Once the Filipino was active, alert, industrious, prosperous. Now he had become inert, often inept, indifferent, poor. For these transformations, behold here the reasons. They are enough.
With more than one purpose we have dwelt at length upon this remarkable treatise. It shows Rizal’s mind, how clear and strong, and his thinking, how firm and sure. It shows how logically he arranged his ideas to a climax, a faculty that marks all his writings. It shows how well based upon reading and reason, no less than upon observation, was his faith in the Filipino people. Not from mere instinct nor from racial prejudice, he felt that here was a great and suppressed power. We dwell upon it also because it offers an unequaled picture of the Philippines after three hundred years of alien rule and indicates the appalling boundaries of the task that he had single-handed undertaken. Courage is the quality that mankind has elected most to honor. Surely the courage of battle-fields [[201]]is little compared with the supreme courage of a man that looking level-eyed upon such terrific difficulties as are outlined here sets himself to the one business of combating and overcoming them.
One other reflection pertains to this chapter, profoundly suggestive to any mind that will give heed to it. After all these generations of a system so elaborately designed to annihilate their spirits and chloroform their energies, the Malays of the Islands were still unerased. A few years after Rizal’s so able plea for them had been written they were in arms beating back the best troops of the oppressor. Thirty years later, under changed auspices, they were giving to the world a conspicuous example of intelligent and successful self-government. No sooner was applied to them the stimulus of a measure of freedom than the old reproach of indolence began to fail.
In thirty years they had demonstrated the truth of all this man had said of them. Sympathetic insight proved to be better than the solemn platitudes of wise men reasoning backward. As you see the Filipino now, said the wise men, so he must be always. Indolence—it is of the race and incurable! With a dash of his pen Rizal sent all this seven ways. He knew the heart of Filipinas; the wise men knew only what had been written by somebody who had read what somebody else had deduced about her. [[202]]
[1] “French Composition Exercises,” by José Rizal, B.A., Ph.M., L.C.M. (Madrid), Postgraduate student in Paris, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Berlin and London. Our copy is published by the Philippine Education Company, Manila, 1912. [↑]
[2] Craig, “Rizal as a French Student,” printed as an Appendix to the “French Composition Exercises.” [↑]
[3] “La Indolencia de los Filipinos,” translated by Dr. Craig, Manila, 1913. [↑]