The Indolence of the Filipino
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Jose Rizal >> The Indolence of the Filipino
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THE INDOLENCE OF THE FILIPINO
BY JOSE RIZAL
("LA INDOLENCIA DE LOS FILIPINOS" IN ENGLISH.)
EDITOR'S EXPLANATION
Mr. Charles Derbyshire, who put Rizal's great novel Noli me tangere
and its sequel El Filibusterismo into English (as The Social Cancer and
The Reign of Greed), besides many minor writings of the "Greatest Man
of the Brown Race", has rendered a similar service for La Indolencia
de los Filipinos in the following pages, and with that same fidelity
and sympathetic comprehension of the author's meaning which has made
possible an understanding of the real Rizal by English readers. Notes
by Dr. James A. Robertson (Librarian of the Philippine Library and
co-editor of the 55-volume series of historical reprints well called
The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, so comprehensive are they) show
the breadth of Rizal's historical scholarship, and that the only error
mentioned is due to using a faulty reprint where the original was
not available indicates the conscientiousness of the pioneer worker.
An appropriate setting has been attempted by page decorations whose
scenes are taken from Philippine textbooks of the World Book Company
and whose borders were made in the Drawing Department of the Philippine
School of Arts and Trades.
The frontispiece shows a hurried pencil sketch of himself which
Rizal made in Berlin in the Spring of 1887 that Prof. Blumentritt,
whom then he knew only through correspondence, might recognize him at
the Leitmeritz railway station when he should arrive for a proposed
visit. The photograph from which the engraving was reproduced came
one year ago with the Christmas greetings of the Austrian professor
whose recent death the Philippine Islands, who knew him as their
friend and Rizal's, is mourning.
The picture perhaps deserves a couple of comments. As a child Rizal
had been trained to rapid work, an expertness kept up by practice, and
the copying of his own countenance from a convenient near-by mirror
was but a moment's task. Yet the incident suggests that he did not
keep photographs of himself about, and that he had the Cromwellian
desire to see himself as he really was, for the Filipino features
are more prominent than in any photograph of his extant.
The essay itself originally appeared in the Filipino forthrightly
review, La Solidaridad, of Madrid, in five installments, running
from July 15 to September 15, 1890. It was a continuation of Rizal's
campaign of education in which he sought by blunt truths to awaken his
countrymen to their own faults at the same time that he was arousing
the Spaniards to the defects in Spain's colonial system that caused
and continued such shortcomings.
To-day there seems a place in Manila for just suets, missionary work
as The Indolence of the Filipino aimed at. It may help on the present
improving understanding between Continental Americans and their
countrymen of these "Far Off Eden Isles", for the writer submits as
his mature opinion, based on ten years' acquaintance among Filipinos
through studies which enlisted their interest, that the political
problem would have been greatly simplified had it been understood
in Dewey's day that among intelligent Americans the much-talked-of
lack of "capacity" referred to the mass of the people's want of
political experience and not to any alleged racial inferiority. To
wounded pride has the discontent been due rather than to withholding
of political privileges.
Spanish Philippine history has curiously repeated itself during the
fifteen years of America's administration of this archipelago.
Just as some colonial Spaniards seemed to the Filipinos less
creditable representatives of the metropolis than the average of
those who remained in the Peninsula, so not all who now pass for
Americans in the Philippines are believed here to measure up to the
highest homestandard.
Sitters in swivel-chairs underneath electric fans hold hopeless the
future of the land where men do not desire to be drudges just as did
their predecessors who in wide armed lazy seats, beneath punkahs,
talked of Filipino indolence.
Ingratitude, to-day as then, is the regular rejoinder to the
progressing people's protest against paternalism, and altruistic
regard for their real welfare is still represented as the reason why
special legislation should be provided when Filipinos prefer the same
laws as govern the sovereign people.
Though those who claim to champion the Philippines' cause apparently
are unaware of it, these Islands have a population strangely alike in
its make up to the people of America; their history is full of American
associations; Americans developed their leading resources, and American
ideas have inspired their political aspirations. It betrays blindness
somewhere that ever since 1898 Filipinos have been trying to get loose
from America in order to set up here an American form of government,
There seems now a, prospect that insular legislation may make available
to the individual the guarantees of personal liberty upon which America
at home prides itself, that municipal self-government and provincial
autonomy may become realities in the Philippines, and possibly even
that both Filipinos and Americans may realize before it is too late
how our elastic territorial government could be made to exact from
them much less of their independence than the sacrifice of sovereignty
necessary in Neutralization or internationalization.
