Lineage, Life and Labors of Jos Rizal, Philippine Patriot | Page 6

him. These precautions
have been considered necessary for every criminal trial, but the framers
of the American Constitution, fearful lest popular prejudice some day
might cause injustice to those advocating unpopular ideals, prohibited
the irremediable penalty of death upon a charge of treason except
where the testimony of two reliable witnesses established some overt
act, inference not being admissible as evidence.
Such protection was not given the subjects of Spain, but still, with all
the laxity of the Spanish law, and even if all the charges had been true,
which they were far from being, no case was made out against Doctor
Rizal at his trial. According to the laws then in effect, he was unfairly
convicted and he should be considered innocent; for this reason his life
will be studied to see what kind of hero he was, and no attempt need be
made to plead good character and honest intentions in extenuation of
illegal acts. Rizal was ever the advocate of law, and it will be found,
too, that he was always consistently law-abiding.
Though they are in the Orient, the Filipinos are not of it. Rizal once
said, upon hearing of plans for a Philippine exhibit at a European
World's Fair, that the people of Europe would have a chance to see
themselves as they were in the Middle Ages. With allowances for the
changes due to climate and for the character of the country, this

statement can hardly be called exaggerated. The Filipinos in the last
half of the nineteenth century were not Orientals but mediaeval
Europeans--to the credit of the early Castilians but to the discredit of
the later Spaniards.
The Filipinos of the remoter Christian barrios, whom Rizal had in mind
particularly, were in customs, beliefs and advancement substantially
what the descendants of Legaspi's followers might have been had these
been shipwrecked on the sparsely inhabited islands of the Archipelago
and had their settlement remained shut off from the rest of the world.
Except where foreign influence had accidentally crept in at the ports, it
could truthfully be said that scarcely perceptible advance had been
made in three hundred years. Succeeding Spaniards by their misrule not
only added little to the glorious achievement of their ancestors, but
seemed to have prevented the natural progress which the land would
have made.
In one form or another, this contention was the basis of Rizal's
campaign. By careful search, it is true, isolated instances of
improvement could be found, but the showing at its very best was so
pitifully poor that the system stood discredited. And it was the system
to which Rizal was opposed.
The Spaniards who engaged in public argument with Rizal were
continually discovering, too late to avoid tumbling into them, logical
pitfalls which had been carefully prepared to trap them. Rizal argued
much as he played chess, and was ever ready to sacrifice a pawn to be
enabled to say "check." Many an unwary opponent realized after he had
published what he had considered a clever answer that the same
reasoning which scored a point against Rizal incontrovertibly
established the Kalamban's major premise.
Superficial antagonists, to the detriment of their own reputations, have
made much of what they chose to consider Rizal's historical errors. But
history is not merely chronology, and his representation of its trend,
disregarding details, was a masterly tracing of current evils to their
remote causes. He may have erred in some of his minor statements; this

will happen to anyone who writes much, but attempts to discredit Rizal
on the score of historical inaccuracy really reflect upon the captious
critics, just as a draftsman would expose himself to ridicule were he to
complain of some famous historical painting that it had not been drawn
to exact scale. Rizal's writings were intended to bring out in relief the
evils of the Spanish system of the government of the Filipino people,
just as a map of the world may put the inhabited portions of the earth in
greater prominence than those portions that are not inhabited. Neither is
exact in its representation, but each serves its purpose the better
because it magnifies the important and minimizes the unimportant.
In his disunited and abased countrymen, Rizal's writings aroused, as he
intended they should, the spirit of nationality, of a Fatherland which
was not Spain, and put their feet on the road to progress. What matters
it, then, if his historical references are not always exhaustive, and if to
make himself intelligible in the Philippines he had to write in a style
possibly not always sanctioned by the Spanish Academy? Spain herself
had denied to the Filipinos a system of education that might have made
a creditable Castilian the common language of the Archipelago. A
display of erudition alone does not make an historian, nor