Prepared by Jeroen Hellingman
Mr. Charles Derbyshire, who put Rizal's great novel Noli me tangereand its sequel El Filibusterismo into English (as The Social Cancer andThe Reign of Greed), besides many minor writings of the "Greatest Manof the Brown Race", has rendered a similar service for La Indolenciade los Filipinos in the following pages, and with that same fidelityand sympathetic comprehension of the author's meaning which has madepossible an understanding of the real Rizal by English readers. Notesby Dr. James A. Robertson (Librarian of the Philippine Library andco-editor of the 55-volume series of historical reprints well calledThe Philippine Islands 1493-1898, so comprehensive are they) showthe breadth of Rizal's historical scholarship, and that the only errormentioned is due to using a faulty reprint where the original wasnot available indicates the conscientiousness of the pioneer worker.
An appropriate setting has been attempted by page decorations whosescenes are taken from Philippine textbooks of the World Book Companyand whose borders were made in the Drawing Department of the PhilippineSchool of Arts and Trades.
The frontispiece shows a hurried pencil sketch of himself whichRizal made in Berlin in the Spring of 1887 that Prof. Blumentritt,whom then he knew only through correspondence, might recognize him atthe Leitmeritz railway station when he should arrive for a proposedvisit. The photograph from which the engraving was reproduced cameone year ago with the Christmas greetings of the Austrian professorwhose recent death the Philippine Islands, who knew him as theirfriend and Rizal's, is mourning.
The picture perhaps deserves a couple of comments. As a child Rizalhad been trained to rapid work, an expertness kept up by practice, andthe copying of his own countenance from a convenient near-by mirrorwas but a moment's task. Yet the incident suggests that he did notkeep photographs of himself about, and that he had the Cromwelliandesire to see himself as he really was, for the Filipino featuresare more prominent than in any photograph of his extant.
The essay itself originally appeared in the Filipino forthrightlyreview, La Solidaridad, of Madrid, in five installments, runningfrom July 15 to September 15, 1890. It was a continuation of Rizal'scampaign of education in which he sought by blunt truths to awaken hiscountrymen to their own faults at the same time that he was arousingthe Spaniards to the defects in Spain's colonial system that causedand continued such shortcomings.
To-day there seems a place in Manila for just suets, missionary workas The Indolence of the Filipino aimed at. It may help on the presentimproving understanding between Continental Americans and theircountrymen of these "Far Off Eden Isles", for the writer submits ashis mature opinion, based on ten years' acquaintance among Filipinosthrough studies which enlisted their interest, that the politicalproblem would have been greatly simplified had it been understoodin Dewey's day that among intelligent Americans the much-talked-oflack of "capacity" referred to the mass of the people's want ofpolitical experience and not to any alleged racial inferiority. Towounded pride has the discontent been due rather than to withholdingof political privileges.
Spanish Philippine history has curiously repeated itself during thefifteen years of America's administration of this archipelago.
Just as some colonial Spaniards