Other Writings “Pensamientos De Un Filipino” (Reflections of A Filipino) Jose Rizal wrote this in Madrid, Spain from 1883-1885. It is widely attributed to the Filipino national hero José Rizal, who supposedly wrote it in 1868 at the age of eight. His testimony, we say, is highly credible, not only because all his contemporaries have spoken of him in terms that border on veneration but also because his work, from which we take these citations, is written with great circumspection and care, as well with reference to the authorities in the Philippines as to the errors they committed. It seems that these thoughts have never entered the minds of those who cry out against the indolence of the Filipinos. Jose Rizal Quotes “If the Philippines secure their independence after heroic and stubborn conflicts, they can rest assured that neither England, nor Germany, nor France, and still less Holland, will dare to take up what Spain has been unable to hold.” The green cloth is under the protection of the government, it is safer! *** José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda, widely known as José Rizal, born on June 19, 1861 – December 30, 1896, was a Filipino nationalist and polymath during the tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. Yes, all attempt is useless that does not spring from a profound study of the evil that afflicts us. but provoked by he annoyances they suffered from some governors they have ceasedto get it out, preferring to live in poverty than to suffer such hardships.” (page 378) Further on, speaking of other towns, he says: “Boaded by ill treatment of the encomenderos who in administering justice have treated the natives as their slaves and not as their children, and have only looked after their own interests at the expense of the wretched fortunes and lives of their charges. If the logical and regulated system of exploitation be chosen, stifling with the jingle of gold and the sheen of opulence the sentiments of independence in the colonies, paying with its wealth for its lack of liberty, as the English do in India, who moreover leave the government to native rulers, then build roads, lay out highways, foster the freedom of trade; let the government heed material interests more than the interests of four orders of friars; let it send out intelligent employees to foster industry; just judges, all well paid, so that they be not venal pilferers, and lay aside all religious pretext. The child or youth who tries to be anything else is blamed with vanity and presumption; the curate ridicules him with cruel sarcasm, his relatives look upon him with fear, strangers regard him with great compassion. Who is the indolent one in the Manila offices? It is well, undoubtedly, to trust greatly in God; but it is better to do what one can not trouble the Creator every moment, even when these appeals redound to the benefit of His ministers. Novels and Other Writing . In fact, the Celestial Empire sent her junks laden with merchandise, that merchandise which shut down the factories of Seville and ruined the Spanish industry, and returned laden in exchange with the silver that was every year sent from Mexico. Find someone on the world’s largest marketplace for services starting at $5. The coastwise trade, so active in other times, had to die out, thanks to the piratical attacks of the Malays of the south; and trade in the interior of the islands almost entirely disappeared, owing to restrictions, passports and other administrative requirements. This poem is attributed to José Rizal (1861-1896), the Filipino national hero who was executed by firing squad on December 30, 1896 for rebellion. Thus friendship of these peoples would be gained, they would furnish New Spain with their merchandise and the money that is brought to Manila would not leave this place.” 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 them! Dr. Hans Meyer, when he saw the tribes not subdued cultivating beautiful fields and working energetically, asked if they would not become indolent when they in turn should accept Christianity and a paternal government. Thus while they attempt to make of the native a kind of animal, yet in exchange they demand of him divine actions. The natives furnished the masts for a galleon, according to the assertion of the Franciscans, and I heard the governor of the province where they were cut, which is Laguna de Bay, say that to haul them seven leagues over very broken mountains 6,000natives were engaged three months, without furnishing them food, which the wretched native had to seek for himself!” Finally passing over many other more or less insignificant reasons, the enumeration of which would be interminable, let us close this dreary list with the principal and most terrible of all: the education of the native. The word taya (tallar, to bet), paris-paris (Spanish,pares, pairs of cards), politana (napolitana a winning sequence of cards), sapote (to stack the cards), kapote (to slam), monte, and so on, all prove the foreign origin of this terrible plant, which only produces vice and which has found in the character of the native a fit soil, cultivated circumstances. Why should it do so when these same products are burdened with taxes and imposts and have no free entry into the ports of the mother country, nor is their consumption there encouraged? there’s the ideal native! At the cost of study and sacrifice a young man becomes a great chemist, and after a long course of training, wherein neither the government nor anybody has given him the least help, he concludes his long stay in the University. What he lacks is in the first place liberty to allow expansion to his adventuresome spirit, and good examples, beautiful prospects for the future. Is it any wonder that with this viciousdressage of intelligence and will the native, of old logical and consistent — as the analysis of his past and of his language demonstrates — should now be a mass of dismal contradictions? 