Unwillingness to work when there is nothing in it for them
is common to Filipinos and Americans, for Thomas Jefferson
admitted that extravagance and indolence were the chief faults
of his countrymen. Labor-saving machinery has made the fruits of
Americans' labors in their land of abundance afford a luxury in
living not elsewhere existing. But the Filipino, in his rich and not
over-populated home, shutting out, as we do, oriental cheap labor,
may employ American machinery and attain the same standard. The
possibilities for the prosperity of the population put the Philippines
in the New World, just as their discovery and their history group
them with the Western Hemisphere.
Austin Craig,
University of the Philippines,
Manila, December 20th, 1913.
------
I
DOCTOR Sancianco, in his Progreso de Filipinas, (1), has taken up
this question, agitated, as he calls it, and, relying upon facts and
reports furnished by the very same Spanish authorities that rule the
Philippines, has demonstrated that such indolence does not exist, and
that all said about it does not deserve reply or even passing notice.
Nevertheless, as discussion of it has been continued, not only
by government employees who make it responsible for their own
shortcomings, not only by the friars who regard it as necessary in
order that they may continue to represent, themselves as indispensable,
but also by serious and disinterested persons; and as evidence
of greater or less weight may be adduced in opposition to that
which Dr. Sancianco cites, it seems expedient, to us to study this
question thoroughly, without superciliousness or sensitiveness,
without prejudice, without pessimism. And as we can only serve our
country by telling the truth, however bit, tee it be, just as a
flat and skilful negation cannot refute a real and positive fact,
in spite of the brilliance of the arguments; as a mere affirmation is
not sufficient to create something impossible, let us calmly examine
the facts, using on our part all the impartiality of which a man
is capable who is convinced that there is no redemption except upon
solid bases of virtue.
The word indolence has been greatly misused in the sense of little
love for work and lack of energy, while ridicule has concealed the
misuse. This much-discussed question has met with the same fate as
certain panaceas and specifies of the quacks who by ascribing to them
impossible virtues have discredited them. In the Middle Ages, and even
in some Catholic countries now, the devil is blamed for everything that
superstitious folk cannot understand or the perversity of mankind is
loath to confess. In the Philippines one's own and another's faults,
the shortcomings of one, the misdeeds of another, are attributed to
indolence. And just as in the Middle Ages he who sought the explanation
of phenomena outside of infernal influences was persecuted, so in the
Philippines worse happens to him who seeks the origin of the trouble
outside of accepted beliefs.
The consequence of this misuse is that there are some who are
interested in stating it as a dogma and others in combating it as a
ridiculous superstition, if not a punishable delusion. Yet it is not
to be inferred from the misuse of a thing that it does not exist.
We think that there must be something behind all this outcry, for it
is incredible that so many should err, among whom we have said there
are a lot of serious and disinterested persons. Some act in bad faith,
through levity, through want of sound judgment, through limitation
in reasoning power, ignorance of the past, or other cause. Some repeat
what they have heard, without, examination or reflection; others speak
through pessimism or are impelled by that human characteristic which
paints as perfect everything that belongs to oneself and defective
whatever belongs to another. But it cannot be denied that there are
some who worship truth, or if not truth itself at least the semblance
thereof, which is truth in the mind of the crowd.
Examining well, then, all the scenes and all the men that we have
known from Childhood, and the life of our country, we believe that
indolence does exist there. The Filipinos, who can measure up with the
most active peoples in the world, will doubtless not repudiate this
admission, for it is true that there one works and struggles against
the climate, against nature and against men. But we must not take the
exception for the general rule, and should rather seek the good of our
country by stating what we believe to be true. We must confess that
indolence does actually and positively exist there; only that, instead
of holding it to be the cause of the backwardness and the trouble,
we regard it as the effect of the trouble and the backwardness,
by fostering the development of a lamentable predisposition.
