CHAPTER I

A PEOPLE’S WRONGS

A futile insurrection had been followed by terrible reprisals and a hardening everywhere of the articulated tyranny, terrorism, and espionage with which the Government ruled. Such from the beginning had been its practice in the long and uninspiring record of the Spanish occupation of the Philippines: sore oppression leading to inevitable revolt and then savage vengeance that sowed the seed of more revolt. Now, as always in that delirious procedure, innocent natives were swept to punishment indiscriminately with the guilty; men that had taken part in the uprising and men that had never heard of it. With the rest of these victims of insensate rage, marched, on the morning of February 28, 1872, three beloved priests and servants of God, of whose complicity in the plot was never a shred of ponderable evidence. One of them, lifting up his voice in prayer for his assassins as he went along, was eighty-five years old. Not his years nor his gray hairs nor those good works that had brought him honor [1] availed to save Father Mariano Gomez from the most ignominious of deaths. With Fathers Burgos and Zamora, he was garroted on Bagumbayan Field, fronting the sea at Manila; a place consecrated in the Filipino mind to memories terrible and yet grand. Native poets and orators that have seen there every blade of grass springing from the blood of heroes are hardly over-imaginative. On that spot to the same cause the same dull power sacrificed victim after victim, ending with the nation’s greatest and best.

But now, in 1872, forgotten medieval brutalities seemed to be brought back to darken life in a region the sunniest and of right the most cheerful. Prisoners were tortured with instruments the world believed to exist only in museums; tortured with thumb-screws, great pincers, and machines of devilish ingenuity that produced and reiterated the agonies of drowning. [2] The whip was busy in the hands of men hired for their expert knowledge of how it could be used to yield the largest fruition of pain; many a wretched Filipino that had in his heart no more of disloyalty than you or I was flogged naked in the presence of officers in whose ears his shrieks seemed to sound like music. Hysteria and fear in the minds of the dominant class were added to the racial hatred always festering there. Under the empire of this triad of the beast, men that had worn the gloss of the almost classic society of Madrid became in the Philippines no better than hooting devils.

To the typical haughty Spaniard there the Filipino was an Indio, an inferior creature designed to render service to the white man’s needs and to receive the white man’s blows. Each successive generation of rulers had learned at least once, and always with astonishment and disgust, that the lowly Indio was capable of combinations and resistances that sometimes shook the walls of Malacañan itself and started painful visions of massacres and wild fleeings. From the beginning to the end of the story, it was a discovery that first exiled reason and then multiplied work to the executioner. Yet the knowledge gained in this way by one generation never seemed to enlighten the next: each revolt created in its turn the same astonishment, as if for the first time in human experience wronged men had turned against their wrongers. Each generation, therefore, had the same obtuse notion of violent repression as the only answer to the natives’ complaint, a concept that each left with additions of its own to its successor. Hence the complex savageries of 1872, which might be regarded as in a way accretionary; not a soul in the governing class seeming to suspect, despite all this rich experience, that the essence of the slayings was no better than one revenge making ready for another.

In those evil days millions of Filipinos rendered to the dominant tyranny what it compelled them to render and kept alive in their proud hearts the longing for justice, the love of their country, and a respect for their race. One of these, Francisco Rizal Mercado, was then living in Calamba, a little town on the west shore of the great lake of Laguna de Bay. Manila was twenty-five miles to the northward; the tall mountains of Luzon, Mount Makiling and others, gloomed or shone south and west; the plains around were fertile and well cultivated; it was a pleasant and profitable region. Francisco Mercado was of some substance and a character so excellent that all the country-side knew and honored him; a sturdy, resolute, reasoning man, wide-eyed, square-headed. He had prospered by diligence and deserving; his large two-storied dwelling was the best in Calamba. Overawing guns and the military checked his spirit but never daunted it. In his house the Government’s key-hole listeners and hired porch-climbers were defied, and no one hesitated to discuss the evils that had befallen the land.

