It was a populous household that welcomed her return; she had already borne eleven children to her husband, rearing them with an old-fashioned and sedulous care not yet out of vogue in the Philippines. Immigration had much affected the original Island strains; on both sides the family was of mixed descent. One of Mr. Mercado’s ancestors was Lam-co, a Chinaman of means and character that came to the Islands in the latter part of the seventeenth century. He settled at Biñan, was converted to Christianity, and was baptized in 1697, taking the name of Domingo. At Biñan he married the daughter of another Chinaman, whose wife was a mestiza, or half-caste Filipino. From this time on Chinese blood was mixed with Malay[9] until in 1847 Francisco Mercado, descendant of Lam-co, married Teodora Alonzo, a Filipino lady of a distinguished family, partly Chinese in ancestry, and came to live at Calamba. It was her lot, twenty-five [[14]]years later, to be the victim of the strange story of persecution and villainy here related.
The seventh of her children, José, was then eleven years old and a student in a preparatory school in Manila. Upon his mind the reports that came to him of the successive steps in her degradation stamped themselves as if in iron. Even when he had become a mature man, famous, accomplished, absorbed in studies and achievements at the other side of the busy world, the thought of that great wrong haunted and goaded him. Yet it had been no novelty, even in his short experience; it had been no more than a focus, upon the one household he knew best, of wrongs with which other households were familiar and of which he had often heard. All his conscious days he had been aware, and ever better aware, of the cold, black, implacable despotism that had yoked and now drove and lashed his people. He knew well the hateful excesses of the Civil Guard, the license and arrogance of the governing class, the extortion and thefts, the infinite scorn in which the subject race was held, the intolerable parody of justice, the bitter jest of the code and the court-room, the flogging of men, the violating of women, the protected murderers, the rapists that went untouched and unabashed. When he was only five years old he used to sit on the shore of that beautiful green lake, the Laguna de Bay, and look across it and wonder if the people that lived on the other side were as wretched as the people of Calamba, whether they were beaten, kicked and trodden upon, whether they dwelt in the same terror of the Civil Guards and [[15]]the flogging-rods.[10] He said years afterward that even then he had a distinct conviction that these things were not necessary and that there must be some region on the earth where its children could be happy and enjoy the sunshine, the flowers, and the beautiful things that seemed made for their delight.
Many of the troubles that fell upon his neighbors, or were laid upon them by the existing System, were troubles about land; and before ever the malicious lieutenant had begun his revenges upon the family, young José was familiar with stories of the wrongs the so-called courts inflicted upon tenants and the men that tilled the farms. It was miserable business for any child to master, if he was to make his way through life as anything but a gloomy misanthrope. Yet such things for his people made the world into which he had come. Doubtless much may be said to excuse the System the Spaniards maintained in the Philippines: they had inherited it, they had not the skill nor the inspiration to better it, and the like extenuations; when all is said, it remains but hideously stupid and cruel. In the beginning it was medievalism, neither better nor worse than was to be found in the sixteenth century in the most of Europe. Planted upon the other side of the globe as if upon another planet, it missed all the vivifying and enlightening influences that drew Europe out of the slough. The Philippines stuck as they were; Europe lumbered ahead. In all the world one could not find another such phenomenon, the sixteenth century cold-storaged for the instruction [[16]]of the nineteenth. Whosoever might wish to observe in action the political and social ideas of Philip the Second needed but to journey to the Philippines.
Almost nothing had changed there. In Europe ideas had dawned of a free press, free speech, general education, the ballot-box, parliamentary government, the rights of the individual, the immaculate nature of justice, the determining of legal causes by unimpeachable processes, the gradual eclipse of the monarchical conception of society, the passing of the barony. Not one of these had come near the Philippines. Government there was the autocracy of a privileged class, tempered slightly by occasional revolutions, unlimited and unrestrained by any other consideration, and carried on chiefly for personal aggrandizement.
Instead of freedom of publication, the censor sat upon an impregnable throne and scrutinized not merely every word to be printed in every journal but every book that was imported, even in a traveler’s hand-baggage. Instead of free speech, the natives might not even petition of their grievances. Instead of general education, the masses were of a purpose kept in ignorance. Instead of justice, they must lead their lives without other protection than they could win by a feigned humility beneath the arbitrary power of their rulers.
It was in such surroundings that this boy came into his consciousness. He had a mind receptive and powerful. By no possibility could these impressions fail to be reflected in his thinkings and then in his life. Other youths the same environment drove into sullen apathy, racial fatalism, or a life fed with always disappointed [[17]]hopes of revenge. This boy they drew along a path of strange adventures and almost unprecedented achievement to a place among the great men of all times.
The roots of this story begin three centuries before the Mercado family at Calamba was caught up in its heartbreaking intrigues. After what was called the “discovery” of the Philippines by Magellan, March 16, 1521, Spain laid claim to the entire Archipelago, more than two thousand sizable Islands.[11] Portugal disputed this, neither having the slightest just basis for its claim, until 1529, when the pope settled the quarrel out of hand and gave the Philippines to Spain. In 1570 the taking by a Spanish expedition of the capital city of Manila was assumed to have put the physical seal upon this deed of gift, and Spain proceeded to annex and to govern such of the Islands as she could by persuasion or beating induce to accept her sovereignty. From the first the tenancy was incongruous and precarious; Europe of the Middle Ages laid upon a civilization more ancient, wholly alien, and traditionally well rooted. What followed is a tangle of inconsistencies. On the administrative side, Spain with musket-balls shot order and obedience into the natives; from first to last the rulers had but the one broad policy, which was to overawe the people they ruled and to subjugate them with fear. On the cultural side the account was at first wholly different. That they might give to these same natives the blessings of Christianity and the gospel of peace, the heroic Spanish missionary priests endured trials compared [[18]]with which most martyrdoms seemed easy. Thus in a naïve way, rather startling now to contemplate, perdition and paradise were to be glimpsed side by side, brute force marched with an apostolic love, and bullets were distributed with the Bible.
But, before the labors and good deeds of the missionary priests, scoffing falls silent. The soldier slew and destroyed; the priest planted schools, spread knowledge, bettered conditions. He did not even wait for the soldier to break a way or to indicate security, but plunged ahead of the armies into the wilderness where he knew he was likely to leave his bones.
Whether when all is said the general balance-sheet of the Spanish occupation shows more net advantages or disadvantages for the Filipino can be argued plausibly either way. In such a welter of conflicting testimonies the fair-minded will be slow to judge. We shall have to deal again with the question when we come to see how in his mature years José Rizal reacted to it and how his analyses disposed of the commonest of the Spanish claims. Considering it here in its due historic place, we may first remind ourselves that with all her faults Spain had at least one great virtue. She pretended no altruism. On a sordid impulse she took the Islands; she kept them merely as goods.
As to this debated point the findings of Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera seem clear.[12]