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In 1897, Ferdinand Blumentritt, an
Austrian professor with whom Rizal corresponded for ten years, said:
"Not only is Rizal the most prominent
man of his own people but the greatest man the Malayan race has produced. "
Rizal was the first person in all of Asia to advocate and introduce ideas which can be
called modem democracy and Western liberalism. As early as the eighteen-eighties, years
before Gandhi or Sun Yat-Sen began their fight for freedom, Jose Rizal through his essays,
letters and novels was already espousing such principles as the worth and dignity of the
individual, the inviolability of human rights, the innate equality of all, men and races,
the necessity for constitutional government and due process of law, popular sovereignty as
the basis of all political authority, faith in human reason and enlightenment, the right
of the masses to public education, and belief in social progress through freedom.
Rizal exhorted the Filipinos to regain the pride in themselves and in their race which
they had possessed in pre-Spanish times. The first champion of racial equality in Asia,
Rizal expressed that there was no difference in innate mentality and capacity between
Westerners and Asians - that cultural and environmental rather than biological or racial
factors played a part in determining the degree and scope of social development. Rizal
emphasized the worth and dignity of the individual human being. He maintained that each
person possessed inalienable, inviolable rights. He declared that a free and democratic
society must be founded upon the education of the people. He absorbed the ideas of the
great Western philosophers of social and political liberalism and bought them to Asia.
Today, close to a hundred years after his death, Jose Rizal is recognized not only as a
great Filipino but also a great citizen of Asia - an inspiration wherever people cherish
freedom and resist oppression in all its forms.
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