One of the most detested instruments of the Spanish supremacy was a body of troops called the Civil Guard, [3] a kind of military police charged with ferreting out disloyalty and the signs of revolt. In the strained relations between Government and governed that followed the cruelties of 1872, it may be imagined how zestfully the Civil Guards pursued their peculiar calling. Domiciliary visits were their specialty, sudden and without warrant; a species of terrorism not then practised anywhere in Europe outside of Russia and Turkey. A squad of these visitors was in the habit of watching Calamba and the neighboring town of Biñan, and when it was Calamba that they were favoring with their attention, the lieutenant commanding quartered himself and his horse upon the Mercados, where he could find the best fare and the best fodder in town.

The crops in 1871 had not been good in that region. Mr. Mercado’s store of fodder diminished until he had barely enough to supply his own live stock. When next the lieutenant came the situation was explained to him, and with every politeness he was asked to bait his horse elsewhere.

He chose to take the request as an affront. Reciprocal hatreds were thick and rife around him; he conceived that in some way his honor as a Spaniard had been impaired by a “miserable Indio,” and he swore revenge. [4]

About the same time the unfortunate Mercado managed to offend another Spaniard still more powerful. For all such visitors to Calamba he kept a kind of gratuitous hotel; hospitality was and is a sacred and inviolable rite among his people. The judge of the local district, conferring upon the Mercados thus the honor of his uninvited presence, fancied that his reception lacked something of cordiality and ceremony. As to this, he may have been right; in the hearts of most intelligent Filipinos of those days the feelings toward official Spaniards were not likely to be exuberantly warm. The judge, like the lieutenant before him, deemed his Spanish honor to have suffered and went away with a similar appetite for vengeance, a lust to which the example of their Government richly incited them.

For judge and lieutenant the opportunity came more quickly than they could have hoped. At this neighboring town of Biñan lived José Alberto Realonda (formerly Alonzo), a half-brother of Mrs. Mercado. He was deservedly of mark in his province; his father had been an engineer whose abilities were recognized by Spain in an order of knighthood that the son inherited, an order equivalent to a baronetcy in England; José Alberto himself had been at school in Calcutta, spoke English well, and had traveled widely. It was at his home in Biñan that Sir John Bowring, [5] the English linguist and traveler, had been entertained; and Bowring had put into his book on the Philippines a graceful paragraph about his host and entertainment, the good taste with which the Realonda house was furnished, the excellent cooking set before its guests.

Don José Alberto had married young, and, as the event showed, not wisely. His wife was his cousin. They quarreled and separated, and the wife seems to have set afoot wild and fantastic stories, injurious to her husband. Divorces were difficult in the Philippines.

From material no better than these the lieutenant now manufactured against Mrs. Mercado and her brother a charge of conspiracy to murder Mrs. Realonda. It was a preposterous tale, but to such tales the institutions that, in those parts, by a figure of speech, were called courts of justice were in the habit of lending a ready ear if thereby they served any end of the dominant power or gratified a powerful Spaniard. In probably no other corner of the world with a pretense to Christian civilization was the judicial system so farcical; the next developments were typical of the conditions under which seven million people dwelt at the mercy of perjurers, adventurers, and thieves. With joy the incensed judge received the accusation and ordered Mrs. Mercado to be arrested and imprisoned in the provincial jail.

This, although but left-handed and imperfect revenge, accorded with the ideas and practices of the governing class. The grievances of the judge and the lieutenant, if they had any, were against Mr. Mercado; they evened the score by striking not at him but at his wife. Incomprehensible or almost insane as this will seem to a healthier sense of honor, it was a custom of which we shall find other and more painful instances. Suppose the governing class, or a member of it, to believe the much cherished supremacy of the white race to demand that an example be made of an offending native. No nice discrimination was deemed necessary. If the offender was not available, retribution could still be inflicted upon the offender’s wife, or upon his children or even upon his brother-in-law or his great aunt, if he had no children, or if his wife was not within striking distance. In fairness to the Spaniards we are to note that this singular reversion was not a product of nationality but of geography; many a man defended vicarious vengeance in the Philippines that would have scorned it in Spain, so wonderful are the moral idiocies into which imperialism drives us.

Mrs. Mercado was ordered from her home to the prison at Santa Cruz, the provincial capital, at the other side of the lake. Ordinarily, traffic with Calamba was by steamer; but a road, rough and ill made, led along the shore. The more to taste the pleasures of his revenge, the judge ordered Mrs. Mercado to be conducted by this road and on foot; that is to say, about twenty miles and in the sun.

