The “Principales” in common with these rude unlettered
peasants was the disability of race and the
 One gathers from Rizal’s own account of his
boyhood that he was brought up in
circumstances that even in the Philippines of
our day would be considered privileged.
 Rizal’s family on his father’s side, The
Mercados, had been originally merchants, as
their surname, which in Spanish means
market, suggested. But they added a second
surname under circumstances described by
Rizal himself.
 Whoever the provincial governor was, his
choice was prophetic for Rizal in Spanish
means a field where wheat, cut while still
green, sprouts again.
 The Mercados had also gradually changed
their means of livelihood, shifting to
agriculture and the modest participation in
local politics which was the obligation, as
well as the privilege, of the propertied.
 Juan Mercado, Francisco’s father, had been
thrice the mayor of Binang (enye na hahaha).
 Rizal’s father, however, had moved to
Kalamba to cultivate lands leased from the
Dominicans, to such good effect that he
became one of the town’s wealthiest man.
 When Rizal was old enough, his father
engaged a private tutor for him, a former
classmate called Leon Monroy who lodged
with the family and gave the boy lessons in
reading, writing, and the rudiments of Latin.
 Don Francisco, and later Paciano when he
took over the management of the family
properties, might lease these from the
Dominicans, run the risks of drought, pests
and falling prices, and spend long hard days
on horseback, planning, overseeing, driving
their braceros. But it was after all these field-
hands who had to sow and reap and mind the
sluices and the primitive mills: what they had
lack of human rights and political liberties,
and it was, naturally enough, these
grievances which aroused Rizal’s
nationalism, a nationalism which, as we shall
see farther on, was essentially rationalist,
anti-racist, anti-clerical-political rather than
social or economic.
 In the Noli, Ibarra admits wryly: “I was not
brought up among the people, and perhaps I
do not know what they need. I spent my
childhood in the Jesuit school and grew up in
Europe. My opinions were formed by books,
and I know only what has been exposed …”
 But the Mercados and the Alonsos, for all
their land and money and horses and stone
houses, were much closer to their field-hands
than the absentee landlords of a later day.
They were ilustrados, that is to say, they
could read and write and figure, they took
newspapers and went to court and sometimes
travelled abroad; they were of the principalia,
that is to say, they could vote for the town
mayor, they collected taxes, they had the
preference, after the Spaniards, in town
church and town hall, in civic and religious
processions, and they could wear a European
jacket or wield knife and fork properly on
occasion.
 John Foreman, an Englishman who lived in
the Philippines at the time and in fact was
often to talk about Rizal with his father.
 Although Foreman makes Father L6pez a
relation by marriage of his half-caste friend,
and Father Lppez was in fact, as we have
seen, related to the Rizals by the marriage of
his nephew to Narcisa Rizal, it would be
presumptuous to assume that Foreman's
shipboard acquaintance was Don Francisco.
 In any case Foreman has left us one of the
few eye-witness descriptions of the life of the
privileged in Rizal's times.
 Foreman and his friend, Capitan G., who
carried the title because he had once been
mayor of his town, were called away from
the baptismal feast. "Eight or ten" of the ex-
mayor's carabaos had been stolen, and they
must ride out to his plantation to investigate.
 The inhabitants of the Philippines were never
slaves and never owned them, except perhaps
for the Christians later captured and held as
war chattels by the Muslims of the southern
islands.
 The Spanish friars themselves, as we have
seen, prevented the enslavement of the
Filipinos by the encomenderos and
successfully restricted their obligations to
their Spanish overlords to the payment of
tribute and the rendition of personal services.
 What the Spaniards had found in the
Philippines, partly misunderstood, and then
wisely adapted, was a social system founded
on the family.
 The patriarchs, the war leaders, the pilots, the
overseers of the communal lands, who would
later, by and large, become the principales of
the Spanish regime, constituted what might
be called an upper class, with two classes of
dependents that still survive in many parts of
the Philippines: the share-croppers and the
debt peons. Neither of these lower classes
were slaves in the strict sense of the word, or
even serfs.
 The share-croppers could have property of
their own, they enjoyed personal freedom,
and their main obligation was to work on
their superior's land one day out of every
four, in return for which they received a share
of the harvest.
 The peons too could own property but their
obligations were more onerous; they were
either household servants or worked on their
master's fields three days out of four.
 Most, if not all, had sunk to this state of
servitude because of debt: they had been
unable to pay judicial fines or they had
borrowed money at usurious rates of interest.
 But free and dependent could intermarry, and
the status of their children was carefully
regulated; peons could buy back their
freedom, and freemen lose theirs.
 The Spaniards made the heads of these small
communities of kinsmen their agents and tax-
collectors, and thus preserved to a great
extent the traditional society under the new
conquerors. The former datus became
cabezas de barangay or local headmen; they
were sometimes ruined when they were
unable to collect the tribute assigned to their
communities and were obliged to make up
the difference; more often they prospered
through the judicious use of their new office,
influence and connections.
 For all that it was the beaten who would
make the Revolution against Spain, a
revolution organized by a warehouseman,
fought by peasants in caves and forests,
condemned and eventually compromised-so
it is said-by the principales. Even if Rizal had
never been born there would have been a
revolution.
 But perhaps it is more useful to evaluate, in
anticipation, the part that the principales,
Rizal among them, actually played in the
events of 1896 and after. Men of property do
not usually begin revolutions, unless it is to
protect their investments. Nor do reasonable
men for, as Bernard Shaw remarks with only
surface irony, "the reasonable man adapts
himself to the world; the unreasonable man
persists in trying to adapt the world to
 himself; therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man."

 It was inevitable that the Revolution should

be started by propertyless men like
Bonifacio, and equally inevitable that it
should be condemned at the start by
reasonable men like Rizal.

 The "beaten men" had their way; they had

their violent revolution, but it was not wholly
uninfluenced by the principalcs and
ilustrados.

 As we shall hereafter see, Rizal and the

ilustrados, of whom he was to be the
exemplar, the teacher, and tacitly but
generally acknowledged leader, would do his
above all: he, through them, would arouse a
consciousness of national unity, of a common
grievance and common fate. He would work
through his writings, writings in Spanish,
which could be read only by the principales,
and not indeed by all of them, but which
were read, overleaping the old barriers of sea
and mountain and native dialect, from Vigan
to Dapitan.

 Without this new middle class, now ·national

by grace of school, the printing press, and
newly discovered interests in common the
Kabite insurrection of 1896 might not have
had a greater significance than that of 1872.

 It was Rizal who would persuade the

principales, and with them, and sometimes
through them, the peasants and the artisans
that they were all equally "Filipinos", and in
so doing would justify the opportunities of
his privileged birth.