Equality, then, was not a dream of enthusiasts, like those of France; equality was the scientific fact. Liberty was not a rare chrism with which were touched the lips of a few peoples set apart by their complexions for this distinction; liberty was the indefeasible right of all.
Manila, Philippine Islands, year 1876—this was. He found nothing in the text-books put into his hands then that bred any of these ideas; above all, there was nothing of the kind in the tuition he was receiving. When he was a student at the Ateneo and later at the University of Santo Tomas, the trend of thought there and elsewhere ran all the other way. By his own mental processes he had worked out, when he was hardly more than a boy, the theory to which gray-beard science was to come a few years later. What he felt then the best schools teach now; a fact that if there were nothing else would establish his precocity. But we are to remember that he had formed early a habit of independent thinking and had been stimulated to form it. This accounts for much. Walls of convention that shut in upon and crushed the intellectual machinery of so many other youths (there and elsewhere) had no terrors for him; despite all weight of eminent authority he would at all times and on all subjects think for himself. To be thus erect intellectually in a university, even of these days and in these nations of ours abreast with the front line of human advance, is still not so easy that we fail to mark [[44]]it if ever we find it. In his day, in his nation, then intellectually dragged along at the moldering chariot-wheels of antique formality, behold a marvel and no less.
This habitual attitude of mind was a great asset in his make-up—the complete intellectual emancipation of the querist that will take nothing for granted, but without bias or passion will investigate, consider, weigh, seek, and decide. Being without feeling, it was curiously counterpoised against another asset that was all feeling, deep and real. His mind might climb into abstraction’s chilly heights; his heart would be hot for Filipinas. He was an example of that enlightened patriotism that has redeemed the word from its cheap and reactionary definitions. It was no mere instinct of attachment to the walls wherein he was born that moved him, the instinct that causes goats to come home and cows to low when they are sold. He saw a people of whom he was a member bowed under monstrous injustice, denied the birthright of opportunity, slandered by oppressors, and contemned by a world that took these slanderous inventions for a true coinage. In a soul that worshiped justice and loved equity, he revolted against these abominations, as it was certain he would have revolted against the same wrongs practised against another people.
Not in the same degree; for at home the brand had been thrust deep into him. He might not even have come, so far in advance of his time, upon the modern theory of races if he had not started with a sense of resentment against the suffering of his own. But when he had satisfied himself of the truth of his theory, [[45]]he naturally applied it to his own people and felt more than ever the yoke that galled and hobbled them. If the Filipino was not in fact made of different stuff from the marl that made up the white man; if he was held in subjection not because he was inferior in capacity but because he was shouldered out of his due share of the world’s light and hope, again how much more terrible was his plight! An aspiring soul, as fine and sure as any other, held as a brother to the ox, Rizal began to perceive even in those early days that the Filipinos were like a river that some great arbitrary force had closed in and dammed back. He could see the water rising and hear it struggling, and knew that some time it would break through the barriers and run its due course. To his thinking, the real powers of his people were latent, but of a kind the world would have to admit when these powers should be set free. And what should set them free?
Education and political liberty.
It has become a habit among some writers and speakers to look upon Rizal as a kind of superman, a creature of abnormal gifts, a brilliant exception to the common endowment of the Filipino. Some have described him as a bright, strange meteor flashing against a background of Malayan incapacity.[18] As this narrative of a wonderful life unfolds it will probably show that the man thus pedestaled was only human and that the secret of his great works, enduring influence and pre-eminence in so many walks was nothing mysterious but plainly understandable. He had a twofold [[46]]inspiration. First, he developed a habit of ceaseless industry, carefully ordered, carefully followed. Second, and even better than this, from his youth he had been overmastered, fired and whirled along by a vision of his people redeemed. So then to their redemption he consecrated his life. He did it in his closet, quietly, without theatrics and without telling anybody. Macaulay’s theory that every great man has something of the charlatan in him falls short in this instance. For him the grand stand never existed. Whatever he did was dedicated first in his heart to Filipinas; whatever he thought, planned, dreamed, or hoped for had some reference to her and her service, and now when he studied it was to fit himself to serve her better.
We come back to him, knocking at the gate of Ateneo, eleven years old, small for his age, and all a boy still; for we have shot far ahead of that day to deal with the development of the ideas of which he was slowly possessed. It was not with a head full of philosophy that he made his application to the famous school, but, as he tells us in his short notes on his life, a heart full of misgivings. The day was June 10, 1872, and he was to take his entrance examinations at the College of San Juan de Letran, Manila. Christian doctrine, arithmetic, and reading were the branches of human erudition required of youth that sought to enter those doors. It is to be supposed that José could have passed them with his eyes shut. He received the required mark and spent the next few days at home. When he returned to Manila to begin his studies at the [[47]]Ateneo, “even then,” he says, “I felt that unhappiness was in store for me.”[19]
For all his good passing-mark, he came near to miss the opening he sought. Father Fernando, the Jesuit priest then in charge of the Ateneo, looked upon him without favor. He had come late in the term, for one thing; and then he was so small and slight. Only at the intercession of Dr. Manuel Burgos, a nephew of the priest officially murdered on Bagumbayan Field, the rules were relaxed and the midget from Calamba allowed to come in. For the moment he forgot his forebodings. With joy he put on the school uniform, the white coat called an americana, the necktie, and the rest. When he found himself in the chapel of the Jesuit fathers to hear mass, surrounded with strange faces, a new boy in a new school, he prayed fervently. Then he says he went to the class-room and appraised his teachers and school-fellows, on whom he seems to have looked with preternaturally keen eyes.
Father José Bech was a tall man, thin and somewhat stooping, but quick in his movements. His face was ascetic, yet animated. The eyes were small and sunken, the nose sharp and Grecian. His thin lips curved downward. He was a little eccentric, at times being out of humor and intolerant and at other times amusing himself by playing like a child.
Some of my schoolmates were interesting enough to warrant mentioning them by name. A boy, or rather a young man from my own province, Florencio Gavino Oliva, was of exceptional talents but only average application. The [[48]]same was true of Moisés Santiago. He was a mathematician and penman. Also it was true of Gonzalo Manzano. The last named then held the position of Roman Emperor.
The title seems incongruous, but Rizal explains that to stimulate the boys in Jesuit colleges the custom was to divide them into two “empires,” one Roman, the other Carthaginian or Greek. These were continually at war—academic. The battles fought were in the class-room, over recitations. Points were scored by discovering errors in the work of the hated foe. Rizal was placed at the bottom of the cohorts of one of these “empires,” a private in the rear ranks. Within a month he was emperor; he had outstripped everybody else.