It will later appear in this narrative that she was no ordinary woman; she came from a household that believed in liberty; she seems to have had a lofty spirit and a certain dignified self-mastery not rare among Filipino women. All about that part of the province she was known for her charities and good neighborliness. Her compatriots liked her. When, therefore, trudging along the shore road under the custody of a guard, she came at the evening of the first day to a village, she was received by its inhabitants with outpourings of sympathy and an invitation to lodge at the best house in the place instead of the village lockup as the judge had thoughtfully intended. She accepted the invitation; but with insatiable malice he had followed to see how his orders were obeyed. When he found the prisoner well bestowed instead of undergoing the miseries of the filthy prison, a madness of rage came upon him. He broke down the door of the house where his victim was sheltered, and, judge as he was, hesitated not to assault with his cane both the unlucky guard that had shown her lenity and the owner of the house that had received her. [6]

He was as merciful as the judicial system he adorned; as intelligent and as well ordered. One of the least of its offenses was that this same hedge-row magistrate, at whose order she had been arrested to gratify his spite, was also to be the prosecuting attorney, when she should be brought to trial, and the judge before whom her fate should be decided. Mr. Mercado, meanwhile, had been putting forth every peaceful means to rescue his wife from this disaster. He had secured an attorney, who now presented a petition that her case should not be allowed to come before a judge so manifestly prejudiced against her. While Mrs. Mercado lay in jail, this appeal went before the supreme court, which sustained it and ordered the prisoner’s release. Before she could be set free the unjust judge brought a new charge against her, that her petition alleging prejudice on his part constituted contempt of court.

On this she continued to be a prisoner until another appeal could be made to the supreme assize. When it had been reached and argued, Dogberry wisdom seated upon this august bench upheld the court below and found that such a petition was indeed contempt. How, that being the case, a prisoner could ever escape from a court or judge manifestly hostile to her, these eminent authorities did not suggest. But as Mrs. Mercado had already been in jail much longer than the term of the sentence passed upon her for contempt, they ordered her liberation.

It was now to be supposed that the end of this business had been reached, vengeance had been satisfied, the crime of not feeding the lieutenant’s horse had been atoned for, and the woman might return to her family. Not in the Philippines, certainly. Before the prison doors could open, a new charge was brought against her.

She was alleged by the judge-prosecutor-tribunal to have committed theft. [7]

Here is an incident luminous upon the society of that day and region; we had better pursue it. All this time, Mrs. Mercado’s half-brother, José Alberto, the engineer, whose unfortunate marriage had wrought so much of trouble, had been a prisoner in the same jail, similarly beset with accusing inventions. He had a moderate fortune; therefore the story went around that he had much money concealed about him. The scent of the peso was ever strong in the nostrils of the jail officials and court attendants. When the gold could not be found in José Alberto’s cell, the searchers for it reasonably concluded that the half-sister must have taken it, possibly by means of an astral presence or through some form of witchcraft.

For this rank imagining there was even less of basis than there had been for the conspiracy charge; yet it was months in falling apart. When it had dissolved in its own absurdity another quite as unfounded took its place. Justice à la espagnole—in the Philippines. Two years passed in these futilities. It was apparently the purpose of the authorities to keep their helpless victim in prison the rest of her life.

From such a fate she was now rescued by another incident not less than her imprisonment typical of misgovernment under which the country groaned. The governor-general of all the Philippines, representative in his single person of the might and majesty of Spain, came to Calamba on a tour. Among the entertainments offered in his honor was dancing by children. One of the little girls by her grace and beauty particularly won the governor-general’s applause. He asked her what he could do for her. She said he could release her mother from prison. She was Mrs. Mercado’s daughter, and by this detour and purified recrudescence of Salome and Herod was Mrs. Mercado snatched at last from her persecutors and got again to her home. [8]

It was a populous household that welcomed her return; she had already borne eleven children to her husband, rearing them with an old-fashioned and sedulous care not yet out of vogue in the Philippines. Immigration had much affected the original Island strains; on both sides the family was of mixed descent. One of Mr. Mercado’s ancestors was Lam-co, a Chinaman of means and character that came to the Islands in the latter part of the seventeenth century. He settled at Biñan, was converted to Christianity, and was baptized in 1697, taking the name of Domingo. At Biñan he married the daughter of another Chinaman, whose wife was a mestiza, or half-caste Filipino. From this time on Chinese blood was mixed with Malay [9] until in 1847 Francisco Mercado, descendant of Lam-co, married Teodora Alonzo, a Filipino lady of a distinguished family, partly Chinese in ancestry, and came to live at Calamba. It was her lot, twenty-five years later, to be the victim of the strange story of persecution and villainy here related.

