The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 52, 1841-1898: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century
History
The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume 52, 1841-1898: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the catholic missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the close of the nineteenth century
Demarcation line of Alexander VI; Missions -- Philippines; Philippines -- Discovery and exploration; Philippines -- History -- Sources
Marcelo H. del Pilar had taken an active part in stimulating
opposition to the friar-curates, particularly in matters of local
government, in his native province (Bulakan) for some years before
the troubles of 1888. When the pendulum swung towards reaction, he
left his family (being then a man of middle-age) and went to Spain
to carry on the fight close by the center of government, support of
his campaign being pledged by a committee who undertook to secure
Filipino subscriptions, certain wealthy Filipinos being identified
privately with the cause. Del Pilar's writings show nothing of the
poet or dreamer, as do Rizal's; he had, in some degree, an "economic
mind," though entirely untrained in that line, and he was at the
outset of the active propaganda in Spain (1889) a maturer man than
Rizal. Coming straight from the problems of actual life among his
people, he stated their grievances with more practical reference to
direct and immediate remedies and with special reference to their
economic status; while Rizal, as a student in contact with modern
European life and thought, dreamed of and preached, in more general
terms but on a far wider scope, the social regeneration of his people
and the expansion of their political rights. Del Pilar would have
made a good representative of his people in the Cortes. But Rizal
was a genius, who with the touch of imagination and satire lifted the
cause of the Filipinos to a place in the thought of the world, and at
the same time, as poet and patriot combined, fired the enthusiasm of
his own people and became their idol. And, in the course of events,
it was Rizal who proved the soberer, the more mature as time went
by. He was opposed to means of violence, even to the last, and the
whole record bears out his protestations on this score; he still
looked to the future as a dreamer-patriot, but he also looked to
the present state of his people and saw that the most vital problem
was the teaching them that they must raise themselves by their own
efforts, must deserve a better destiny. Del Pilar, disappointed
by the failure to achieve greater immediate, practical results by
relying upon the progress of Liberalism in Spain, after seven years
of propaganda along these lines, was starting for Hongkong or Japan,
to conduct there a really revolutionary campaign, when death overtook
him shortly before the Tagálog revolt in 1896. He had, apparently,
lost faith in the ideals of "assimilation," of Spanish-Filipino unity,
which he had set forth in glowing phrases in 1888 and 1889. He had
also, apparently, become convinced that the upper-class Filipinos,
especially the most wealthy and prominent, were too lukewarm or too
prone to temporize for safety's sake, that the time had come to make
the cause more distinctly one of the people as a whole. He is credited
with having suggested and outlined the organization of the Katipunan,
and he seems to have concluded that it was time for the Filipinos to
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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