The Indolence of the Filipino

The essay itself originally appeared in the Filipino forthrightly
review, La Solidaridad, of Madrid, in five installments, running
from July 15 to September 15, 1890. It was a continuation of Rizal’s
campaign of education in which he sought by blunt truths to awaken his
countrymen to their own faults at the same time that he was arousing
the Spaniards to the defects in Spain’s colonial system that caused
and continued such shortcomings.

To-day there seems a place in Manila for just suets, missionary work
as The Indolence of the Filipino aimed at. It may help on the present
improving understanding between Continental Americans and their
countrymen of these “Far Off Eden Isles”, for the writer submits as
his mature opinion, based on ten years’ acquaintance among Filipinos
through studies which enlisted their interest, that the political
problem would have been greatly simplified had it been understood
in Dewey’s day that among intelligent Americans the much-talked-of
lack of “capacity” referred to the mass of the people’s want of
political experience and not to any alleged racial inferiority. To
wounded pride has the discontent been due rather than to withholding
of political privileges.

Spanish Philippine history has curiously repeated itself during the
fifteen years of America’s administration of this archipelago.

Just as some colonial Spaniards seemed to the Filipinos less
creditable representatives of the metropolis than the average of
those who remained in the Peninsula, so not all who now pass for
Americans in the Philippines are believed here to measure up to the
highest homestandard.

Sitters in swivel-chairs underneath electric fans hold hopeless the
future of the land where men do not desire to be drudges just as did
their predecessors who in wide armed lazy seats, beneath punkahs,
talked of Filipino indolence.

Ingratitude, to-day as then, is the regular rejoinder to the
progressing people’s protest against paternalism, and altruistic
regard for their real welfare is still represented as the reason why
special legislation should be provided when Filipinos prefer the same
laws as govern the sovereign people.

Though those who claim to champion the Philippines’ cause apparently
are unaware of it, these Islands have a population strangely alike in
its make up to the people of America; their history is full of American
associations; Americans developed their leading resources, and American
ideas have inspired their political aspirations. It betrays blindness
somewhere that ever since 1898 Filipinos have been trying to get loose
from America in order to set up here an American form of government,

There seems now a, prospect that insular legislation may make available
to the individual the guarantees of personal liberty upon which America
at home prides itself, that municipal self-government and provincial
autonomy may become realities in the Philippines, and possibly even
that both Filipinos and Americans may realize before it is too late
how our elastic territorial government could be made to exact from
them much less of their independence than the sacrifice of sovereignty
necessary in Neutralization or internationalization.

Unwillingness to work when there is nothing in it for them
is common to Filipinos and Americans, for Thomas Jefferson
admitted that extravagance and indolence were the chief faults
of his countrymen. Labor-saving machinery has made the fruits of
Americans’ labors in their land of abundance afford a luxury in
living not elsewhere existing. But the Filipino, in his rich and not
over-populated home, shutting out, as we do, oriental cheap labor,
may employ American machinery and attain the same standard. The
possibilities for the prosperity of the population put the Philippines
in the New World, just as their discovery and their history group
them with the Western Hemisphere.

Austin Craig,

University of the Philippines,

Manila, December 20th, 1913.