Before I give the article, let me give you an overview. The Philippines a Century Hencewas written by Jose Rizal in an edition of La Solidaridad during 1889. I came across this because we had to do a review for this in my history class. I thought it would be nice to share this with you for you to see how we were before. It also shows the tone of our hero when he wrote this. This is the first out of three parts so here goes:
THE PHILIPPINES, A CENTURY HENCE
Following our usual custom of facing squarely the most difficult and delicate questions relating to the Philippines, without weighing the consequences that our frankness may bring us, we shall in the present article treat of her future.
In order to read the future destiny of a people, it is necessary to open the book of its past. The past of the Philippines may be reduced in general terms to what follows.
Scarcely had they been incorporated to the Spanish Crown than they had to sustain with their blood and the efforts of their sons, the wars and ambitions, the conquests of Spain. In these struggle, in that terrible crisis when a people changes its forms of government, laws, usages, customs, religion and beliefs, the Philippines was depopulated, impoverished and retarded, caught in their metamorphosis, without confidence in their past, without faith in their present and without any fond hope for the years to come. The former rules who had merely endeavored to secure the fear and submission of their subjects habituated by them to servitude, fell like leaves from a dead tree, and the people, who neither had love for him nor knew what liberty was, easily changed masters hoping to perhaps to gain something from the change.
A new era thus began for the Filipinos. They gradually lost their old traditions and memories, they forgot their writings, their songs, their poetry, their laws in order to learn by rote other doctrines, which they did not understand, other standards of morality, other tastes, different from those inspired in their race by their climate and by their own way of thinking. Then they were humbled, degraded before their own eyes, ashamed of what had been distinctively their own, in order to admire, to extol whatever was foreign and incomprehensible; their spirit was disheartened and they acquiesced.
Thus, years and centuries passed. Religious pomp, rites that appeal to the eye, songs, lights, images arrayed in gold, worship in a strange language, legends, miracles, and sermons hypnotized the spirit already naturally inclined to superstitions, though they did not succeed in destroying it completely, in spite of the whole system later developed and followed with implacable tenacity.
When the moral humiliation of the inhabitants had reached this stage, when they had become humiliated and disgusted with themselves, an effort was made to give a last blow for subduing so many wills, so many dormant minds to nothingness, so that the person may become a kind of worker, a brute, a beast of burden, and to develop a race without a mind and without heart. Then the end sought was revealed. It was taken for granted. The race was insulted. The people were denied every good trait, every human characteristic. There were even writers and priests who pushed the movement further by trying not to deny to the natives of the country the capacity for virtue, but also to impute to them the tendency to vice.
Then this that they thought would be death became its sure salvation. Some dying persons are restored to health by a powerful drug.
Their patient endurance reached a climax in the insults heaped on them and the lethargic spirit woke to life. This sensitiveness, the chief trait of the native, was wounded and while he head the forbearance to suffer and die under a foreign flag, the head none when they whom he served repaid his sacrifice's with insults and ridicule. Then he began to study himself - slowly, until he realized his misfortune. Those who had not expected this result, like all despotic masters, regarded as a mistake every complaint, every protest and punished it with death, endeavoring thus to stifle every cry of anguish with blood and they made mistake after mistake.
The spirit of the people was not cowed by this, and even though it had been awakened in only a few hearts, its flame nevertheless was surely and fiercely propagated, thanks to abuses and the stupid machinations of certain classes to stifle noble and generous sentiments. Thus when a flame catches a garment, fear and confusion propagate it more and more and each movement, each blow is a blast from the bellows which fan it into life.
Undoubtedly, during all this time there were not lacking generous and noble spirits among the dormant race that tired to struggle for the rights of justice and humanity, or petty and cowardly souls among the dominated that helped in the debasement of their own country; but both were exceptions and we are speaking in general terms.
This has been their past. We know their present. Now, what will their future be? Will the Philippine Islands continue to be a Spanish colony? If so, what kind of colony? Will they become a province of Spain, with or without autonomy? And to reach this stage, what kind of sacrifices will have to be made? Will they separate from the Mother Country to live independently, to fall into the hands of other nations, or to ally themselves with other neighboring powers?
It is impossible to reply to these questions, for all of them can be answered by a "yes" and a "no," depending upon the time chosen. When there is no fixed condition in nature, how much less there ought to be in the life of peoples - being endowed with mobility and movement. So it is that in order to reply to these questions, it is necessary to presume an unlimited period of time, and in agreement therewith try to forecast future events.
JOSE RIZAL
