I was not born in Manila; but having lived in this city for
so long, I have acquired a strong affection for it. No matter what part of the
country we came from originally, we have all become, as it were, naturalized
Manileños, proud to say of ourselves, as a certain Paul of Tarsus once said of
himself, that we are citizens of no mean city.
The juxtaposition of “citizen” and “city” will try to remind
us of a number of other words, familiar to us from daily usage, which are
really derivatives of the Greek or Latin names for “city” such as “civitas,”
and “polis.” Thus to be “civil” to someone is to treat him with the respect and
regard with which a citizen treats a fellow-citizen; to be “urbane” is to have
the good manners that may be expected of a city dweller; and this is the same
as to be “polite.” “Police” comes from the same root as “polite,” although you
may have had encounters with the police in which this was not immediately
apparent. At any rate, the police is that body of men upon whose vigilance,
courage and integrity the good order of the city depends.
What the police enforce is the “civil” law, the law of the
citizen, the law to which city people freely subject themselves. This they do
because they are “civilized”; because, unlike barbarians, who respect only
force, they have learned to live under law; and this they have learned by
living together in peace in the city. Living together thus, cheek-by-jowl to
one another in a relatively limited area, they have also learned to govern
themselves, and so take part with great gusto in the process by which they
form, dissolve, reconstitute, supervise, control and clean up their own
government – the process familiar to us all under the name of “politics.”
If these derivatives of the word for city suggest anything,
it is surely that men have generally have found great advantages in being part
of a city; that many of the good things they enjoy they owe to their city; and
hence that their city is something worthy of their loyalty and love. And so we
see that before there was love of one’s fatherland, or patriotism, there was
love of one’s city, or citizenship; the first was, historically, merely the
extension of the second. Indeed, the ancient Greeks identified what we would
now call a nation, or the state with the city; they found it difficult to
conceive of a nation or state larger than a city. I believe it was Aristotle
who said that a state should not be so big that you could not walk from one end
of it to the other in a single day. The thinking behind this was that what
binds the people of a state together is mutual respect, esteem and affection; and how can you love someone
you do not know?
Manila is a city with a great past. This year, we celebrate
the four hundredth anniversary of the founding of Manila as a Spanish city. But
the history of Manila goes back much further than that, so far back that we
cannot set a definite date for the founding of the Tagalog citadel on the site
of which the Spanish conquerors built Fort Santiago.
Of that citadel, the first Spanish captain ever to set eyes
on it, Goiti, said that “it was situated on the bank of the river,” and was
“defended by a palisade all along its front. Within it were many warriors, and
shore outside was crowded with people” – the civilian population, presumably, who
could not be prevented from rushing out of the citadel to gape at these
strangers from the West. Trust Manilenos to break through police lines whenever
there is a site to be seen! At the same time, Goiti continues – pieces of
artillery stood at the gates, guarded by bombardiers, linstock in hand.” So
there was someone in authority in the city who thought it prudent to take
precautions.
We know who this someone was – a young rajah named Sulayman,
whom we can picture standing very straight before Captain Goiti and saying to
him what is, to the best of my knowledge, the first recorded speech of a
Manileño – a speech recorded for that reason, and also because it was so
unexpectedly short. As Goiti reports it, Sulayman said “that he was pleased to
be the friend of the Spaniards; but . . . that (they) should understand that he
would not tolerate any abuse . . .; on the contrary; they would repay with
death the least thing that touched their honor.”
We would be hard put to it, I think, to find a briefer or a
better statement of the foreign policy of this country that these words of the
Gatpuno of Maynila whose name has gone down to us. Perhaps the Department of
Foreign Affairs should inscribe its substance on Romblon marble in its Hall of
Banners
