For the documents showing what was the modern phase of the question regarding parishes in its beginnings, see the pamphlets cited in the List of the Library of Congress under Agu[a]do (p. 64), and in Pardo de Tavera’s Biblioteca under the same name and numbers 681, 873, 1,348 and 1,962.[69] We must come down to the period of American rule for full statements of the case of the Filipino clergy against the friars. A Spanish cleric, formerly an Augustinian friar-curate, who was excloistered on his own petition some time before the end of Spanish rule and has since continued to reside in the islands, has been the chief spokesman for the Filipino clergy. He is Salvador Pons y Torres, and, apart from frequent contributions on the subject to the press of Manila since 1898 and various pamphlets, he undertook to review the entire subject in his Defensa del clero filipino and its supplement El clero secular filipino, both published at Manila in 1900; while in connection with the visit of Delegate Chapelle, a campaign was being conducted for fuller recognition of the Filipino clergy by the Vatican.[70] Their claims are set forth in Memorial elevado á Sa Santidad El Papa León XIII por el Pueblo Filipino (Manila, 1900).[71] For the full exposition of the question, one must study it under the Filipino revolution against the United States and in the history of the Aglipay schism since 1903.[72]
Revolt of 1872.—That the chief victims of this episode were prominent Filipino priests connects it rather with religio-political than with purely political matters. The civilians who were arrested for too great activity in agitating for political privileges were deported to Guam, whence their escape to foreign ports was perhaps winked at, while after a time some of them returned to the Philippines.[73] But the three most prominent priests who were tried for complicity in the mutiny at Cavite (Burgos, a Spanish-Filipino, Zamora, a Chinese-Filipino, and Gomez, a pure-blooded Filipino) were condemned to death by a very speedily summoned court-martial and were promptly executed. If we had the record of the proofs submitted before this court-martial (which acted very summarily and under pressure of official and other demonstrations of indignation, not to say vindictiveness), and the statement of its conclusions, we should be in better position to judge whether or not a great injustice was done. But neither officially nor semi-officially was the guilt of the condemned ever shown, and we have either to accept very vehement and intemperate assertions about it having been proved, or to incline to the belief that these men were struck down by a power which stretched out its hand in the dark, and that their death was a punishment for having ventured under the preceding Liberal administrations to advocate the withdrawal of the friars as curates of parishes. Certainly this became the belief of the Filipino people, propagated from year to year by word of mouth (acquiring thus exaggerated and distorted details as being of sober truth), and occasionally finding expression in print.[74] The usually sober and colorless Montero y Vidal becomes very rabid in his recital of this episode in Philippine history and is very positive not only in denouncing the priests who were executed and the deportees as guilty but in proclaiming their movement as actually separatist in character. He ridicules at length the account of the Frenchman Plauchut in the Revue des deux mondes for 1877; but Plauchut, as well as Montero y Vidal himself, was resident in or near Manila at the time of these occurrences. Finally, Dr. Pardo de Tavera, a nephew of one of the prominent Philippine Spaniards who were deported, supports Plauchut’s version and impeaches Montero y Vidal’s.[75]
Reforms and Demands for more. “Assimilation.”—The reactionists had regained the saddle in the Philippines even before the Republic in Spain came to an end; they used the incident of the Cavite mutiny as a “horrible example,” and succeeded in repealing or nullifying all reforms not to their taste even in educational or purely administrative matters. Till after 1880, the “Filipino cause” was in hiding. But meanwhile young Filipinos of wealth were going abroad for education, and above all a new generation of Filipinos were coming from the new middle class produced by the better industrial opportunities consequent upon expanding trade and commerce, were breathing in popular ideas of hostility to the friars in the more advanced rural districts, and were exchanging ideas, and imbibing in the exchange a new sentiment of nationality, when they met, in constantly increasing numbers, in the colleges and normal school at Manila, Tagálogs, Ilokanos, Bisayans and others of the hitherto separate communities. Regional feeling was still strong, but it was beginning to break down.[76] Those who went abroad for education soon began to propagate the idea, already half expressed at home, that Philippine education, even with the improvements, was still archaic and in some ways anti-modern; and every avenue out of this condition was found to be blocked by the friars. If in reality the men of Spanish blood (in whole or part) who had agitated for greater political liberties during 1868–72, had aimed at separating the Philippines from Spain—and all the reasonable probabilities are opposed to such a belief—at any rate, the new generation of Filipinos who took up the cause in the eighties were ardent and, for some time at least, sincere advocates of Spanish-Philippine union. They carried the matter, indeed, to the extreme, in the campaign for “assimilation,” which has already been characterized as unpractical.
