The project of Marcelo del Pilar for an association called Solidaridad Filipina,[92] which came to nothing practical, and the Liga Filipina, organized by Rizal just before his deportation from Manila in July, 1892, though in part modeled after Masonry, are among the things which show that the Filipino propagandists did not confine their efforts to Masonic organization. Our Spanish sources would have it that the Liga Filipina was really separatist in character, and the prosecution deliberately based upon this charge the demand for Rizal’s conviction in 1896. It remains unproved, and the statutes of the League as prepared by Rizal[93] entirely support his assertion that the design of the League was to foster coöperation among the Filipinos, to “raise the arts and sciences,” and develop Filipino commercial and economic interests generally. The organization was a fraternal society, in effect, the aim being to bring Filipinos closer together in a “brotherhood,” and incidentally to undermine the control of Chinese and others upon the trade of the country—in which respects it would likely have proved mostly utopian, even had not political conditions and Rizal’s deportation brought it virtually to naught. In the pledges of its “brothers” to stand by each other for the “remedy of abuses” as well as for other things, the League very plainly looked toward unity of action in matters social and political, and no doubt the idea of bringing his people together for such political action as might become possible was foremost in the mind of Rizal and its other organizers. But this does not prove the charge that it merely covered up a plan to get arms and rise in rebellion as soon as possible.
The Katipunan.—We come now to the parting of the ways. Just as Marcelo del Pilar had concluded that the time was at hand for more vigorous measures, so on the other hand some of the Filipinos of education and social position (cautious also, in some cases, because of their property) had become discouraged and faint-hearted. The deportation of Rizal had its effect in 1892, and the local government reforms of 1893–94 were followed by a reactionary government in Spain which might nullify even such concessions, in the face of the constant demand for a check upon the half-liberal régime of Blanco. Some of the middle-class leaders of Manila, who had been drawn into the Masonic movement, had decided that the time had come to organize the masses, at least in the Tagálog provinces. Andrés Bonifacio, an employe of a foreign business house in Manila, was the leading spirit; gathering his ideas of modern reform from reading Spanish treatises on the French Revolution, he had imbibed also a notion that the methods of the mob in Paris were those best adapted to secure amelioration for the Filipinos. His ideas were those of a socialist, and of a socialist of the French Revolution type, and he thought them applicable to an undeveloped tropical country, where the pressure of industrial competition is almost unknown, and where with the slightest reasonable exertion starvation may be dismissed from thought. There was in this new propaganda an element of resentment toward the wealthy, upper-class Filipinos, the landed proprietors in general, as well as toward the friar landlords and the whole fabric of government and society resting on them. Summing up all the evidence he has been able to obtain on the Katipunan, the writer agrees with Felipe G. Calderón, a Filipino, in his opinion[94] that its socialistic character negatives the assertion of the Spanish writers that the upper-class Filipinos were its real supporters and directors, working in the background; and that, while this propaganda from below looked to independence and the substitution of Spanish rule by Filipino rule, yet it was without any political program, properly speaking, and there was merely a crude idea in the minds of the masses that they were somehow going to shake off their masters, get rid of the whites, and divide up the big estates not only of the friars but of Filipino landholders as well. Calderón does not discuss the alleged plan of the Katipunan to assassinate the whites, especially the friars. It is certain that such bloodthirsty ideas were in the minds of some of the leaders; but the more direct documentary evidence that has been produced on this point is perhaps open to the suspicion that it was manufactured in connection with the courts-martial which operated with such fury after the outbreak of revolt in 1896.[95] After all the furore that had been made, the actual revelations as to the importance of the organization, character of its leaders, number of its followers, and extent of its operations, would have made the whole affair somewhat ridiculous, had it not been represented that behind this humble organization of perhaps forty thousand initiates in the Tagálog towns there was a great program for setting up an independent government and that the upper-class Filipinos were simply using this organization as a stalking-horse. The truth appears to be that, while these over-important Katipunan leaders thought in terms grandiloquent, and led their humble followers in the towns around Manila most affected by the propaganda to indulge in futile and ridiculous dreams of a coming millennium (while some of themselves were quarreling over the obols contributed), the movement was mostly talk even up to the time when an Augustinian curate in Manila made himself the hero of the rabid Spanish element in Manila by “exposing” an organization about which the governmental authorities had had partial information for some weeks, or even months. Bonifacio started this separate organization in 1894, but Calderón seems to be correct in saying that work in the towns outside of Manila was only begun in the spring of 1896. The humble followers were assured that the Japanese government would help them oust Spain, and that rifles to arm the whole population would come from there. But Japan never in the least violated her obligations to Spain, and, if the leaders even bought any rifles in Japan, they must have been few indeed.[96] When Bonifacio sent an emissary to Dapitan in the spring of 1896, to propose to Rizal a plan of armed revolt and that he should escape on a steam vessel sent for the purpose, and join in this campaign, Rizal rejected the proposition as folly, and displayed his great impatience with it.[97] On every ground, it seems probable that, had not Friar Gil and the Spanish press of Manila been so insistent on giving great publicity to some Katipunan engraving-stones, receipts for dues, etc., kept in hiding by the affiliated employes of a Spanish newspaper, the revolt might never have come about at all. Certainly, no date was set for it (though various future dates had been vaguely discussed), till the sudden arrests of August 19 and 20, 1896, sent Bonifacio and his companions fleeing to Bulakan Province where, practically without arms, they appealed to their fellow-workers in Bulakan, Manila, and Cavite provinces to rise in revolt on August 30. The friars and the rabid element of Spanish patriots were so anxious to force the hand of Blanco, and to discredit him, that, it may be, they forced upon a military commander whose troops were mostly in Mindanao a revolt that, a few months further on, might either have dissipated itself or have been avoided by an adequate show of force.[98]