The seventh of her children, José, was then eleven years old and a student in a preparatory school in Manila. Upon his mind the reports that came to him of the successive steps in her degradation stamped themselves as if in iron. Even when he had become a mature man, famous, accomplished, absorbed in studies and achievements at the other side of the busy world, the thought of that great wrong haunted and goaded him. Yet it had been no novelty, even in his short experience; it had been no more than a focus, upon the one household he knew best, of wrongs with which other households were familiar and of which he had often heard. All his conscious days he had been aware, and ever better aware, of the cold, black, implacable despotism that had yoked and now drove and lashed his people. He knew well the hateful excesses of the Civil Guard, the license and arrogance of the governing class, the extortion and thefts, the infinite scorn in which the subject race was held, the intolerable parody of justice, the bitter jest of the code and the court-room, the flogging of men, the violating of women, the protected murderers, the rapists that went untouched and unabashed. When he was only five years old he used to sit on the shore of that beautiful green lake, the Laguna de Bay, and look across it and wonder if the people that lived on the other side were as wretched as the people of Calamba, whether they were beaten, kicked and trodden upon, whether they dwelt in the same terror of the Civil Guards and the flogging-rods. [10] He said years afterward that even then he had a distinct conviction that these things were not necessary and that there must be some region on the earth where its children could be happy and enjoy the sunshine, the flowers, and the beautiful things that seemed made for their delight.

Many of the troubles that fell upon his neighbors, or were laid upon them by the existing System, were troubles about land; and before ever the malicious lieutenant had begun his revenges upon the family, young José was familiar with stories of the wrongs the so-called courts inflicted upon tenants and the men that tilled the farms. It was miserable business for any child to master, if he was to make his way through life as anything but a gloomy misanthrope. Yet such things for his people made the world into which he had come. Doubtless much may be said to excuse the System the Spaniards maintained in the Philippines: they had inherited it, they had not the skill nor the inspiration to better it, and the like extenuations; when all is said, it remains but hideously stupid and cruel. In the beginning it was medievalism, neither better nor worse than was to be found in the sixteenth century in the most of Europe. Planted upon the other side of the globe as if upon another planet, it missed all the vivifying and enlightening influences that drew Europe out of the slough. The Philippines stuck as they were; Europe lumbered ahead. In all the world one could not find another such phenomenon, the sixteenth century cold-storaged for the instruction of the nineteenth. Whosoever might wish to observe in

## action the political and social ideas of Philip the Second needed but

to journey to the Philippines.

Almost nothing had changed there. In Europe ideas had dawned of a free press, free speech, general education, the ballot-box, parliamentary government, the rights of the individual, the immaculate nature of justice, the determining of legal causes by unimpeachable processes, the gradual eclipse of the monarchical conception of society, the passing of the barony. Not one of these had come near the Philippines. Government there was the autocracy of a privileged class, tempered slightly by occasional revolutions, unlimited and unrestrained by any other consideration, and carried on chiefly for personal aggrandizement.

Instead of freedom of publication, the censor sat upon an impregnable throne and scrutinized not merely every word to be printed in every journal but every book that was imported, even in a traveler’s hand-baggage. Instead of free speech, the natives might not even petition of their grievances. Instead of general education, the masses were of a purpose kept in ignorance. Instead of justice, they must lead their lives without other protection than they could win by a feigned humility beneath the arbitrary power of their rulers.

It was in such surroundings that this boy came into his consciousness. He had a mind receptive and powerful. By no possibility could these impressions fail to be reflected in his thinkings and then in his life. Other youths the same environment drove into sullen apathy, racial fatalism, or a life fed with always disappointed hopes of revenge. This boy they drew along a path of strange adventures and almost unprecedented achievement to a place among the great men of all times.

