Of a sudden appeared at Calamba a battery of artillery and a company of soldiers, who ostentatiously took possession of the town as if it had been in a state of armed revolt. At this the inhabitants blinked and gasped, for nowhere on earth lay a more peaceable community. They were not left long in doubt as to what was toward. The commandant of the troops [[165]]issued a curt order to Mercado and the other tenants involved in the litigation to remove within twenty-four hours all their buildings from the land they had occupied. An appeal was pending, a fact that in all civilized countries would have been sufficient to stay proceedings until the appeal could be decided. It was of no such validity here. To comply with the savage order was physically impossible; there were not hands enough in Calamba nor in all the country around. At the end of the next day the agents of the authorities set fire to all the houses, and among them perished from human sight and treasuring the house where José Rizal was born.[5]
Across this repulsive story glowers a face permanently evil in history. The governor-general that connived at these barbarities where he did not order them was Emiliano Weyler, immortal in the records of Cuba as “The Butcher,” accused of deeds there so horrible they can never be put into print, accused in the Philippines of huge peculations as well as stupid cruelties, a man that seemed to delight in cruelty as other men delight in kindness. It was he that thought, “in the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things,” of the expedient of overawing Calamba and the courts with artillery and martial law upon the heads of the litigants; it was he that had made the most show of a violent hatred of Rizal and furnished the proof that the persecution of Francisco Mercado was revenge upon Francisco Mercado’s son. When Weyler transferred his rule of blood and iron to Cuba, he left in the official archives evidence of the real nature of the [[166]]proceedings. He can have had no suspicion that he was preparing evidence of his own iniquity to be given to the world through the nation he most hated. His papers were still in the archives August 13, 1898, when Manila surrendered to Dewey and Merritt. Among them was a copy of a letter he had sent at this time to certain of the friar landlords, expressing his full sympathy with them and (with a characteristic touch) the pleasure he had in serving them against the tenantry.[6]
In the spot from which it had been thus evicted the Mercado family had lived for many years. There could have come upon these kinsfolk of Rizal no sterner test of their fortitude. Before it they went their way undaunted. At Los Baños was a small house to which Mr. Mercado had title. There he led his family to a refuge and continued his fight against the friars.
Rizal was in London when the news reached him of the petty vengeance wreaked upon the body of his brother-in-law. There had been launched some months before by the Filipino colony in Madrid a semimonthly magazine called “La Solidaridad,” the object of which was to arouse and unify the Filipinos and wrest reforms from the Spanish Government. With impunity it could be published in Madrid but could not have lived a day in Manila, a fact sufficiently indicating the power and value of publicity. Spain, with the eyes of Europe upon her, did not dare to do at home the things she did daily in the Philippines; dared not to do them [[167]]or dared not to avow them. Distance, creating an impenetrable screen, created also in effect a transition from the modern to the antique world. There was much freedom of the press in Spain, a freedom, as we have remarked, partly sustained by the incessant threat of rebellion in Barcelona. Therefore, as a singular fact and almost comically incongruous, “La Solidaridad,”[7] with its acrid criticism of the Spanish Government, circulated freely in Spain and was not allowed to enter the Philippines. One of its editors was Marcelo H. del Pilar, a resolute and restless man, type of the intransigent, the indomitable and professional revolutionist. Before long he and Rizal quarreled,[8] for he was all for revolution by physical force and Rizal was always asserting its futility. A few years later del Pilar died on his way home to start his long meditated uprising. Untimely was his death if any man’s ever was. He would have reached the Philippines to find in full swing a revolution wherein his tireless energies and fiery spirit would have found an outlet at which men might have wondered.
But before they quarreled Rizal had written much for del Pilar and “La Solidaridad;” poems, articles, editorials, all directed toward Philippine reforms. When he heard of the indignity put for his sake upon the name and clay of Herbosa, he took up his pen and poured out for his journal an account of the incident and his feelings about it that scalded the church authorities [[168]]with a flood of the short, hot sentences he knew so well how to write—scoriæ and hot lava from the volcano. When the news of the attack upon his father came he was living in Ghent, whither he had retired to write his new novel “El Filibusterismo.” The effect upon him of the persecution of his family is to be observed in the work he was doing at the time; in one place he makes direct reference to it. He has been telling the story of Cabesang Tales, a peaceful Filipino farmer, driven to brigandage by the extortions of the friars and the savageries of the Civil Guards. Then he says, with mingled rage and sarcasm:
Calm yourselves, peaceful inhabitants of Calamba! None of you is named Tales, none of you has committed any crime.… You cleared your fields, on them you have spent the labor of your whole lives, your savings, your vigils and privations, and you have been despoiled of them, driven from your homes, with the rest forbidden to show you hospitality! Not content with outraging justice, they have trampled upon the sacred altars of your country! You have served Spain and the king, and when in their name you have asked for justice you were banished without trial, torn from your wives’ arms and your children’s caresses! Any one of you has suffered more than Cabesang Tales, and yet not one of you has received justice. Neither pity nor humanity has been shown to you—you have been persecuted even beyond the tomb, as was Mariano Herbosa. Weep, or laugh, there in those lonely isles, where you wander vaguely, uncertain of the future! Spain, the generous Spain, is watching over you and soon or late, you will have justice![9]
[[169]]
It is the bitter sarcasm of a soul stung beyond endurance with the sense of great wrong.
As a work of fictional art, “El Filibusterismo” is not equal to “Noli Me Tangere.” It is likely that Rizal knew this and as likely that he cared not, having now another purpose than to tell a story powerfully. He is working with rather less of a connected story and rather less of the clear dramatic prevision. The fates of such characters as he left unrelated in “Noli Me Tangere” he follows to the end, but on the way stops to picture lives and conditions not vitally interwoven with the climacteric. Yet in one way this book is the superior in interest, for it reveals the change that had been coming over him in these two years. Slowly there had been erased in his creed the belief in the good intentions of Spain; slowly (and reluctantly, no doubt) he had come to face the thought that to appeal to Spain for reforms was useless and the Filipinos must achieve by their own efforts the changes that would lead to their redemption. That these efforts must be of a peaceful character was a sheet-anchor of faith to which he still clung, or tried to cling, and yet there is evidence that he felt it dragging as more and more the hopeless stupidity of Spain was revealed to him.[10] [[170]]
Evidence of the change in his essential point of view may be found even in the dedication of the new book. It is boldly and uncompromisingly to the men that, perishing on Bagumbayan Field, in 1872, the gored victims of the System, made their names immortal.