Solidaridad, Madrid, Spain, July 15, 1890September 15, 1890.
Rizal wrote the article to defend the Filipinos from
the charge that they were born indolent.
It is desirable to study thoroughly this
question without contempt or sensitiveness,
without bias and without pessimism.
The word indolence has been greatly misused in
the sense of little love for work and lack of energy,
but ridicule has covered the misuse. In the Philippines ones own and anothers faults,
the shortcomings of one, the misdeeds of another,
are attributed to indolence.
The Filipinos who can stand beside the most
active men of the world will doubtless not
challenge the admission. It is true that they have to work and struggle much against the climate, against the nature and against men; but we should not take the exception for the general rule and we should seek the welfare of our country by stating what we believe is true.
Those who have yet treated of indolence,
with the exception of Dr. Sancianco, have
been content to dent or affirm it. We dont know anyone who studied its causes.
The warm climate requires quiet and rest for the
individual, just as cols incites him to work and to
action. The very Europeans who accuse the peoples of the colonies of indolence. The fact is that in the tropical countries severe
work is not a good thing as in cold countries, for
there it annihilation, it is death, it is destruction.
Man is not a brute, he is not a machine. His object
is not merely to produce despite the claim of some
white Christians who wish to make of the colored Christian a kind of motive power somewhat more intelligent. His purpose is not to satisfy the passions of another man but to seek happiness for himself and his fellowmen by following the road towards progress and perfection.
To foster the good ones and aid them, as well as
correct the bad ones and repress them would be
the duty of society or of governments. The evil is that the indolence in the Philippines is a magnified indolence, an indolence of snow ball type. If we may be permitted the expression, an evil which increases in direct proportion to the square of the periods of time, an effect of misgovernment and backwardness as we said and not a cause of them.
When the condition of the patient is examined
after a long chronic illness, 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. The attending physician attributes the entire failure of his skill to the poor constitution of the patient. As it happens in similar cases then the patient gets worse, everybody loses his head, each one dodges the responsibility to place it upon somebody else;
Indolence in the Philippines is a chronic
malady, but not a hereditary one. The
Filipinos have not always been what they are, witnesses being all the historians of the first years after the discovery of the Islands.
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 or less unproductive. 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 tranquillity, attest this.
A fatal combination of circumstances, some
independent of the will in despite the efforts of men,
others the offspring of stupidity and ignorance, others the inevitable corollaries of false principles, and still others the result of more or less base passions has induced the decline of work, an evil which instead of being remedied by prudence, mature reflection and recognition of the mistakes made, through deplorable policy, through regret, table blindness and obstinacy, has gone from bad to worse until it has reached the condition in which we now see it.
Add to these fatal expeditions that wasted all the
moral and material energies of the country, the
frightful inroads of the terrible pirates from the south, instigated and encouraged by the government,
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?
Man works for a purpose. Remove the purpose and
you reduce him to inaction. The most active man
in the world will fold his arms the moment he learns that it is folly to be so, that his 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 outside
It is very true that we have once said that when a
house becomes disturbed and disorderly, we
should not blame the youngest child, nor the servants but its head. Especially if his power is unlimited. and the Filipino people, not being free, are not responsible either for their misfortunes or woes.
Fearing the frequent contact between the
Filipinos and other individuals of the same race
who are independent and free like the Borneans, the Siamese, the Cambodians, and the Japanese people whose customs and feelings differ very much from those of the chinese has looked upon them with great mistrust and treated them harshly.
The Filipinos were not allowed to go to their work
or farms, unless with the permit from the governor
or the provincial governors and justices and even of the priests. Then without the means to defend himself and
without security, he is reduced to inaction and
abandon the farm, the work and indulges in gambling as a better means in gaining a livelihood.
The miserly return that the Filipinos gets
from his labor would in the end discourage
him. This state of affairs has lasted a long time
and still exists, despite the fact that the
breed of encomenderos has become extinct.
the high and noble functions he performs are nothing
more than instruments of gain. He monopolizes all business and instead stimulating around him love of work, instead of curbing the very natural indolence of the natives abusing his authority, his thinks of nothing else but destroying all competitions which might bother him or attempt to share in his profits. Little does it matter if the country is impoverished, is without education, without trade, without industry, provided the Governor gets rich quickly.
Yes.
Trading with China was not only prejudicial to
Spain but also to the life of her colonies.
In fact, the government officials and private
citizens of Manila, finding an easy means of
enriching themselves, neglected everything.
The dislike for manual labor began when the
rulers are taking advantage of their workers.
No.
The Spaniards introduction of different
form of gambling to the Filipinos.
