With rare exceptions the Filipinos who left their native soil to
finish their education in the Spanish peninsula, were those to whom
the real work of separatism is owing. The Filipino at home who has
fallen into line with his foreign educated brother is but a blind
worker. And the Filipino who went to Spain was as a rule, a very
general rule, taken under the sheltering care of Miguel Morayta (see
note 13). The responsibility therefore for the ideas inculcated into
the minds of those "students" lies, and that heavily, upon Morayta,
the chief of that family of freemasonry which claims ignorance of the
aims of its filipino membership. The only logical excuse that can be
brought forwards is that filipino freemasonry degenerated. When once it
took root in the Archipelago it spread with wonderful rapidity. The
adepts were for the most part Chinese half-castes; and little by
little that strange train of thought of the native, whether he be
full blooded or mixed, a train of thought which, like the filipino
pony is accustomed to walk backwards when it should go forwards,
or like the patient carabao which too often lies down just at the
moment when its services are the most needed to drag a load over a
mud hole, carried the would-be citizens of an independent country to
the verge of political insanity. Certain it is that as the idea of
separation became more and more developed the Spanish masons who were
member of the Filipino lodges severed their connection therewith. But
yet it does not appear within the limits of common sense to believe
that the Spanish masons were ignorant; the greater probability is
that they were too indulgent, too confiding. To hold too fast to the
excuse of ignorance is to profess oneself very ignorant. But whether
it was ignorance or the wanting of even that species of patriotism
which one expects to find in beasts of burden (for every horse knows
his own stables) the black fact still remains that Spanish masonry
gave birth to, and fostered, Filipino freemasonry or in other words,
the katipunan.
However, be the degree of ignorance what it may, we cannot overlook
the fact that the actions of the Tagalog freemasons, the katipunan
if you will, for the one and the other are the same thing under
different names, were the cause of no little surprise to the Grand
Oriente Español. The filipino mason was a traitor to the mother which
gave him being and nourished him into activity: a traitor who used
the cover of the freemason lodge only that he might the easier and
safer hatch out his plot to gain, by the most brutal means imaginable,
the independence of his country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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