The roots of this story begin three centuries before the Mercado family at Calamba was caught up in its heartbreaking intrigues. After what was called the “discovery” of the Philippines by Magellan, March 16, 1521, Spain laid claim to the entire Archipelago, more than two thousand sizable Islands. [11] Portugal disputed this, neither having the slightest just basis for its claim, until 1529, when the pope settled the quarrel out of hand and gave the Philippines to Spain. In 1570 the taking by a Spanish expedition of the capital city of Manila was assumed to have put the physical seal upon this deed of gift, and Spain proceeded to annex and to govern such of the Islands as she could by persuasion or beating induce to accept her sovereignty. From the first the tenancy was incongruous and precarious; Europe of the Middle Ages laid upon a civilization more ancient, wholly alien, and traditionally well rooted. What followed is a tangle of inconsistencies. On the administrative side, Spain with musket-balls shot order and obedience into the natives; from first to last the rulers had but the one broad policy, which was to overawe the people they ruled and to subjugate them with fear. On the cultural side the account was at first wholly different. That they might give to these same natives the blessings of Christianity and the gospel of peace, the heroic Spanish missionary priests endured trials compared with which most martyrdoms seemed easy. Thus in a naïve way, rather startling now to contemplate, perdition and paradise were to be glimpsed side by side, brute force marched with an apostolic love, and bullets were distributed with the Bible.

But, before the labors and good deeds of the missionary priests, scoffing falls silent. The soldier slew and destroyed; the priest planted schools, spread knowledge, bettered conditions. He did not even wait for the soldier to break a way or to indicate security, but plunged ahead of the armies into the wilderness where he knew he was likely to leave his bones.

Whether when all is said the general balance-sheet of the Spanish occupation shows more net advantages or disadvantages for the Filipino can be argued plausibly either way. In such a welter of conflicting testimonies the fair-minded will be slow to judge. We shall have to deal again with the question when we come to see how in his mature years José Rizal reacted to it and how his analyses disposed of the commonest of the Spanish claims. Considering it here in its due historic place, we may first remind ourselves that with all her faults Spain had at least one great virtue. She pretended no altruism. On a sordid impulse she took the Islands; she kept them merely as goods.

As to this debated point the findings of Dr. T. H. Pardo de Tavera seem clear. [12]

“Those that are wont to depreciate civilization and material development to the point of being inexact,” he says, “cite the voyage of Magellan as an enterprise motived only by religious ideals and by sincerest and purest charity. They misrepresent or forget two incontestible facts. First, the voyage of Magellan was proposed to and accepted by the King of Spain, was approved by his ministers and was carried out by Magellan and his companions for the mercantile purpose of discovering, by sailing westward, a route to the Moluccas and thus wresting from the hands of Portugal the rich commerce that pertained to those, the Spice Islands. This and nothing else was the origin, inspiration and object of that famous expedition. Second, such a purpose could be realized precisely because the Spaniards had achieved a material development that inspired the enterprise and made it possible.”

The more honor, then, to the Spaniards, who, having in view only the purposes of a bargain, still added much to the equipment of the Islanders. They erected better buildings than the Filipinos had ever known, made better roads, introduced, with whatsoever cruelties, a better coördination, something like uniform laws, something like a welded and coherent polity; they discouraged piracy when it could no longer serve to subdue the natives; they gave money for schools, whether these were efficient or otherwise; they made some connection, however frail, between the culture of the Islands and that formerly existing in the rest of the world. Yet, aside from the labors of the missionaries, the other boons that followed their red trail are doubtful. Accepting these at the Spanish valuation, the fact still seems to protrude that Spain found an industrious population and managed to leave it indifferent and indolent, [13] found one style of civilization and left another.

