destined
to become the idol of his countrymen, and consequently the victim of
the friars and General Polavieja. Often have I, together with the old
native parish priest, Father Leoncio Lopez, spent an hour with Jose's
father, Francisco Mercado, and heard the old man descant, with pride,
on the intellectual progress of his son at the Jesuits' school in
Manila. Before he was fourteen years of age he wrote a melodrama in
verse entitled _Junto al Pasig_ ("Beside the Pasig River"), which was
performed in public and well received. But young Jose yearned to set
out on a wider field of learning. His ambition was to go to Europe,
and at the age of twenty-one he went to Spain, studied medicine,
and entered the Madrid University, where he graduated as Doctor of
Medicine and Philosophy. He subsequently continued his studies in
Paris, Brussels, London, and at several seats of learning in Germany,
where he obtained another degree, notwithstanding the fact that he had
the difficulty of a foreign language to contend with. As happened to
many of his _confreres_ in the German Universities, a career of study
had simultaneously opened his eyes to a clearer conception of the
rights of humanity. Thrown among companions of socialistic tendencies,
his belief in and loyalty to the monarchical rule of his country were
yet unshaken by the influence of such environment; he was destined
only to become a disturbing element, and a would-be reformer of that
time-worn institution which rendered secular government in his native
land a farce. To give him a party name, he became an anti-clerical,
strictly in a political and lawful sense. He was a Roman Catholic, but
his sole aim, outside his own profession, was to save his country from
the baneful influence of the Spanish friars who there held the Civil
and Military Government under their tutelage. He sought to place his
country on a level of material and moral prosperity with others, and he
knew that the first step in that direction was to secure the expulsion
of the Monastic Orders. He sympathized with that movement which, during
his childhood, culminated in the Cavite Conspiracy (_vide_ p. 106). He
looked profoundly into the causes of his country's unhappiness, and to
promote their knowledge, in a popular form, he wrote and published in
Germany, in the Spanish language, a book entitled "Noli me tangere." It
is a censorious satirical novel, of no great literary merit, but it
served the author's purpose t