Those who have as yet treated of indolence, with the exception of
Dr. Sancianco, have been content to deny or affirm it. We know of no
one who has studied its causes. Nevertheless, those who admit its
existence and exaggerate it more or less have not therefore failed
to advise remedies taken from here and there, from Java, from India,
from other English or Dutch colonies, like the quack who saw a fever
cured with a dozen sardines and afterwards always prescribed these
fish at every rise in temperature that he discovered in his patients.
We shall proceed otherwise. Before proposing a remedy we shall examine
the causes, and even though strictly speaking a predisposition is not
a cause, let us, however, study at its true value this predisposition
due to nature.
The predisposition exists? Why shouldn't it?
A hot, climate requires of the individual quiet and rest, just as
cold incites to labor and action. For this reason the Spaniard is
more indolent than the Frenchman; the Frenchman more so than the
German. The Europeans themselves who reproach the residents of the
colonies so much (and I am not now speaking of the Spaniards but of
the Germans and English themselves), how do they live in tropical
countries? Surrounded by a numerous train of servants, never going
afoot but riding in a carriage, needing servants not only to take
off their shoes for them but even to fan them! And yet they live and
eat better, they work for themselves to get rich, with the hope of
a future, free and respected, while the poor colonist, the indolent
colonist, is badly nourished, has no hope, toils for others, and
works under force and compulsion! Perhaps the reply to this will be
that white men are not made to stand the severity of the climate. A
mistake! A man can live in any climate, if he will only adapt himself
to its requirements and conditions. What kills the European in hot
countries is the abuse of liquors, the attempt to live according to
the nature of his own country under another sky and another sun. We
inhabitants of hot countries live well in northern Europe whenever
we take the precautions the people there do. Europeans can also stand
the torrid zone, if only they would get rid of their prejudices. (2)
The fact is that in tropical countries violent work is not a good
thing as it is in cold countries, there it is death, destruction,
annihilation. Nature knows this and like a just mother has therefore
made the earth more fertile, more productive, as a compensation. An
hour's work under that burning sun, in the midst of pernicious
influences springing from nature in activity, is equal to a day's
work in a temperate climate; it is, then, just that the earth yield
a hundred fold! Moreover, do we not see the active European, who has
gained strength during the winter, who feels the fresh blood of spring
boil in his veins, do we not see him abandon his labors during the
few days of his variable summer, close his office--where the work
is not violent and amounts for many to talking and gesticulating in
the shade and beside a lunch-stand,--flee to watering places, sit
in the cafés or stroll about? What wonder then that the inhabitant
of tropical countries, worm out and with his blood thinned by the
continuous and excessive heat, is reduced to inaction? Who is the
indolent one in the Manila offices? Is it the poor clerk who comes
in at eight in the morning and leaves at, one in the afternoon with
only his parasol, who copies and writes and works for himself and
for his chief, or is it the chief, who comes in a carriage at ten
o'clock, leaves before twelve, reads his newspaper while smoking and
with is feet cocked up on a chair or a table, or gossiping about all
his friends? Which is indolent, the native coadjutor, poorly paid
and badly treated, who has to visit all the indigent sick living in
the country, or the friar curate who gets fabulously rich, goes about
in a carriage, eats and drinks well, and does not put himself to any
trouble without collecting excessive fees? [3]
Without speaking further of the Europeans, in what violent labor does
the Chinaman engage in tropical countries, the industrious Chinaman,
who flees from his own country driven by hunger and want, and whose
whole ambition is to amass a small fortune? With the exception of some
porters, an occupation that the natives also follow, he nearly always
engages in trade, in commerce; so rarely does he take up agriculture
that we do not know of a single case. The Chinaman who in other
colonies cultivates the soil does so only for a certain number of
years and then retires. [4]
We find, then, the tendency to indolence very natural, and have to
admit and bless it, for we cannot alter natural laws, and without
it the race would have disappeared. Man is not a brute, he is not
a, machine; his object is not merely to produce, in spite of the
pretensions of some Christian whites who would make of the colored
Christian a kind of motive power somewhat more intelligent and less
costly than steam. Man's object is not to satisfy tile passions of
another man, his object is to seek happiness for himself and his kind
by traveling along the road of progress and perfection.
