when asking for
the prohibition of the book. The recommendation of the censor was
disregarded, and General Terrero, fearful that Rizal might be molested
by some of the many persons who would feel themselves aggrieved by his
plain picturing of undesirable classes in the Philippines, gave him for
a bodyguard a young Spanish lieutenant, Jose Taviel de Andrade. The
young men soon became fast friends, as they had artistic and other
tastes in common. Once they climbed Mr. Makiling, near Kalamba,
and placed there, after the European custom, a flag to show that
they had reached the summit. This act was at first misrepresented by
the enemies of Rizal as planting a German banner, for they started
a story that he had taken possession of the Islands in the name of
the country where he was educated, which was just then in unfriendly
relations with Spain over the question of the ill treatment of the
Protestant missionaries in the Caroline Islands. This same story was
repeated after the American occupation with the variation that Rizal,
as the supreme chief and originator of the ideas of the Katipunan
(which in fact he was not--he was even opposed to the society as it
existed in his time), had placed there a Filipino banner, in token
that the Islands intended to reassume the independent condition of
which the Spanish had dispossessed them.

"Noli Me Tangere" circulated first among Doctor Rizal's relatives;
on one occasion a cousin made a special trip to Kalamba and took
the author to task for having caricatured her in the character of
Dona Victorina. Rizal made no denial, but merely suggested that the
book was a mirror of Philippine life, with types that unquestionably
existed in the country, and that if anybody recognized one of the
characters as picturing himself or herself, that person would do well
to correct the faults which therein appeared ridiculous.

A somewhat liberal administration was now governing the Philippines,
and efforts were being made to correct the more glaring abuses in
the social conditions. One of these reforms proposed that the larger
estates should bear their share of the taxes, which it was believed
they were then escaping to a great extent. Requests were made of the
municipal government of Kalamba, among other towns, for a statement
of the relation that the big Dominican hacienda bore to the town,
what increase or decrease there might have been in the income of the
estate, and what taxes the proprietors