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. Sanciano cites, it seems expedient to us to study this question thoroughly, without superciliousness or sensitiveness, without prejudice, without pessimism. If the former, the government may act with the security that some day or other it will reap the harvest and will find people its own in heart and interest; there is nothing like a favor for securing the friendship or enmity of man, according to whether it be conferred with good will or hurled into his face and bestowed upon him in spite of himself. There is no doubt that the government, some priests like the Jesuits and some Dominicans like Padre Benavides, have done a great deal by founding colleges, schools of primary instruction, and the like. From his birth until he sinks into his grave, the training of the native is brutalizing, depressive and anti-human (the word “inhuman” is not sufficiently explanatory; whether or not the Academy admits it, let it go). How is it that the Filipino people, so fond of its customs as to border on routine, has given up its ancient habits of work, of trade, of navigation, etc., even to the extent of completely forgetting its past? unfortunately, or because of the brutalization is not yet complete and because the nature of man is inherent in his being in spite of his condition, the native protests; he still has aspirations, he thinks and strives to rise, and there’s the trouble! 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 his feet cocked up on a chair or a table, or gossiping about all his friends? 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 crucified!”  The chief of Paragua was more generous: he forgot. During the celebration of the 121st Independence Day hosted by the Philippine Embassy in The Hague, the Dutch translated version of "Noli Me Tangere" was officially introduced to the public. To Mexico went a little more: some cloth and dry goods which the encomenderos took by force or bought from the natives at a paltry; price, wax, amber, gold, civet, etc; but nothing more, and not even in great quantity, as is stated by Admiral Don Jeronimo de Benelos y Carrilo, when he  begged the King that “the inhabitants of the Manilas be permitted (1) to load as many ships as they could with native products, such as wax, gold, perfumes, ivory, cotton cloths, which they would have to buy from the natives of the country. Rizal as our national hero showed unselfish love for his country by laying his own life in martyrdom and awakening people’s patriotic fervor so that Philippines would be freed from Spanish tyranny. We have already spoken of the more or less latent predisposition which exists in the Philippines toward indolence, and which must exist everywhere, in the whole world, in all men, because we all hate work more or less, as it may be more or less hard, more ore less unproductive. Hong Kong, which is not worth the most insignificant of the Philippines, has more commercial movement than all the islands together, because it is free and is well governed. They amount ot five or ten years (years of a hundred and fifty days at most) during which the youth comes in contact with books selected by those very priests who boldly proclaim that it is evil for the natives to know Castilian, that the native should not be separated from his carabao, that he should not value any further aspirations, and so on; five to ten years during which the majority of the students have grasped nothing more than that no one understands what the books say, nor even the professors themselves perhaps; and these five to ten years have no offset the daily preachment which lowers the dignity of man, which by degrees brutally deprives him of the sentiment of self-esteem, that eternal, stubborn, constant labor to bow the native’s neck, to make him accept the yoke, to place him on a level with the beast — a labor aided by some persons, with or without the ability to write, which if it does not produce in some individuals the desired effect in others it has the opposite effect, like that of breaking of a cord that is stretched too tightly. Bumaba kang taglay ang kagiliw-giliw True it is that the spirit of rivalry is sometimes awakened, only that then it awakens with bad humor in the guise of envy, and instead of being a lever for helping, it is an obstacle that produces discouragement. Doctor Sanciano, in his Progreso de Filipinas, has taken up this question, agitated, as he calls it, and relying upon facts and reports furnished by the very same Spanish authorities that ruled the Philippines has demonstrated that such indolence does not exist, and that all said about it does not deserve a reply or even passing choice. An ophthalmologist by profession, Rizal became a writer and a key member of the Filipino Propaganda Movement, which advocated political reforms for the colony under Spain. Examining well, then, all scenes and all the men that we have known from childhood; and the life of our country, we believe that indolence does exist there. Where did this extemporaneous interpreter learn Castilian? Yes, transfusion of blood, transfusion of blood! 