The fact that the Filipinos were much less
lazy before the word miracle was introduced
into their language.
The facility with which individual liberty is
curtailed, the endless worry of all from the
knowledge that they are liable to secret report, an administrative action, and to the accusation of rebel or suspect, an accusation which does not need proof or the presence of the accuser necessary to produce the desired result. With lack of confidence in the future, that uncertainty of reaping the reward of labor, as in a city stricken with the plague, everybody yields to fate.
The apathy of the government itself toward
everything in commerce and agriculture
contributes not a little to foster indolence. There is no encouragement, at all for the manufacturer or for the farmer; the government furnishes no aid either when poor crop comes, when the locusts sweep over the fields, or when a cyclone destroys in its passage the wealth of the soil;
The fact that the best plantations, the best tracts
of land in some provinces, those that from their
easy access are more profitable than others, are in the hands of the religious corporations, whose desideratum is ignorance and a condition of semistarvation of the Filipinos so that they may continue to govern him and make themselves necessary to their hapless existence, is one of the reasons why many towns do not progress in spite of the efforts of their inhabitants.
Add to this lack of material inducement the
absence of moral support, and you will see
how he who is not lazy in that country must be a madman or at least a fool.
The education of the Filipino from birth until he sinks
into his grave, the training of the native is brutalizing,
depressive and antihuman. during five to ten years the majority of the students have grasped nothing more than that no one understands what the books say, not even the professors themselves; and during these five to ten years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole life, that 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.
The ancient writers, like Chirino, Morga and Colin,
take pleasure in describing them as well-featured, with
good aptitudes for any thing they take up, keen and susceptible and of resolute will, very clean and neat in their persons and clothing, and of good mind and bearing. Our writers today, we say, find that the Indio is a creature something more than a monkey but much less than a man, an anthropoid, dull-witted, stupid, timid, dirty, cringing, grinning, ill-clothed, indolent, lazy, brainless, immoral, etc.
Alas! The whole misfortune of the present Filipinos
consists in that they have become brutes only half-way.
The Filipino is convinced that to get happiness it is necessary for him to lay aside his dignity as a rational being, to attend mass, to believe what is told him, to pay what is demanded of him, to pay and forever to pay; to work, suffer and be silent, without aspiring to anything, without aspiring to know or even to understand Spanish, without separating himself from his carabao, as the friars shamelessly say, without protesting against any injustice, against any arbitrary action, against an assault, against an insult; that is, not to have heart, brain or spirit:
Now it falls to us to analyze those that emanate
from the people. Peoples and governments are
correlated and complementary: a fatuous government would be an anomaly among righteous people, just as a corrupt people cannot exist under rulers and wise laws. Like people, like government, we will say in paraphrase of a popular adage.
We can reduce all these causes to two classes:
defects of education and lack of national sentiment. The very limited training in the home, the tyrannical and
sterile education in the few educational centers, that blind
subjection of the youth to his elders, influence the mind so that a man may not aspire to excel those who preceded him and must merely be content to follow or walk behind them. Stagnation inevitably results from this, and as he who devotes himself to copying fails himself to develop his inherent qualities, he naturally becomes sterile; hence decadence. Indolence is a corollary derived from the absence of stimulus and vitality.
There is one who will work for us; let us
sleep on!
Nurtured with the stories of anchorites who lead a
contemplative and lazy life, the Filipinos spend
theirs by giving money to the Church in the hope of miracles and other wonderful things.
You cant do more than old So and So! Dont aspire to
be greater than the curate! You belong to an inferior race! You havent any energy! The child or the youth who tries to be anything else is
charged of being vain and presumptuous;
The curate ridicules him with cruel sarcasm, his
relatives look upon him with fear, and strangers pity
him greatly.
The Filipino follows the most pernicious of all
routines a routine, not based on reason, but
imposed and forced. What he lacks principally are freedom to give
expansion to his adventuresome spirit and good
examples, beautiful prospects in the distance.
Convinced through insinuation of his inferiority,
his mind bewildered by his education with only his
racial susceptibility and poetical imagination remaining in him, the Filipino in the exchange of usages and ideas among the different nations, allows himself to be guided by his fancy and selflove.
The scarcity of any opposition to the
measures that are prejudicial to the people
and the absence of any initiative that will redound to their welfare. Deprived of the right of association,
therefore he is weak and inert.
Love of peace and the horror many have of
accepting the few administrative posts that
fall to the lot of Filipinos on account of the troubles and annoyances they bring them, lead to the appointment of the most stupid and incompetent men to municipal posts.