Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/231

Rh the respectfulness which the Filipinos manifested towards the Spaniards did not proceed from self-depreciation, but was simply dictated by fear and self-interest. By fear, because they saw in the Spaniard their lord and master who oppressed them arbitrarily even if with good intentions; by self-interest, because they had observed that his pride of race lays the European open to flattery and that they could get large concessions from him by a little subserviency. The Filipinos do not, therefore, have any real respect for the European, but cringe and bow to him from interested motives alone. Behind his back they laugh at him, ridicule his presumption and regard themselves as in reality the shrewder of the two races. Because the Spaniards never divined the real sentiments of the Filipinos towards themselves, young Eizal felt justified in regarding them as inferior in intelligence to his own countrymen. But in later years he found it necessary to change this false impression of his youth, especially as he had found by his own personal experience how easy it is to draw mistaken conclusions about people of a different race from one's own. "Whenever" he used to say, "I came upon condemnation of my people by Europeans, either in conversation or in books, I recalled those foolish ideas of my youth, my indignation cooled, and I could smile and quote the French proverb tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner"

Dr. Bizal's sojourn in Spain opened to him a new world. His intellectual horizon began to widen with his new experiences. New ideas thronged in upon him. He came from a land which was the very home of bigotry, where the Spanish friar, the Spanish official and the Spanish soldier governed with absolute sway. But in Madrid he found the exact opposite of this repression. Free thinkers and atheists spoke freely, in disparaging terms, of religion and the church; the authority of the government he found to be at a minimum, while he not only saw liberals contending with the clerical party but he beheld with astonishment republicans and Carlists openly promoting the development of their political ideas.

Still greater was the influence upon him of his residence in France, Germany and England. In those countries he enlarged his scientific information, or it would be better, perhaps, to say that there the spirit of modern philology was revealed to him, and there he learned the meaning of the word ethnology.

The personal influence of the late Dr. Rost, of London, was most marked in the philological training of Dr. Rizal. His teachings and the study of the works of W. v. Humboldt, Jacquet and Professor H. Kern opened a new world for the Filipino scholar. He formed a plan to write a work upon the Tagalog verb, which he afterwards modified and, while in exile in Dapitan in Mindanao, he began to write a Tagalog grammar