Deportations to the Philippine Islands, April 9, 1875

Deportations to the Philippine Islands.

* * * * * * *

From all this it results that, in 1873 and 1874—that is to say; in the two years of the Spanish republic—deportations took place while Mr. Garcia Ruiz was minister of gohernacion, before he held that office, and after he held it. Political prisoners and those suspected of common crimes were deported. Deportations were ordered by the captains-general and by the council of ministers. The Cantonalists were sent to Ceuta. There were embanked and taken to the Marian Islands those re-convicted of theft and convicts on ticket-of-leave, as well as persons deemed to be of ill life and manners. The initiative of this system was taken under the government of Mr. Castelar, and it was broadened and strengthened by that created on the 2d of January, and by that which came to an end on the 30th of December; and still these statistics, so varied and so abundant, in data of different kinds, are not complete unless they be limited exclusively to the enforced voyages to the other side of the waters, since, as one of our colleagues opportunely recalls to mind, there do not figure in these statistics the enforced voyages made, for example, about a year ago, by Mr. Cazurro and Mr. Chico de Guzman.

And the most notable thing about it is, that all this has been, for the greater part, unknown to the public, the present polemic having been needed in order to disclose such charming facts and such beautiful theories.

There is nothing left to say now concerning illimitable rights and the minute guarantees with which they were surrounded by the constitution of 1869; the only novelty , is in the unembarrassed freedom with which Mr. Garcia Ruiz considers as deportable matter, by mere executive order, reconvicted thieves, ticket-of-leave convicts, and people of ill life and manners. The partisans of the revolution, in spite of the importance they gave to questions of penal right, even to the point of raising some of their number to the highest positions in the state for the single merit of professing determinate ideas thereon, have not done anything to ameliorate the penitentiary system. Their pompous programmes, their severe inflexibility, which carried them even to suppressing the right of pardon, their exaggerated theories as to the nature of the penalty of which they devised the enormous paradox of regarding as a right of the criminal, were about on a-par with what we read in the communication of Mr. Garcia Ruiz. They did not establish penitentiaries in the peninsula and in the colonies, but they dragged to the Marian Islands hundreds of persons not judicially condemned. It was never seen that the new legal recourses invented in order that Spanish citizens might exact responsibility of the governmental and judicial authorities was a practical truth, and, on the contrary, one of the oldest and most constant defenders of the revolutionary doctrines believes that when an attempt is made to know what were the guarantees of security when the deportations were decreed, the public can be satisfied with the statement that the names of the victims were read one by one in council of ministers, or the other statement that not even the minister of gohernacion assumed the responsibility and the direction of what was decreed in so delicate a matter. Nothing, in more than six years, was executed or even attempted in order to imitate in our country the experiments and the institutions which in other countries have had for their object the rehabilitation by means of honest labor, and through the normal conditions of family and of society, of those who are set at liberty from convict prisons; and, instead of this, we find that, without trial and without judicial intervention, executive condemnation to the most cruel punishments was pronounced against those who had already fulfilled the penalties imposed on them conformably to law. By their manifestations of horror at the death-penalty and at all life-sentences, they initiated grave conflicts, they fomented the indiscipline of the army, and they aroused more than one political crisis; but at the same time that they denied to society the right of self-defense against the criminals duly declared such-by the tribunals of justice, they gave to the Spanish government the power of imposing upon Spanish citizens whose delinquency was not proved a punishment which in very many cases, perhaps in a majority of the cases, would cause the death of the persons so punished.

If experience does not serve to make the people understand the revolutionary leaders, it will not be because the lesson has failed to be instructive and eloquent.