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. At eighteen years of age, Rizal won first prize for his poem “To the Philippine Youth” in 1879 in a poetry contest organized for Filipino poets by the Manila Lyceum of Art and Literature. . All the Filipinos, as well as all those who have tried to engage in business in the Philippines, know how many documents, what comings, how many stamped papers, how much patience is needed to secure from the government a permit for an enterprise. We do not mean to say that before the coming of the Spaniards the natives did not gamble: the passion for gambling is innate in adventuresome and excitable races, and such is the Malay, Pigafetta tells us of cockfights and of bets in the Island of Paragua. Another blood-letting, as as the organism has neither nerves nor voice the physician proceeds in the belief that the treatment is not injuring it. 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. In the Philippines abandon for a year the land most beautifully tended and you will see how you will have to begin all over again: the rain will wipe out the furrows, the floods will drown the seeds, pants and bushes will grow up everywhere, and on seeing so much useless labor the hand will drop the hoe, the laborer will desert his plow. Take it away from him and he is a corpse, and he who seeks activity in a corpse will encounter only worms. Jose Rizal was born on June 19, 1861 in Calamba, Laguna, Philippines. 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 yields a hundred fold! The curate says that the rich man will not go to heaven. And not only Morga, not also Chirinco, Colin, Argensola, Gaspar de San Agustin and others agree to this matter, but modern travelers, after two hundred and fifty years, examining the decadence and misery, assert the same thing. The following other causes contributed to foster the evil and aggravate it; the constantly lessening encouragement that labor has met with in the Philippines. Humayo ka ngayon, papagningasin mo Every creature has its stimulus, its mainspring; man’s is his self-esteem. As as we can only serve our country by telling the truth, however bitter it be, just as flagrant and skillful negation cannot refute a real and positive fact, in spite of the brilliance of the arguments; as mere affirmation is not sufficient to create something possible, 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 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. The native, whom they pretend to regard as an imbecile, is not so much so that he does not understand that it is ridiculous to work himself to death to become worse off. This does not mean that we should ask first for the native the instruction of a sage and all imaginable liberties, in order then to put a hoe in his hand or place him in a workshop; such a pretension would be an absurdity and vain folly. of rice, 20 pigs, 20 goats, and 450 chickens. What else? José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda was a Filipino nationalist and polymath during the tail end of the Spanish colonial period of the Philippines. . The dolce far niente of the Italian, the rascarse la barriga of the Spaniard, the supreme aspiration of the bourgeois to live on his income in peace and tranquility, attest this. It is necessary that his spirit, although it may be dismayed and cowed by the elements and the fearful manifestation of their mighty forces, store up energy, seek high purposes, in order to struggle against obstacles in the midst of unfavorable natural conditions. A hot climate requires of the individual quiet and rest, just as cold incites to labor and action. José Rizal, son of a Filipino father and a Chinese mother, came from a wealthy family. Of Cagayan, Padre Agustin speaks with mournful brevity: “A great deal of cotton, of which they made good cloth that the Chinese and Japanese every year bought and carried  away.”  In the historian’s time, the industry and the trade had come to an end. and at present they may amount to some fourteen thousand tributaries.”  From fifty thousand families to fourteen thousand tributaries in little over half a century! The Philippines is an organism whose cells seem to have no arterial system to irrigate it or nervous system to communicate its impressions; these cells must, nevertheless, yield their product, get it where they can; if they perish, let them perish. We must confess that indolence does actually and positively exist there, only that, instead of holding it to be thecause of the backwardness and the trouble, we regard it as theeffect of the trouble and the backwardness, by fostering the development of a lamentable predisposition. His conduct, while it may reveal weakness, also demonstrates that the islands ere abundantly provisioned. Remember, that lack of capital and absence of means paralyze all movement, and you will see how the native was perforce to be indolent for if any money might remain to him from the trials, imposts and exactions, he would have to give it to the curate for bulls, scapularies, candles, novenaries, etc. l 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. Perhaps the reply to this will be that white men are not made to stand the severity of the climate. . Ikaw, na may diwang inibig ni Apeles (Martin Mendez, Purser of the ship Victoria: Archivo de Indias.). . The name of Manila is known only from those cloths of China or Indo-China which at one time reached Spain by way of Manila, heavy silk shawls, fantastically but coarsely embroidered, which no one has thought of imitating in Manila since they are so easily made; but the government has other cares, and the Filipinos do not know that such objects are more highly esteemed in the Peninsula than their delicate piñaembroideries and their vey fine jusi fabrics. For this reason the Spaniard is more indolent than the Frenchman; the Frenchman more so than the German. Speaking of Ipion, in Panay, Padre Gaspar de San Agustin says: “It was in ancient times very rich in gold . Moreover, “Why work?” asked the natives. These expeditions lasted about three centuries, being repeated five and ten times a year, and each expedition cost the island over eight hundred prisoners. Of no little importance were the hindrance and obstacles that from the beginning were thrown in the farmer’s way by the rules, who were influenced by childish fear and saw everywhere signs of conspiracies and uprisings. 