Guerrero, in a Rizal lecture he delivered titled Rizal As Liberal; Bonifacio As Democrat.There is much of Rizal in this: the political -and I say political because there really is no valid historical evidence for it- the political, then, nostalgia for an idyllic past which could not be recovered on the eve of the 20th Century; the unfamiliarity with, not to say indifference toward, the economic and social realities; that reverse colonial mentality which blames all the ills of the country on the foreign ruler’s malevolence; the utopian conviction that a government of the Filipinos by the Filipinos would be very heaven.In a way, Rizal and Bonifacio were romantics, very much like Rousseau with his “noble savage”, Bonifacio perhaps more than the relatively sophisticated Rizal, and indeed under the influence of Rizal…. His grievances were those of the common people among whom he lived, of whom indeed he was truly one, grievances that, homely and petty as they might sound, they felt in their own shacks and tenements, in their own families, in their own bodies, the stick on their backs, the empty plate.If we ask ourselves again why the Filipinos took up arms, we may be nearer the correct answer in Bonifacio’s wrongs, the wrongs inflicted upon the common people, than in Rizal’s rights, the rights which he desired for his aborning nation…I have suggested that Rizal and Bonifacio both appear to be romantics, nurturing illusions of an idyllic pre-Spanish past. But their romanticism was really political tactics: Rizal’s to refute the clerical claim that Mother Church and Mother Spain had brought the natives down from the trees; Bonifacio’s to attract followers with the vision of a primitive paradise without taxes and police…It was the perennial conflict between the intellectual, on the one hand, who is always waiting for something more, one more condition to be fulfilled, one more factor to be supplied, one last question that should be answered, and the man of instinct, on the other hand, who knows only when he has had enough.It was also the conflict between the liberal, anxious to reconcile the old and the new in an orderly and controlled progress, and the democrat, ready and willing to leave it all to the will of the people, right or wrong.
