of the surrender of the city. At the first opportunity Paco Cemetery was visited and Rizal’s body raised for a more decent interment. Vainly his shoes were searched for a last message which he had said might be concealed there, for the dampness had made any paper unrecognizable. Then a simple cross was erected, resting on a marble block carved, as had been the Page 263smaller one which secretly had first marked the spot, with the reversed initials “R. P. J.”
Governor-General Forbes and his aide, delegate Mariano Ponce, at the unveiling of the tablet on the Rizal house.
The first issue of a Filipino newspaper under the new government was entirely dedicated to Rizal. The second anniversary of his execution was observed with general unanimity, his countrymen demonstrating that those who were seeing the dawn of the new day were not forgetful of the greatest of those who had fallen in the night, to paraphrase his own words.
His widow returned and did live by giving lessons in English, at first privately in Cebu, where one of her pupils was the present and first Speaker of the Philippine Assembly, and afterwards as a government employee in the public schools and in the “Liceo” of Manila.
| The last portrait of José Rizal’s mother. |
With the establishment of civil government a new province was formed near Manila, including the land across the lake to which, as a lad in Kalamba, Rizal had often wonderingly looked, and the name of Rizal Province was given it.
Later when public holidays were provided for by the new laws, the anniversary of Rizal’s execution was in the list, and it has become the great day of the year, with the entire community uniting, for Spaniards no longer consider him to have been a traitor to Spain and the American authorities have founded a government in conformity with his teachings.
On one of these occasions, December 30, 1905, William Jennings Bryan, “The Great American Commoner,” gave the Rizal Day address, in the course of which he said:
“If you will permit me to draw one lesson from the Page 264life of Rizal, I will say that he presents an example of a great man consecrated to his country’s welfare. He, though dead, is a living rebuke to the scholar who selfishly enjoys the privilege of an ample education and does not impart the benefits of it to his fellows. His example is worth much to the people of these Islands, to the child who reads of him, to the young and old.”