The Social Cancer

The Social Cancer [Noli Me
Tangere] [with accents]

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Social Cancer, by Jose Rizal
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Title: The Social Cancer
Author: Jose Rizal
Release Date: October, 2004 [EBook #6737] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on January 20,
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The Social Cancer

The Social Cancer A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere

from the Spanish of José Rizal
By
Charles Derbyshire

Manila 1912

THE NOVELS OF JOSÉ RIZAL
Translated from Spanish into English
BY CHARLES DERBYSHIRE
THE SOCIAL CANCER (NOLI ME TANGERE) THE REIGN OF
GREED (EL FILIBUSTERISMO)

Translator's Introduction

"We travel rapidly in these historical sketches. The reader flies in his
express train in a few minutes through a couple of centuries. The
centuries pass more slowly to those to whom the years are doled out
day by day. Institutions grow and beneficently develop themselves,
making their way into the hearts of generations which are shorter-lived
than they, attracting love and respect, and winning loyal obedience; and
then as gradually forfeiting by their shortcomings the allegiance which
had been honorably gained in worthier periods. We see wealth and

greatness; we see corruption and vice; and one seems to follow so close
upon the other, that we fancy they must have always co-existed. We
look more steadily, and we perceive long periods of time, in which
there is first a growth and then a decay, like what we perceive in a tree
of the forest."
FROUDE, Annals of an English Abbey.
Monasticism's record in the Philippines presents no new general fact to
the eye of history. The attempt to eliminate the eternal feminine from
her natural and normal sphere in the scheme of things there met with
the same certain and signal disaster that awaits every perversion of
human activity. Beginning with a band of zealous, earnest men, sincere
in their convictions, to whom the cause was all and their personalities
nothing, it there, as elsewhere, passed through its usual cycle of
usefulness, stagnation, corruption, and degeneration.
To the unselfish and heroic efforts of the early friars Spain in large
measure owed her dominion over the Philippine Islands and the
Filipinos a marked advance on the road to civilization and nationality.
In fact, after the dreams of sudden wealth from gold and spices had
faded, the islands were retained chiefly as a missionary conquest and a
stepping-stone to the broader fields of Asia, with Manila as a depot for
the Oriental trade. The records of those early years are filled with tales
of courage and heroism worthy of Spain's proudest years, as the
missionary fathers labored with unflagging zeal in disinterested
endeavor for the spread of the Faith and the betterment of the condition
of the Malays among whom they found themselves. They won the
confidence of the native peoples, gathered them into settlements and
villages, led them into the ways of peace, and became their protectors,
guides, and counselors.
In those times the cross and the sword went hand in hand, but in the
Philippines the latter was rarely needed or used. The lightness and
vivacity of the Spanish character, with its strain of Orientalism, its
fertility of resource in meeting new conditions, its adaptability in
dealing with the dwellers in warmer lands, all played their part in this
as in the other conquests. Only on occasions when some stubborn
resistance was met with, as in Manila and the surrounding country,
where the most advanced of the native peoples dwelt and where some
of the forms and beliefs of Islam had been established, was it necessary

to resort to violence to destroy the native leaders and replace them with
the missionary fathers. A few sallies by young Salcedo, the Cortez of
the Philippine conquest,