The evil is not that indolence exists more or less latently but that
it is fostered and magnified. Among men, as well as among nations,
there exist not only aptitudes but also tendencies toward good and
evil. To foster the good ones and aid them, as well as correct the
evil and repress them, would be the duty of society and governments,
if less noble thoughts did not occupy their attention. The evil is
that the indolence in the Philippines is a magnified indolence, an
indolence of the snowball type, if we may be permitted the expression,
an evil that increases in direct proportion to the square of the
periods of time, an effect of misgovernment and of backwardness,
as we said, and not a cause thereof. Others will hold the contrary
opinion, especially those who have a hand in the misgovernment, but
we do not care; we have made an assertion and are going to prove it.
II
When in consequence of a long chronic illness the condition of the
patient is examined, the question may arise whether the weakening
of the fibers and the debility of the organs are the cause of the
malady's continuing or the effect of the bad treatment that prolongs
its action. The attending physician attributes the entire failure of
his skill to the poor constitution of the patient, to the climate, to
the surroundings, and so on. On the other hand, the patient attributes
the aggravation of the evil to the system of treatment followed. Only
the common crowd, the inquisitive populace, shakes its head and cannot
reach a decision.
Something like this happens in the case of the Philippines. Instead of
physician, read government, that is, friars, employees, etc. Instead
of patient, Philippines; instead of malady, indolence.
And, just as happens in similar cases then the patient gets worse,
everybody loses his head, each one dodges the responsibility to place
it upon somebody else, and instead of seeking the causes in order
to combat the evil in them, devotes himself at best to attacking
the symptoms: here a blood-letting, a tax; there a plaster, forced
labor; further on a sedative, a trifling reform. Every new arrival
proposes a new remedy: one, seasons of prayer, the relics of a saint,
the viaticum, the friars; another, a shower-bath; still another, with
pretensions to modern ideas, a transfusion of blood. "It's nothing,
only the patient has eight million indolent red corpuscles: some few
white corpuscles in the form of an agricultural colony will get us
out of the trouble."
So, on all sides there are groans, gnawing of lips, clenching of fists,
many hollow words, great ignorance, a deal of talk, a lot of fear. The
patient is near his finish!
Yes, transfusion of blood, transfusion of blood! New life, new
vitality! Yes, the new white corpuscles that you are going to
inject into its veins, the new white corpuscles that were a cancer
in another organism will withstand all the depravity of the system,
will withstand the blood-lettings that it suffers every day, will
have more stamina than all the eight million red corpuscles, will
cure all the disorders, all the degeneration, all the trouble in the
principal organs. Be thankful if they do not become coagulations and
produce gangrene, be thankful if they do not reproduce the cancer!
While the patient breathes, we must not lose hope, and however late we
be, a judicious examination is never superfluous; at least the cause
of death may be known. We are not trying to put all the blame on the
physician, and still less on the patient, for we have already spoken
of a predisposition due to the climate, a reasonable and natural
predisposition, in the absence of which the race would disappear,
sacrificed to excessive labor in a tropical country.
Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic malady, but not a hereditary
one. The Filipinos have not always been what they are, witnesses
whereto are all the historians of the first years after the discovery
of the Islands.
Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Malayan Filipinos carried
on an active trade, not only among themselves but also with all the
neighboring countries. A Chinese manuscript of the 13th century,
translated by Dr. Hirth (Globus, Sept. 1889), which we will take
up at another time, speaks of China's relations with the islands,
relations purely commercial, in which mention is made of the activity
and honesty of the traders of Luzon, who took the Chinese products
and distributed them throughout all the islands, traveling for nine
months, and then returned to pay religiously even for the merchandise
that the Chinamen did not remember to have given them. The products
which they in exchange exported from the islands were crude wax,
cotton, pearls, tortoise-shell, betel-nuts, dry-goods, etc. [5]
The first thing noticed by Pigafetta, who came with Magellan in 1521,
on arriving at the first island of the Philippines, Samar, was the
courtesy and kindness of the inhabitants and their commerce. "To honor
our captain," he says, "they conducted him to their boats where they
had their merchandise, which consisted of cloves, cinnamon, pepper,
nutmegs, mace, gold and other things; and they made us understand by
gestures that such articles were to be found in the islands to which
we were going." [6]
Further on he speaks of the vessels and utensils of solid gold that he
found in Butuan, where the people worked mines. He describes the silk
dresses, the daggers with long gold hilts and scabbards of carved wood,
the gold, sets of teeth, etc. Among cereals and fruits he mentions
rice, millet, oranges, lemons, panicum, etc.
