If her portraits do her justice, Josephine must have had unusual beauty, but her letters do not reveal in her the intellectual gifts that would have made her an ideal companion for José Rizal. Yet she must have been sympathetic, and he, solitary at the world’s outpost, seems to have been fond of her. When he came to ask her hand in marriage of her guardian, Mr. Taufer was overcome with grief. An hour later, he attempted suicide. He was blind; the examinations of Rizal had shown no chance that his eyesight could be restored; a daughter of his had but lately left him to be married; he had lost his first wife; his second marriage had not been happy; and he felt that without Josephine there was nothing to live for. Rizal came upon him razor in hand about to carry out his threat and narrowly rescued him from himself.[3]
After this, a marriage seemed impossible, and Josephine returned to Hong-Kong with Taufer.
But the affair had gone so far that already Rizal had made overtures to the parish priest to perform the ceremony. The priest shook his head: there were Rizal’s well known heresies in the way; he could not [[269]]marry a heretic. Rizal said that if by heresies his political opinions were meant, nothing could induce him to profess any change in them; but if the priest meant religious views, he was ready to declare that he was and had been at all times a faithful son of the Catholic religion and purposed so to remain. The priest thought a declaration to this effect might win past the bishop, who now appeared as the chief obstacle; at least he would send to Cebu to find out. The letter of inquiry he had written and was about to despatch when news came that the engagement had been broken. The letter was never sent.
None the less, Rizal and Josephine continued to regard themselves as plighted, and after a time in Hong-Kong Mr. Taufer was won over to consent to their union. Josephine went to Manila, where she made the acquaintance of Rizal’s mother and sisters. She was about to start for Dapitan to renew the attempt to gain the sanction of the church when in a conversation Mrs. Mercado reminded her that there were two views of this proceeding. It was doubtful if the bishop could be induced to think well of the marriage; but even if he could his permission would then be regarded as evidence of compromise on Rizal’s part. In the opinion of many of his countrymen he enlisted against the church when he enrolled against the friars; since the religious orders had come to control the ecclesiastic as well as the political administration, the distinction between church and friar was to some minds fairly vague. Mrs. Mercado desired that nothing should weaken her son’s influence; a constancy from which we may surmise of what fighting stock she came. She [[270]]knew that anything that looked like compromise would hearten his enemies and dismay his friends. Therefore, she suggested a civil marriage, the church to be ignored. Civil marriages and even common-law marriages were now authorized by the laws of Spain, and, if not yet decreed in the islands, were legally binding there.[4]
This advice the lovers deemed good when Josephine reached Dapitan and reported it; there was no more talk of a dispensation from the bishop of Cebu. A marriage ceremony was performed by the simple device of the taking of hands before witnesses and the registering of their mutual vows.
Rizal’s stout-hearted mother succeeded about this time in winning permission to visit her son; later came two of his sisters. Their presence revived in him the hope he had once cherished of uniting his family in a spot where, after so much of strife and grief, they might begin life afresh and be free from the friars that were the landlords and rulers of Biñan and Calamba. He could see no reason why Mindanao should not be well adapted to their needs. Government could not urge against such a plan the objection it used against the North Borneo project; Mindanao was Philippine territory. He wrote to Despujol asking for the necessary permits and received a chilly answer reminding him that he was an exile and an outcast and in no position to seek favors of his Government. Steady persistence in the face of whatever rebuff was one of Rizal’s strongest traits; the man seemed as incapable of discouragement as George [[271]]Washington was; and the philosophical reader of history may well consider the appearance of this quality in three men that founded three nations, William the Silent, Washington, and Rizal, and inquire whether in value to the world this possession did not overtop all others. With one cherished hope crushed, he turned to another. He set himself to improve agriculture in the region where he had been marooned; he showed the farmers how they could raise better crops and get better prices for them. From the United States, where in his travels he had observed with interest the latest agricultural inventions, he imported modern farm machinery, using it upon his own place and teaching its use to others. It has been the lot of few men to lead lives of such varied use to their fellows. He seemed to go through the world with eyes observing whatever was done around him and mind considering how it could be done better.
Meantime, in Manila great changes had been at work, of which he knew nothing. The discontent of the people, always growing, had begun to find a new expression. Another leader had arisen, in all ways different from Rizal except in this that he, too, was an inevitable product of the attempt to force upon a people a distasteful sovereignty. It has been much the fashion, particularly with writers of a scholastic bent or reactionary sympathy (which is probably the same thing), to speak ill of Andrés Bonifacio. If we desire a just estimate of the forces that worked in diverse ways for Philippine freedom, we are not to dismiss this man lightly[5] nor to speak of him with disrespect. [[272]]Successful revolutions demand the man that thinks and the man that acts, Mazzinis and Garibaldis, Jeffersons and Washingtons. Rizal was the Mazzini of the Philippine struggle; Bonifacio was its Garibaldi.
He was born in the working-class, was almost wholly self-educated, and at the time he began to be powerful in Philippine destiny was a porter in a maritime warehouse of Manila. In his youth he developed a passion for reading; he read when other persons slept, ate, or idled. By diligent study in the night-time he acquired a knowledge of history and its philosophy that in a man of his handicaps and employment was not less than marvelous and alone would have indicated a phenomenal capacity.[6] He studied deeply the stories of other peoples oppressed, the Israelites in Egypt, the Dutch under Spain, the American colonies under England, the French under their monarchical system, and formulated from these a church militant of democratic faith and principles of which he was first the acolyte and then the devout minister. In the end it mastered all his thought and waking hours and became essentially his life. Something of the great truth he saw clearly that the substance of all real progress in civilization has been progress in democracy, and for the most part this has been won by hard blows, rude encounters, and illimitable sacrifices. He caught a glimpse of the magical stimulus that came to the world from the successive emancipations of the American and the French peoples and another glimpse of the probable effect of a similar emancipation on his own. Upon the condition of those countrymen of his, dragging [[273]]at a chain that stifled in them all mental vitality with all self-respect, he stared with growing impatience while he burned and fretted for another Bunker Hill and another Yorktown.
He was of somewhat violent passions and such deficiencies in self-control as were to have been expected from his experiences and inadequate training. Nevertheless, he had great sincerity, a mind of extraordinary fertility, and a readiness for swift decision and action. He showed himself to be indomitable when wholly concentered upon the one cause; and his contribution to it is not now to be disparaged because he happened to come no nearer the academic walk than Lincoln came.
When Rizal, lured from Hong-Kong by false promises of safety, landed in Manila, Bonifacio was twenty-nine years old. He had long revolved in his mind the fact so patent to all observing Filipinos that the first step to their freedom must be unity. About the time Rizal was founding his Liga Filipina, Bonifacio was formulating another and much more portentous union. The two were launched about the same time; one in the open, the other in the dark and with the utmost secrecy. Bonifacio called his society the Kataastaasang Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng̃ mg̃a Anak ng̃ Bayan, which being interpreted means Supreme Most Respected Association of the Sons of the People. For brevity’s sake the long unwieldy name soon came to be shortened into K.K.K. or the Katipunan, and so remains in history. Bonifacio shaped it like a masonic lodge, with a ritual, passwords, grips, and the swearing of fealty and silence. Its avowed object was the overthrowing [[274]]by force of the Spanish power and the establishing of the Philippine nation, free and independent.