Prejudice and racial hatreds have obscured about this one other fact that never should be overlooked. The Filipinos would not have stood still if the Spaniards had left them alone. True estimate, therefore, is to be made, not on a comparison between what they were when the Spaniards came and what they were when the Spaniards left them, but on what they probably would have made of themselves. They were no backward race; they had shown a remarkable aptitude to absorb the best of the progress around them, taking on arts, inventions, manufactures, and developing them. They made and used gunpowder before it was known in Europe; they made and used cannon of a considerable size, built better sea-going ships than the Spaniards, had developed more skilful artificers in silver and gold, and had evidently a disposition to improve methods and manners. [14] In those three hundred years, supposing them to have been left to their own devices, they would never have ceased to look forward. Yet when the line comes to be drawn below the items of their progress under Spanish control and we glance across even to the most dilatory countries of Europe, we are compelled to admit that relatively the advance is small.

But because the natives writhed under the crude and savage oppression that walked with this, we are not to suppose the Spaniards they hated were all bad men. Goodness and badness hardly enter into the matter. There came to the Philippines in these 325 years many a governor-general with a worthy inspiration to overturn the tables of the money-changers and bring in righteousness and justice. It appears that what was going on in the Philippines was not always ignored at home, and many a private citizen of good character started out to support a reforming governor-general. The significant fact is that all these efforts had one end. Nothing was ever changed. The best of the governor-generals fell impotent against the same menacing wall of System. Securely it had been based upon favoring conditions; it had grown under generations of greedy maladministration; it extended to every part of the Archipelago where Spain had authority; and it was buttressed by the power that in all times has proved the most difficult foe to the freedom and progress of the masses. For such is the power of accumulated profits to breed more power to make more profits and still more power. Here was indeed the appetite that grows by what it feeds on. The invisible government had swallowed the visible.

Nevertheless, for a long time, nothing is to be subtracted from the work of the fathers of the church. A noble zeal animated them; often they added to it a fine tact, much practical wisdom, unlimited capacity for self-denial, and even self-immolation. Years went by; the missionary era came to an end; there was no longer the splendor of the apostolic adventure into the jungle. A different spirit began to possess a part of the clergy; not all of it, but a part. Marvelously rich the country was that Spain had annexed in this fashion; hardly anywhere else had nature bestowed a more fertile soil with a more pleasing climate. For two hundred years the Government at Madrid, with an excess of stupidity, restrained the natural development of this Eden by narrowly limiting its trade. Only to Mexico and only by means of one galleon a year could the struggling colony export its products; a process of strangulation into which some bugaboo of competition had harried the merchants of Barcelona and so the poor foolish Government. After 1815, as liberalism and the beneficent results of the French Revolution began to make their belated appearance in Spain, these restrictions were cautiously relaxed, and at once the value of Philippine lands began to increase.

Four orders of European friars [15] had settled themselves in the Philippines, obtaining in the early days from the insular Government grants of estates that because of the lack of adequate surveying and for other reasons were of shadowy boundaries. As trade increased it multiplied the demand for Philippine products. Under this pressure, forests once covering great areas of rich land were cleared away by pioneers that settled upon the soil they had made tillable. In hundreds of cases the friars laid claim to such lands and demanded of the settlers possession or rents. If the settler resisted, the Civil Guard or other military force ejected him. If he sought relief in the courts he had only his heavy expenses for his pains.

Thus the monastic orders had become the System. Accumulated wealth had wrought upon them the effects it ever achieves everywhere. Originally they had come to the Philippines with a pure notion of doing good; now they were caught in the soiled entanglements of gain. Through all the sequel a gap widened between the four orders and the rest of the church. Other clergy, notably the native priests, continued to serve, according to their lights, the professed objects of religion; the four orders were four great corporations, indurated with profits, playing the callous landlord, extorting rents, harassing tenants, extending their operations, and with every new peso of their hoards strengthening their influence upon Malacañan, the seat of the administration. So works the law that inevitably attends upon accretion. Gradually they dispossessed the military, official, and merchant castes that at first had been all in all. Such potency as in other countries belongs to banks or great industrial companies lay now in their hands. Whatsoever they wished, that, by one means or another, they won. It is not humanly possible that under such conditions men should not deteriorate; the men that sway so gross a rule, the men upon whom it is swayed.