Reforms of a partial nature, any statesman could predict, would breed the demand for more. So, during the eighties, when most headway was made in administrative and legal reforms under Liberal administrations, we find the Filipinos formulating demands for the first time; and it is significant that they all centered about the friars. Under the liberal Governor-General Terrero, and with sympathetic Spaniards in the posts of secretary of the civil administration and civil governor of Manila, officers of some of the Tagálog towns ventured to display a sense of independence of the traditional friar-dictatorship in local affairs, even (in the case of Malolos and the Binondo district of Manila) to carry contests with the friars over the personal tax-lists before higher authority; the friars’ tenants around Kalamba, where José Rizal’s parents lived, challenged the administrator of that Dominican estate, and aired their protests publicly in 1887;[77] and in 1888 a public demonstration against the friars, and especially Archbishop Payo, took place in Manila, and a petition for the removal of the friars was addressed to the Queen Regent. In 1887 these civil authorities of Liberal affiliation had issued official orders regarding cemeteries and church funerals, contravening, on grounds of public health, long-standing practices of the friar-curates; and the friars, even the archbishop, had been almost openly intransigent about the matter, indicating the belief that they would soon upset this régime of affairs by the exercise of their power at Madrid. The demand on the part of some Spanish periodicals of Manila that the proposed government trade school should not be surrendered to the Augustinians was another indication of the current of the times.[78]
In form at least, there was nothing in any of these demonstrations or representations which would not be perfectly legitimate under any free government. Yet, even before the expiration of Terrero’s term, he was prevailed upon to send home Centeno y García, the civil governor of Manila, and the processes of law had been set in action by judicial authority against some of the participants. And, even before the downfall of the Liberal ministry at Madrid, the mere display of a disposition on the part of Filipinos to speak for themselves as a people had started the currents of reaction there. Weyler was the successor of Terrero as Governor-General. The friars’ representations at Madrid obtained, while the Liberal minister Becerra[79] was still in office, the omission of the provisions for civil marriage and registration from the Civil Code as it was extended to the Philippines in 1889. Weyler used force to quell the subsequent disturbances at Kalamba, and among the score or so of deportees were some of Rizal’s family.[80]
The Propagandists.—A full history of the Filipino Propaganda would list a large number of names, both of members of the Filipino colonies abroad and of secret agitators and wealthy contributors at home. But the story must be developed from the various sources to be cited, and we are concerned here with those who figured most actively by their writings. Of these, Marcelo H. del Pilar and José Rizal were altogether the most notable, their prominence indeed leading to the formation of factions about them and the display of those personal jealousies which wreck or threaten to wreck every Filipino movement.[81] It is significant that the propagandists coming to the front in the eighties were, one may say, genuine “sons of the people” though associated with them were others who were sons of the half-caste aristocracy. It is significant also, that, though these two leaders Del Pilar and Rizal, came from Bulakan and Laguna provinces respectively, the heart of the more advanced communities of Tagálogs around Manila, yet the islands as a whole were beginning to be represented in the propaganda, notably by the Lunas, from Ilokos, and Graciano Lopez Jaena, a Bisayan. The latter started the first Filipino periodical of consequence, La Solidaridad, and published eighteen numbers of it at Barcelona up to October 31, 1889, when Del Pilar took charge of it, transferred it to Madrid and edited it there as a fortnightly till 1895. It was face to face with La Política de España en Filipinas from 1891, and, as the latter is the chief source for the pro-friar and anti-liberal side of the controversy, so La Solidaridad, which circulated among the educated Filipinos in many parts of the archipelago despite the censorship, is the chief source for the writings of the propagandists.[82]
Marcelo H. del Pilar had taken an active part in stimulating opposition to the friar-curates, particularly in matters of local government, in his native province (Bulakan) for some years before the troubles of 1888. When the pendulum swung towards reaction, he left his family (being then a man of middle-age) and went to Spain to carry on the fight close by the center of government, support of his campaign being pledged by a committee who undertook to secure Filipino subscriptions, certain wealthy Filipinos being identified privately with the cause. Del Pilar’s writings show nothing of the poet or dreamer, as do Rizal’s; he had, in some degree, an “economic mind,” though entirely untrained in that line, and he was at the outset of the active propaganda in Spain (1889) a maturer man than Rizal. Coming straight from the problems of actual life among his people, he stated their grievances with more practical reference to direct and immediate remedies and with special reference to their economic status; while Rizal, as a student in contact with modern European life and thought, dreamed of and preached, in more general terms but on a far wider scope, the social regeneration of his people and the expansion of their political rights. Del Pilar would have made a good representative of his people in the Cortes. But Rizal was a genius, who with the touch of imagination and satire lifted the cause of the Filipinos to a place in the thought of the world, and at the same time, as poet and patriot combined, fired the enthusiasm of his own people and became their idol. And, in the course of events, it was Rizal who proved the soberer, the more mature as time went by. He was opposed to means of violence, even to the last, and the whole record bears out his protestations on this score; he still looked to the future as a dreamer-patriot, but he also looked to the present state of his people and saw that the most vital problem was the teaching them that they must raise themselves by their own efforts, must deserve a better destiny. Del Pilar, disappointed by the failure to achieve greater immediate, practical results by relying upon the progress of Liberalism in Spain, after seven years of propaganda along these lines, was starting for Hongkong or Japan, to conduct there a really revolutionary campaign, when death overtook him shortly before the Tagálog revolt in 1896. He had, apparently, lost faith in the ideals of “assimilation,” of Spanish-Filipino unity, which he had set forth in glowing phrases in 1888 and 1889. He had also, apparently, become convinced that the upper-class Filipinos, especially the most wealthy and prominent, were too lukewarm or too prone to temporize for safety’s sake, that the time had come to make the cause more distinctly one of the people as a whole. He is credited with having suggested and outlined the organization of the Katipunan, and he seems to have concluded that it was time for the Filipinos to resort to Cuba’s example and not to political petitions only.[83]
Even in Noli me tangere, first published under his own eye at Berlin in 1887, when Rizal, at the age of twenty-six, was just fairly setting out in life, there are many evidences that the author, if he meant primarily to set before the world the backwardness of the existing social and political régime in the Philippines, its stifling of thought, and its many tyrannies, had also in mind to set before his people, in some of his instantaneous photographs of Philippine life, their own defects. In El filibusterismo (Ghent, 1891), the more mature reformer preached yet more plainly the necessity of social and political progress beginning from below, and not simply inspired from above. That his people took the lessons meant for themselves (and take them still today) less to heart than they responded to the satire and invective directed against the form of rule imposed upon them, was the fault not of Rizal but of human nature, prone to apply the preacher’s words only to the other fellow.