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. Others delight in minute accounts of their intelligence and pleasant manners, of their aptitude for music, the drama, dancing and singing, of the faculty with which they learned, not only Spanish but also Latin, which they acquired almost by themselves (Colin); others of their exquisite politeness in their dealings and in their social life, others, like the first Augustinians, whose accounts Gaspar de San Agustin copies, found them more gallant and better mannered than the inhabitants of the Moluccas. Ikaw na ang himig ay lalong mairog The Filipinos, who can measure up with the most active peoples in the world, will doubtless not repudiate his admission, for it is true there one works and struggles against the climate, against nature and against men. . The hostile Sulus did great damage in this island in 1608, leaving it almost depopulated.”  (Page 380). All the histories of those first years, in short, abound in long accounts about the industry and agriculture of the natives; mines, gold-washings, looms, farms, barter, naval construction, raising of poultry and stock, weaving of silk and cotton, distilleries, manufactures of arms, pearl fisheries, the civet industry, the horn and hide industry, etc., are things encountered at every step, and considering the time and the conditions in the islands, prove that there was life, there was activity, there was movement. Jose Rizal was Filipino, although the Rizal-Mercado family had traces of Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Malay and Negrito blood. But there is not the least doubt that the fostering of this game is due to the government, as well as the perfecting of it. He did a lot of contribution to our country. What future awaits him who distinguishes himself, him who studies, who rise above the crowd? These pages resemble a sad and monotonous scene in the night after a lively day. mapagbabago mo alaalang taglay Your email address will not be published. Before the arrival of the Europeans, the Malayan Filipinos carried on an active trade, no only among themselves but also with all the neighboring countries. Only the common crowd, the inquisitive populace, shakes its head and cannot reach a decision. What is there strange in it, when we see the pious but impotent friars of that time trying to free their poor parishioners from the tyranny of the encomenderos by advising them to stop work in the mines, to abandon their commerce, to break up their looms, pointing out to them heaven for their whole hope, preparing them for death as their only consolation? Legazpi’s expedition met in Butuan various traders of Luzon with their boats laden with iron, cloths, porcelain, etc. And if this does not suffice to form an indolent character, if the climate and nature are not enough in themselves to daze him and deprive him of all energy, recall then that the doctrine of his religion teach him to irrigate his fields in the dry season, not by means of canals but with amasses and prayers; to preserve his stock during an epidemic with holy water, exorcisms and benedictions that cost five dollars an animal, to drive away the locusts by a procession with the image of St. Augustine, etc. Some act in bad faith, though levity, through levity, through want of sound judgment, through limitation in reasoning power, ignorance of the past, or other cause. But this is not enough; their efforts is neutralized. We shall proceed otherwise. The products which they in exchange exported from the islands were crude wax, cotton, pearls, tortoise shell, betel-nuts, dry goods, etc. Instead of patient, Philippines; instead of malady, indolence. Still they struggled a long time against indolence, yes: but their enemies were so numerous that at last they gave up! Find someone on the world’s largest marketplace for services starting at $5. . The poem is about love of one's native language, in this case, Tagalog. The most active man in the world will fold his arms from the instant he understands that it is madness to bestir himself, that this work will be the cause of his trouble, that for him it will be the cause of vexations at home and of the pirate’s greed abroad. mga Kabataan, hayo na’t lagutin Even were the Filipino not a man like the rest, even were we to suppose that zeal in him for work was as essential as the movement of a wheel caught in the gearing of others in motion; even were we to deny him foresight and the judgment that the past and present form, there would still be left us another reason to explain the attack of the evil. The Cavite mutiny (Spanish: El Mótin de Cavite) of 1872 was an uprising of Filipino military personnel of Fort San Felipe, the Spanish arsenal in Cavite,: 107 Philippine Islands (then also known as part of the Spanish East Indies) on 20 January 1872.Around 200 locally recruited colonial troops and laborers rose up in the belief that it would elevate to a national uprising. There is no handwritten manuscript by Rizal. 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