It was so here. The friars of the orders became intolerable local tyrants. In the rural regions, the word of the curate, if he was of the dominant caste, outweighed the command of the provincial governor. As a rule the governor-general himself dared not in any way oppose the clerical domination; a few words lightly whispered at Madrid would be enough to make sure his recall and ruin. One of these governors that tried to assert his own authority had to fight a clerical mob in his own palace, and fell dead, sword in hand, across the body of his son. [16] The lesson did not need repetition; thenceforth the successors of the Governor-General Bustamante of 1719 made haste to placate a power so great and so malignant. Even the redoubtable Emiliano Weyler himself was careful and obsequious to maintain good relations with the four orders. Nay, he went to the length of supervising the ejection of settlers from the lands the friars claimed, and in at least one instance, as we shall see, accelerated the work with a battery of artillery.

It is now reasonably certain that most of these claims were without merit, but unlimited power had produced among the orders the effect it has had in all ages and climes upon the men that have possessed it. Over a certain genus of temperament the evil spell seems too great to be abridged by religion or by anything else. Nothing in the so-called civilizing adventures of Europe upon the fringes of the earth has been more clearly proved than that the white man, removed from the restraining influence of home and his neighbors and clothed with irresponsible power over people whom he deems inferior, is capable of reversion to an astonishing tyranny. The records of the Congo, of Dr. Peters in South Africa, of the Germans in the South Seas, are easy illustrations on a large scale of what happened here in little.

It has been the huge blunder of Europeans dealing with the Malay to mistake his patience for weakness and his silence for acquiescence. Aliens imposing themselves by force upon a remote people of another color have seldom been at pains to pick up the keys to the psychology of the governed. Great is the misery that would have been avoided for the dark-skinned children of earth by the use of this simple process, and nowhere was it simpler than in the Philippines.

All these influences and causes were at work to make trouble. Partly by their own excesses, partly by becoming the symbols and visualized representatives of the whole foreign domination, with all its intolerable wrongs and oppressions, the friars were now the objects of a deathless hatred. Hardly were the landlords of old more abhorred by the Irish peasantry.

It was a people capable by nature of much hating as of much loving upon whom fell this bitter inheritance. One can only suppose that the average Spaniard in the Philippines stood sentinel against himself lest he should understand the people he thought were under his boot-heel. In point of fact, they were not stupid and inferior, as he always described them, but of an excellent mentality, quick apprehension, reasoning powers at least equal to his own, of a certain inheritance of culture, different, cruder, but in its way not less. Particularly they were a people in whom resentment against injustice might smolder long but only in the end to blaze into perilous fires. Three centuries of Spanish domination had not extirpated the Malayan instinct for liberty, but, judging from the climax of all this, only intensified it. Spanish officers watching with intent eyes for the least sign of revolt took from these people every discoverable weapon, even to bolos (knives) of blades longer than so many inches. The better organization, discipline, equipment, and military skill that alone constituted Spanish supremacy was for ever being paraded in the eyes of the Indios. At every turn they were reminded in some way of their position, helpless, barehanded, and kept from one another by enmities the Spaniards knew well how to foster. In the face of all this sedulous care, behold in the story of their possession of the Philippines a serial of insurrection! Between 1573 and 1872, thirty-one revolts had been serious enough to leave enduring records in history. [17]

Going over these records now, no one can fail to see that the uprisings were progressive; however lamely inaugurated, poorly armed, fallaciously led, each was of an aspect more serious than its predecessor. Any Spaniard with the least skill in reading human history could have foretold the result. As education spread, as mankind elsewhere struggled more and more into comparative liberty, as the sense of injustice grew in the Filipino heart, the day would come when these people, too, would be driven to unite for the one great all-embracing, all-inspiring object of national freedom and national existence, and they would win it.

To this the friars and the governing class of the Philippines were now contributing by providing the immediate sting that seems always to be needed when an old and deep-lying resentment is to be goaded into outward and physical activities. The friars and the governing class were palpable; their acts of oppression were daily before the people’s observation; but what they stood for as the emblems of a general condition was much more important than anything they did. Stories of men with causes just and righteous that had been ruined at the friars’ dictation in the farcical courts; stories of men and women persecuted as Mrs. Mercado had been persecuted; stories of men beaten to death, men strangled and men shot, men deported and women wronged, were brooded over in thousands of barrios. [18] They but completed the tale of three hundred years of government with the iron fist.

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