Fourth, taxes and the cruelty of the Government. De los Rios Coronel cites “the natives that were executed, those that left their wives and children and fled in disgust to the mountains, those that were sold into slavery to pay the taxes levied upon them,” among the elements disappearing from the population. There were also, it appears from San Agustin, to be added “those flogged to death, women crushed to death by their heavy burdens, those that sleep in the fields and there bear and nurse their children and die bitten by poisonous vermin, the many that are executed or left to die of hunger, those that eat poisonous herbs, and the mothers that kill their children in bearing them.”[14] It is not an exhilarating picture; to believe it we must remind ourselves that it is limned by Spaniards: it can have no impulse to a hostile exaggeration.
The fields once cleared ceased to be cultivated; the towns once flourishing lost population and trade. The Filipino was launched on a backward career. Because,
Fifth, there was the psychological or spiritual fruitage of all this lethargy.
Worse than all the others and the culminating cause, this was. The Filipino’s spirit sank under the alien yoke. It appears that he no longer cared; what was there to care for? Spanish polity offered him in exchange for his lost liberty here only the prospect of salvation in another life. The bargain was not stimulating. Salvation depended in no degree upon terrestrial industry; the idle were saved equally with the active. We think, besides, that a racial spring was touched too fine to be suspected by the trampling soldiers [[194]]that Spain sent over to walk upon these bowed necks. The Malay responds to kindness; under blows, compulsion, or superior brute force he retires within himself into a sullen apathy. This now fell upon the native wherever the Spanish flag waved and to the extent that the Spanish methods prevailed. To go beyond Rizal’s able treatise and to record what even he could not have expected, the Americans, when their day came, noted with astonishment that the Filipinos of the South were more active, industrious, and resilient than their brothers in the North, although this was to reverse the usual order of nature. Some Americans ascribed the Southerner’s advantage to his religion and credited to Mohammedanism a virtue it hardly possessed. The real explanation, which abundantly confirms Rizal’s thesis, is that the Southerner had never gone under the lethal yoke of the Spanish conception of society.
Even when actual slavery was not enforced upon the native, the returns for his labor and efforts were so meager and uncertain he had no longer an incentive to work. There was a kind of padrone or contractor called the encomendero to whom the people of a district were virtually delivered over that he might extract from them all available profit and steer back to Spain with both pockets stuffed with the gold he had wrung from their toil. Usually this person had no other interest than to make his exit as early as possible and as heavily laden, to the which ends conscience should be no hindrance. He robbed the natives of produce where he could not steal labor; he used false measures in buying and selling. The unhappy Filipinos [[195]]had no appeal. In one town where a particularly brutal encomendero exacted additional tribute by using a steelyard twice as long as it should have been, they rose and tried to kill him—it appears, unfortunately, without success.[15]
De San Agustin gives these practices as the reason why the gold-mines of Panay, once “very rich,” had ceased to be worked; the natives preferred to live in poverty rather than to work under the conditions imposed upon them. Exploitation was the business of the Spaniard (from the governor down), and the only business that seems to have been attended to with diligence. To get rich quickly and to get home to spend the money was the real inspiration, an impulse not unknown in other parts of the earth where with his trusty rifle the white man has imposed his peculiar civilization upon his dark-skinned brother. In some places the dark brother under these ministrations lies down and dies; in the Philippines he ceased to work except under the lash or when he was fomenting an insurrection. Reviewing these facts the superior wisdom supposed to lurk mysteriously under the white skin seems to require much explanation.
Rizal points out that while in his time the pirates had ceased from troubling and the Dutch colonists were at rest, the other causes of the Filipino uneasiness went on undiminished to a loud chorus of denunciation from the elements responsible for these evils. As usual, names had shifted, the essentials of exploitation were unchanged. The encomendero was no longer the commanding figure in the process of extracting and [[196]]coining the toilers’ sweat; it was now the local governor, the friar, or both, but the machinery in use was the same. He quotes a French traveler of his own time that observed with astonishment the operations of a typical governor in whose hands “the high and noble functions he performs are nothing more than instruments of gain. He monopolizes all the business and instead of developing the love of work, instead of stimulating the natives to overcome the too natural indolence, he with the abuse of his powers thinks only of destroying all competition that may trouble him or attempt to participate in his profits. It matters little to him that the country is impoverished, without commerce, without industry, if only the governor is quickly enriched.”[16]
The whole story deserves the attention of mankind; the debacle and its causes. It is a simulacrum of exploitation and exploitation’s fatal results.
To do business in the Philippines, as we understand business, was almost impossible, year of grace 1890, so numerous were the obstacles, documents, papers, signatures, tangles of red tape to be unwound, officers to be bribed. If there is no commerce, how can there be industry? If there is no industry what shall the masses of people do but idle? “The most commercial and most industrious countries have been the freest,” says Rizal; “France, England, and the United States prove this. Hong-Kong, while it is not worth the most insignificant of the Philippines, has more commercial movement than all these Islands together because it is free and well governed.” [[197]]
The Spanish aristocrats in the Islands contributed to the general impulse to indolence. They posed as superior persons and exalted models, yet they did no work and despised all that labored. The vice of gambling, which the Spaniards deliberately encouraged in the natives, added to the general stagnation; not only cock-fighting (officially protected and a source of government revenue) but other gaming. It is a passion to which the Malay blood seems peculiarly susceptible, as the Chinese are to opium-smoking. Under government encouragement gambling became almost a native obsession wherever the Spanish rule was strongest. Having taught them to gamble, the Spaniards denounced the Filipinos as a race of gamblers; but this was again a species of injustice of which the Spaniard had no monopoly. It is easy to instance white communities that refuse to allow colored men to perform any but menial offices and then despise them as a race of menials. As to this practice in the United States of America, for example, reference may profitably be had to the pointed comments of Mr. George Bernard Shaw.