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.[11] Then came breakfast, which generally consisted of a plate of rice and two dried sardines. [[37]]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.[12]
In Manila, though not at the Ateneo, he had been preceded by his elder brother Paciano, long a student at the College of San José, 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 José as a notorious patriot; because [[38]]he spoke with some freedom against the tyranny that blasted his country the authorities refused to allow him to pass his examinations.[13] 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.[14] 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 José 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 José 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 [[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.[15] 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 José 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 [[40]]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.[16] 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 accepted [[41]]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 Asiatic 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]]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.[17] 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 [[43]]be dearer than another to the Omnipotence that he believed had created all.