It is a great misfortune that we have in English no real translation of Noli me tangere,[84] and none at all of El filibusterismo, which, as a political document, is the stronger of the two.[85] It is no less regrettable that no biography of Rizal, tracing his mental development and his relation with the events of 1880 to 1896, nor even a good biographical sketch of him, has been published in the English language. Retana’s biographical and bibliographical notes, published in a Madrid monthly, Nuestro Tiempo, 1904–06, and about to appear in book form, are indispensable as the only comprehensive work on the subject, and resort must be had to them for a full array of citations, as also for many documents not available elsewhere.[86] Rizal’s edition (Paris, 1890) of Morga’s Sucesos de las islas Filipinas has already been cited in connection with that work in VOLS. XV and XVI of this series (see note 3 of former). Its annotations are Rizal’s chief contribution to the history of his people, and it must be said that his political feeling has crept into them to the damage often of their scientific value.[87] There also deserve mention here Rizal’s discussion in 1889 of the future of his people,[88] and some of Blumentritt’s writings about Rizal and in his defense.[89]
Masonry, Liga Filipina, etc.—In almost all the Spanish writings about the Philippine insurrection, especially those by friars, we find it ascribed primarily to “Franc-Masonería,” the terrible bugaboo in naming which the Spanish friar sums up in one word his notion of all that is pernicious in modern life since the French Revolution, and the chief cause of the loss by Spain of her American colonies. So, as to the Philippines, the argument is, had not Spanish Masons been able secretly to organize there, and to pervert the minds of certain Filipinos, the colony would have remained in its loyalty of primitive simplicity and happiness. The truth is that Masonry played a very secondary part in the Filipino agitation for reform, furnishing simply a convenient medium for conducting the propaganda. Up to the last ten years of Spanish rule, only a few lodges of Spanish Liberals and foreigners, into which some of the half-castes and more well-to-do Filipinos had been admitted, had been organized in the Philippines, and had led a rather irregular existence. At about the time when La Solidaridad was moved to Madrid, a Spanish-Filipino Association was there formed, in which Spaniards and Filipinos combined to agitate for reform. This circle was virtually identified in membership with a certain Spanish Grand Lodge (probably spurious, as regards the legitimate parent organization of Free Masonry), which delegated agents to conduct the active organization of new Philippine lodges dependent upon it. It appears certain that this was done with the idea definitely in view of being able thus to propagate liberal political ideas and secretly distribute such literature among the Filipinos, also the more easily to raise funds for the work. But had not such a favorable means of conducting the propaganda been presented, it would have been improvised. One must subject to critical examination the Spanish writings, and will readily discover their exaggerated deductions from such facts as came to light.[90] Interesting reading is afforded by the confidential Royal Order of July 2, 1896, addressed to Governor-General Blanco.[91] It approves his deportation of the principales, or headmen, of Malolos and Taal (who had defied the local friar-curates), and orders him to have provincial and other officials watch and report confidentially on all secret organizations (forbidden by the Laws of the Indies, as recited in Royal Order of August 2, 1888) and list all persons of whom “there may be indications enough to believe that they are affiliated,” etc. (opening up thus a splendid opportunity for private denunciations). He is to use in this secret work only officials who are Peninsulars, never natives; so also he is to invite coöperation of “the parish-priests who belong to the religious orders.” As to punishments, it is preferable to deport the “suspected,” fixing their residence in the Moro country or Guam, rather than to exile them, as they would then join the colonies abroad and conduct a propaganda.