Because the friars are so much to the fore in all the discussions of these events, we must not overlook the part played by governmental abuses, as already described. The Civil Guard, given a more extensive organization and scope of action during these closing years of Spanish rule, by its abuses (committed, for the most part, by Filipinos upon their own fellows) played probably the foremost part in drawing odium upon the government.[99] Next to police abuses, and sometimes allied with them, were the misuses of the powers of local government (with which alone the great majority of the people came into direct contact), especially in regard to the levy of forced labor; and here again, the humble Filipino’s complaint was chiefly against his own fellow-countrymen of power and position. But, summing up all the administrative abuses and all the evils of the government system, we are still left a long way from agreement with the friars’ assertions that the masses loved them and that governmental abuses were the sole cause of rebellion.[100]
Insurrection of 1896–97.—No history from the Filipino side has yet come to light, and there are certain points that can be cleared up only by the frank testimony of the Filipino participants.[101] We are dependent chiefly on Spanish sources, written in the passion of the times by men not careful about sifting the facts. All things considered, the two best sources, both for what they say and for what may be inferred from them, are the so-called Memorias of two Governor-Generals, prepared in order to defend their administrations before the Spanish Senate and the public; that of Blanco covering the preparatory stage and early months of the rebellion, that of Primo de Rivera its closing stages. Between these two Governor-Generals, the work of Monteverde y Sedano covers the military operations under Polavieja.
Blanco’s Memoria[102] affords, unconsciously, the most severe indictment that could be passed on Spain’s fitness to hold the Philippines (or her other colonies) in 1898. This man was really of liberal temperament; he had formed a just conception of the real insignificance of the Katipunan movement; and he strove, when the crisis was prematurely forced on him, to restrain the vindictiveness of the rabid Spanish element, and really believed in the efficacy of a “policy of attraction.” But instead of setting forth on broader grounds the reasons for his course of action and discussing with sincerity and frankness a policy for the Philippines, he felt compelled after his return to Spain to bow before the howls of press and public. He defends himself before his clerical-conservative critics not by showing the folly of their illiberal policy for the colony, but endeavors to prove that they were wrong in accusing him of lack of severity as well as of energy. Thus we learn (p. 20) that, even under a Blanco, before the outbreak came, one thousand and forty-two persons had been deported “as Masons, disaffected and suspicious or harmful to their towns.” During the night of August 19–20, 1896, following the sensation created by Friar Gil, there were forty-three arrests in Manila, and three hundred more within the next week. During September, thirty seven men taken in arms were shot, after summary trials (p. 25.) The number of Filipinos, mostly men of some position, who had not taken up arms, but were arrested for alleged complicity in the Katipunan, and involved in the trials before a special court for conspiracy and sedition, very soon mounted to five hundred, including those sent in from the provinces. Some remained incomunicados for more than forty days. The men executed from September 4 to December 12, 1896, when Blanco surrendered command to Polavieja, numbered seventy-four in all.[103]
Evidence as to the “reign of terror” that was inaugurated in Manila may be drawn from the Spanish treatises to be cited, wherein the episode is recited with gusto. The Spanish press of Manila for 1896–98; also that of Spain, especially Philippine letters of 1896–98 in La Política de España en Filipinas, El Heraldo, El Imparcial and El Correo of Madrid, furnished the original source of information for these writers, and should be used to supplement this history of the insurrection. Transcriptions of testimony taken by the special court for sedition and conspiracy appear in Retana’s Archivo, iii and iv, and evidences that the more yielding witnesses had their phraseology, and sometimes their statements of fact, dictated to them will be noted by the careful reader, especially if he be familiar with Spanish methods of judicial procedure. References to the common use of torture to make witnesses (in some cases eager enough to insure their own safety by “delation”) sign such testimony, will be found in the Filipino press since 1898, occasionally also in Spanish periodicals of Manila since 1898.[104] These same sources also supplement the citations on Rizal already given, for the story of his trial and execution, and the increase of severity and terrorism after Polavieja took charge. They are also, in the main, our sole, fragmentary sources on the state of Cavite during insurgent control of the province, the insurgent organization, etc.[105]
The Spanish treatises and pamphlets on the insurrection are:[106] José M. del Castillo y Jimenez, El Katipunan, ó el Filibusterismo en Filipinas (Madrid, 1897). Partial accounts of events of 1896–97; already characterized as rabid and cheaply patriotic.
Ricardo Monet y Carretero, Comandancia general de Panay y Negros. Alteraciones de órden público … desde Octubre de 1896 á Marzo de 1897 (Iloilo, 1897). Mostly official proclamations, etc., by the author as commander in the western district of Bisayas, regarding disturbances there and symptoms of a tendency to revolt.
E. Reverter y Delmas.—Filipinos por España. Narración episódica de la rebelión en el archipiélago Filipino (Barcelona, 1897); 2 vols. The title of a later edition is La insurrección de Filipinas. Known to the writer only by title.[107]
Enrique Abella y Casariego, Filipinas (Madrid, 1898). More temperate than most other Spanish writings. Treats of the development of the insurrection, and of the course of events under Blanco, Polavieja, and Primo de Rivera.