The Indolence of the Filipino

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Indolence of the Filipino, by Jose Rizal
#2 in our series by Jose Rizal

Prepared by Jeroen Hellingman

THE INDOLENCE OF THE FILIPINO

BY JOSE RIZAL

(”LA INDOLENCIA DE LOS FILIPINOS” IN ENGLISH.)

EDITOR’S EXPLANATION

Mr. Charles Derbyshire, who put Rizal’s great novel Noli me tangere
and its sequel El Filibusterismo into English (as The Social Cancer and
The Reign of Greed), besides many minor writings of the “Greatest Man
of the Brown Race”, has rendered a similar service for La Indolencia
de los Filipinos in the following pages, and with that same fidelity
and sympathetic comprehension of the author’s meaning which has made
possible an understanding of the real Rizal by English readers. Notes
by Dr. James A. Robertson (Librarian of the Philippine Library and
co-editor of the 55-volume series of historical reprints well called
The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, so comprehensive are they) show
the breadth of Rizal’s historical scholarship, and that the only error
mentioned is due to using a faulty reprint where the original was
not available indicates the conscientiousness of the pioneer worker.

An appropriate setting has been attempted by page decorations whose
scenes are taken from Philippine textbooks of the World Book Company
and whose borders were made in the Drawing Department of the Philippine
School of Arts and Trades.

The frontispiece shows a hurried pencil sketch of himself which
Rizal made in Berlin in the Spring of 1887 that Prof. Blumentritt,
whom then he knew only through correspondence, might recognize him at
the Leitmeritz railway station when he should arrive for a proposed
visit. The photograph from which the engraving was reproduced came
one year ago with the Christmas greetings of the Austrian professor
whose recent death the Philippine Islands, who knew him as their
friend and Rizal’s, is mourning.

The picture perhaps deserves a couple of comments. As a child Rizal
had been trained to rapid work, an expertness kept up by practice, and
the copying of his own countenance from a convenient near-by mirror
was but a moment’s task. Yet the incident suggests that he did not
keep photographs of himself about, and that he had the Cromwellian
desire to see himself as he really was, for the Filipino features
are more prominent than in any photograph of his extant.