Translator’s Introduction - Page 13 of 31

(English version of “Noli Me Tangere”)

II

And third came she who gives dark creeds their power,
Silabbat-paramasa, sorceress,
Draped fair in many lands as lowly Faith,
But ever juggling souls with rites and prayers;
The keeper of those keys which lock up Hells
And open Heavens. Wilt thou dare, she said,
Put by our sacred books, dethrone our gods,
Unpeople all the temples, shaking down
That law which feeds the priests and props the realm?

But Buddha answered, What thou bidd’st me keep
Is form which passes, but the free Truth stands;
Get thee unto thy darkness.

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD, The Light of Asia.

Ah, simple people, how little do you know the blessing that you enjoy!  Neither hunger, nor nakedness, nor inclemency of the weather troubles you.  With the payment of seven reals per year, you remain free of contributions.  You do not have to close your houses with bolts.  You do not fear that the district troopers will come in to lay waste your fields, and trample you under foot at your own firesides.  You call ‘father’ the one who is in command over you.  Perhaps there will come a time when you will be more civilized, and you will break out in revolution; and you will wake terrified, at the tumult of the riots, and will see blood flowing through these quiet fields, and gallows and guillotines erected in these squares, which never yet have seen an execution.[6]  Thus moralized a Spanish traveler in 1842, just as that dolce far niente was drawing to its close.  Already far-seeing men had begun to raise in the Spanish parliament the question of the future of the Philippines, looking toward some definite program for their care under modern conditions and for the adjustment of their relations with the mother country.  But these were mere Cassandra-voices—the horologe of time was striking for Rome’s successor, as it did for Rome herself.

Just where will come the outbreak after three centuries of mind-repression and soul-distortion, of forcing a growing subject into the strait-jacket of medieval thought and action, of natural selection reversed by the constant elimination of native initiative and leadership, is indeed a curious study.  That there will be an outbreak somewhere is as certain as that the plant will grow toward the light, even under the most unfavorable conditions, for man’s nature is but the resultant of eternal forces that ceaselessly and irresistibly interplay about and upon him, and somewhere this resultant will express itself in thought or deed.

[6]Sinibaldo de Mas, Informe sobre el estado de las Islas Filipinas en 1842, translated in Blair and Robertson’s The Philippine Islands, Vol. XXVIII, p. 254.

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