That the islands maintained relations with neighboring countries and
even with distant ones is proven by the ships from Siam, laden with
gold and slaves, that Magellan found in Cebu. These ships paid certain
duties to the King of the island. In the same year, 1521, the survivors
of Magellan's expedition met the son of the Rajah of Luzon, who,
as captain-general of the Sultan of Borneo and admiral of his fleet,
had conquered for him the great city of Lave (Sarawak?). Might this
captain, who was greatly feared by all his foes, have been the Rajah
Matanda whom the Spaniards afterwards encountered in Tondo in 1570?
In 1539 the warriors of Luzon took part in the formidable contests
of Sumatra, and under the orders of Angi Siry Timor, Rajah of Batta,
conquered and overthrew the terrible Alzadin, Sultan of Atchin,
renowned in the historical annals of the Far East. (Marsden, Hist. of
Sumatra, Chap. XX.) (7)
At that time, that sea where float the islands like a set of emeralds
on a paten of bright glass, that sea was everywhere traversed by junks,
paraus, barangays, vintas, vessels swift as shuttles, so large that
they could maintain a hundred rowers on a side (Morga;) that sea
bore everywhere commerce, industry, agriculture, by the force of the
oars moved to the sound of warlike songs (8) of the genealogies and
achievements of the Philippine divinities. (Colin, Chap. XV.) (9)
Wealth abounded in the islands. Pigafetta tells us of the abundance
of foodstuffs in Paragua and of its inhabitants, who nearly all
tilled their own fields. At this island the survivors of Magellan's
expedition were well received and provisioned. A little later, these
same survivors captured a vessel, plundered and sacked it, add took
prisoner in it the chief of the Island of Paragua (!) with his son
and brother. (10)
In this same vessel they captured bronze lombards, and this is the
first mention of artillery of the Filipinos, for these lombards were
useful to the chief of Paragua against the savages of the interior.
They let him ransom himself within seven days, demanding 400 measures
(cavanes?) of rice, 20 pigs, 20 goats, and 450 chickens. This is the
first act of piracy recorded in Philippine history. The chief of
Paragua paid everything, and moreover voluntarily added coconuts,
bananas, and sugar-cane jars filled with palm-wine. When Caesar
was taken prisoner by the corsairs and required to pay twenty five
talents ransom, he replied; "I'll give you fifty, but later I'll
have you all crucified!" The chief of Paragua was more generous: he
forgot. His conduct, while it may reveal weakness, also demonstrates
that the islands were abundantly provisioned. This chief was named
Tuan Mahamud; his brother, Guantil, and his son, Tuan Mahamed. (Martin
Mendez, Purser of the ship Victoria: Archivos de Indias.)
A very extraordinary thing, and one that shows the facility with
which the natives learned Spanish, is that fifty years before the
arrival of the Spaniards in Luzon, in that very year 1521 when they
first came to the islands, there were already natives of Luzon who
understood Castilian. In the treaties of peace that the survivors
of Magellan's expedition made with the chief of Paragua, when the
servant-interpreter died they communicated with one another through
a Moro who had been captured in the island of the King of Luzon and
who understood some Spanish. (Martin Mendez, op, cit ) Where did
this extemporaneous interpreter learn Castilian? In the Moluccas? In
Malacca, with the Portuguese? Spaniards did not reach Luzon until 1571.
Legazpi's expedition met in Butuan various traders of Luzon with
their boats laden with iron, wax cloths, porcelain, etc. (Gaspar de
San Agustin,) plenty of provisions, activity, trade, movement in all
the southern islands. (11)
They arrived at the Island of Cebu, "abounding in provisions, with
mines and washings of gold, and peopled with natives," as Morga says;
"very populous, and at a port frequented by many ships that came
from the islands and kingdoms near India," as Colin says; and even
though they were peacefully received discord soon arose. The city was
taken by force and burned. The fire destroyed the food supplies and
naturally famine broke out in that town of a hundred thousand people,
(12) as the historians say, and among the members of the expedition,
but the neighboring islands quickly relieved the need, thanks to the
abundance they enjoyed.