Finally the President of the United States in a public address at Fargo, North Dakota, on April 7, 1903—five years after American scholars had begun to study Philippine affairs as they had never been studied before—declared: ”In the Philippine Islands the American government has tried, and is trying, to carry out exactly what the greatest genius and most revered patriot ever known in the Philippines, José Rizal, steadfastly advocated,” a formal, emphatic and clear-cut expression of national policy upon a question then of paramount interest.
In the light of the facts of Philippine history already set forth there is no cause for wonder at this sweeping indorsement, even though the views so indorsed were those of a man who lived in conditions widely different from those about to be introduced by the new government. Page 20Rizal had not allowed bias to influence him in studying the past history of the Philippines, he had been equally honest with himself in judging the conditions of his own time, and he knew and applied with the same fairness the teaching which holds true in history as in every other branch of science that like causes under like conditions must produce like results, He had been careful in his reasoning, and it stood the test, first of President Roosevelt’s advisers, or otherwise that Fargo speech would never have been made, and then of all the President’s critics, or there would have been heard more of the statement quoted above which passed unchallenged, but not, one may be sure, uninvestigated.
The American system is in reality not foreign to the Philippines, but it is the highest development, perfected by experience, of the original plan under which the Philippines had prospered and progressed until its benefits were wrongfully withheld from them. Filipino leaders had been vainly asking Spain for the restoration of their rights and the return to the system of the Laws of the Indies. At the time when America came to the Islands there was among them no Rizal, with a knowledge of history that would enable him to recognize that they were getting what they had been wanting, who could rise superior to the unimportant detail of under what name or how the good came as long as it arrived, and whose prestige would have led his countrymen to accept his decision. Some leaders had one qualification, some another, a few combined two, but none had the three, for a country is seldom favored with more than one surpassingly great man at one time. Page 21Page 22
Rizal at Thirteen.
Rizal at Eighteen.
The Portrait on the Philippine Postage Stamp.
