February 1894

Dapitan

Dapitan, February 1894

MOST EXCELLENT SIR,

Since more than a year hand a half ago by order of your predecessor I have been banished to this district. In spite of the groundlessness of the accusation, of its scant importance, and of not having been allowed the slightest defense, in spite of the hopes with which they have used to calm my natural impatience, the most cruel uncertainty still weights on my future.

I do not know, Most Excellent Sir, if the smallness of my person has been able to engage Your Excellency’s attention, claimed by so many affairs of the most difficult office that you hold; but knowing your zeal in fulfilling your duty and your exalted patriotism that will not want that under your administration the name of Spain be stained with an act of patent injustice, I fear, seeing how my banishment is prolonged, that either Your excellency wants to leave the responsibility for it to what was ordered by your predecessor or that you could be likewise convinced of my guilt.

I must not bother now your attention with my defense. When Your Excellency orders me to do it, I shall give you a detailed account of the antecedents and circumstances of my return to these Islands, and I shall cite to you facts and witness that will demonstrate the absurdity of the accusation brought against me, an accusation that sufficed in complete peace, without proofs or trial, to pull me out of the environment in which I lived, making me abandon all at once family, home, engagements, and interests, and depriving me of the right that is not denied, not even to the last Spanish subject, not even to the last person of any society, but even to the most despicable criminal. Nevertheless, a lover of peace for my country and its government, convinced as always that our destiny is to progress through suffering, and that the welfare of a society can only be found in its orderly development under a lawful government, and giving a proof of respecting the name of that government, sacrificing to its will the right that belonged to me absolutely and incontestably and that Spain guarantees to all her subjects with her force and her laws, I have resignedly kept silent and I have not raised the slightest protest. I have preferred to wait for that government itself to appraise critically its own reputation showing that if it is fallible, as every human institution is, like few, it has more than enough independence to recognize its involuntary injustices.

But time is passing away, circumstances change, and necessities are pressing. Life in a district that lacks everything, far from the environment where one has been educated and accustomed to live, the continuous struggle with the climate and the necessities of life, and badly lodged in temporary dwellings, and what is even more terrible the uncertainty of the future, undermine the most robust health and can vitiate the few good endowments one might have. I am moreover at an age when illusions vanish to give way to realities, when one ought to settle down and think seriously of life, at an age that, if it is not utilized, can make of a useful future one of fatal consequences to himself and his fellowmen. To continue waiting in silence could not only be interpreted adversely but would be even reprehensible for it would denote little love for justice, little affection for the mother country in not sparing her the commission of a deed that could sully her prestige. The greatest criminals, Most Excellent Sir, those who have merited public indignation for their base and abject crimes can defend themselves and enjoy the immunities granted to them by law. If they are convicted, they know for what they have been condemned and frequently, even before the expiration of their term, they are pardoned. I, on the other hand, suffer in the uncertainty of an imaginary crime that cannot be proven, because it is absurd and ridiculous. Moreover, my crime would consist of having desired for my equals the exercise of political rights, the most just aspiration of worthy men, according to the expression of the most illustrious of Spanish historians; my crime would be for having desired what the Constitution and our laws assign to us, for having wanted our liberty, and I say liberty and not independence because I know very well that people can be independent and a slave at the same time, like many peoples of Asia, and on the contrary one can be a colony and dependent but equally free and happy, as we see in many countries in Oceania. Yes, this is my crime, Most Excellent Sir; I have been too much inspired by the examples that books, remembrances, great men, and my professors in Spain have inculcated in me daily. I have wished for my fellow countrymen the same thing that the illustrious Isabella the Catholic wanted for them, the same thing that the great thinkers and politicians of present day Spain want, those whose hands have not yet been contaminated nor whose conscience stained with colonial injustice, what Your Excellency in the nobility of your sentiments and the loftiness of your views would like not merely for your brothers in Spain but also for these poor Indios who are plagued with defects and vices on account of their ignorance — an ignorance that I have wished to combat by all means. I have no other crime but the crime innate in every Spaniard, in every man who feels a love for his equals, affection for his native country to which he owes his education and his life, compassion for the pitiful disinherited people, who possesses sufficient conviction to translate into action what his conscience believes and his heart dictates. And nevertheless, with all these aspirations, despite the rage with which my enemies have treated me; despite the persecutions that my family and myself have suffered; despite the traps they have spread for me in very recent dates; never has a bastard idea occurred to me, never have I employed a means that is not honorable, never have I resorted to an ignoble act to defend my ideals. I have said what I believe just, I have defended it on the peaceful ground of ideas, and if sometimes I have been mistaken, as it might well happen, for I am not infallible, it has always been with the best good faith and the most sane intention. I appeal to the good sense of every Spanish patriot, to the sentiment of every courageous man, I appeal to Your Excellency to tell me if the crime that I could be accused of is not the inevitable result of the Spanish education that I have received, is not the consequence of being a subject of Spain, a crime that would be converted into virtue if instead of my being a Filipino I were a Spaniard.

In view of this, I ask your enlightened and just administration to lift up my deportation if you find no merits for it and if you find me guilty, at least to define it and submit me to the decision of the courts. It is already time, Most Excellent Sir, to reverse a decision that if it had been dictated in a moment of rash haste, owing to circumstances that I cannot ascertain, now that it has been seen that neither peace has been altered nor have the spirits been over excited, there is no more reason for it to prevail and consequently to continue. Fortunately for governments and peoples have passed away those times when it was believed that prestige was acquired only through harsh acts of an inflexible and blind policy. Your Excellency has proven enough times during your rule in Cataluña that the best and most enduring prestige is the one based on the love of the people and the sentiment of justice, the most powerful means of assuring order and establish unity and respect among different or antagonistic races.[1]

04-809 [Misc.]