The Social Cancer | Page 7

either in its own constitution or in the life of the
people trained under it. Not only the ecclesiastical but also the social
and political system of the country was controlled by the religious
orders, often silently and secretly, but none the less effectively. This is
evident from the ceaseless conflict that went on between the religious
orders and the Spanish political administrators, who were at every turn
thwarted in their efforts to keep the government abreast of the times.

The shock of the affair of 1872 had apparently stunned the Filipinos,
but it had at the same time brought them to the parting of the ways and
induced a vague feeling that there was something radically wrong,
which could only be righted by a closer union among themselves. They
began to consider that their interests and those of the governing powers
were not the same. In these feelings of distrust toward the friars they
were stimulated by the great numbers of immigrant Spaniards who
were then entering the country, many of whom had taken part in the
republican movements at home and who, upon the restoration of the
monarchy, no doubt thought it safer for them to be at as great a distance
as possible from the throne. The young Filipinos studying in Spain
came from different parts of the islands, and by their association there
in a foreign land were learning to forget their narrow sectionalism;
hence the way was being prepared for some concerted action. Thus,
aided and encouraged by the anti-clerical Spaniards in the mother
country, there was growing up a new generation of native leaders, who
looked toward something better than the old system.
It is with this period in the history of the country--the author's
boyhood--that the story of Noli Me Tangere deals. Typical scenes and
characters are sketched from life with wonderful accuracy, and the
picture presented is that of a master-mind, who knew and loved his
subject. Terror and repression were the order of the day, with ever a
growing unrest in the higher circles, while the native population at
large seemed to be completely cowed--"brutalized" is the term
repeatedly used by Rizal in his political essays. Spanish writers of the
period, observing only the superficial movements,-- some of which
were indeed fantastical enough, for
"they, Who in oppression's darkness caved have dwelt, They are not
eagles, nourished with the day; What marvel, then, at times, if they
mistake their way?"

--and not heeding the currents at work below, take great delight in
ridiculing the pretensions of the young men seeking advancement,
while they indulge in coarse ribaldry over the wretched condition of the
great mass of the "Indians." The author, however, himself a "miserable
Indian," vividly depicts the unnatural conditions and dominant
characters produced under the outworn system of fraud and force, at the

same time presenting his people as living, feeling, struggling
individuals, with all the frailties of human nature and all the
possibilities of mankind, either for good or evil; incidentally he throws
into marked contrast the despicable depreciation used by the Spanish
writers in referring to the Filipinos, making clear the application of the
self-evident proposition that no ordinary human being in the presence
of superior force can very well conduct himself as a man unless he be
treated as such.
The friar orders, deluded by their transient triumph and secure in their
pride of place, became more arrogant, more domineering than ever. In
the general administration the political rulers were at every turn
thwarted, their best efforts frustrated, and if they ventured too far their
own security threatened; for in the three-cornered wrangle which lasted
throughout the whole of the Spanish domination, the friar orders had, in
addition to the strength derived from their organization and their wealth,
the Damoclean weapon of control over the natives to hang above the
heads of both governor and archbishop. The curates in the towns,
always the real rulers, became veritable despots, so that no voice dared
to raise itself against them, even in the midst of conditions which the
humblest indio was beginning to feel dumbly to be perverted and
unnatural, and that, too, after three centuries of training under the
system that he had ever been taught to accept as "the will of God."
The friars seemed long since to have forgotten those noble aims that
had meant so much to the founders and early workers of their orders, if
indeed the great majority of those of the later day had ever realized the
meaning of their office, for the Spanish writers of the time delight in
characterizing them as the meanest of the Spanish peasantry, when not
something worse, who had been "lassoed," taught a few ritualistic
prayers, and shipped to the Philippines to be placed in isolated towns