made much of what they chose to consider Rizal's historical
errors. But history is not merely chronology, and his representation
of its trend, disregarding details, was a masterly tracing of current
evils to their remote causes. He may have erred in some of his minor
statements; this will happen to anyone who writes much, but attempts to
discredit Rizal on the score of historical inaccuracy really reflect
upon the captious critics, just as a draftsman would expose himself
to ridicule were he to complain of some famous historical painting
that it had not been drawn to exact scale. Rizal's writings were
intended to bring out in relief the evils of the Spanish system of
the government of the Filipino people, just as a map of the world
may put the inhabited portions of the earth in greater prominence
than those portions that are not inhabited. Neither is exact in its
representation, but each serves its purpose the better because it
magnifies the important and minimizes the unimportant.

In his disunited and abased countrymen, Rizal's writings aroused, as he
intended they should, the spirit of nationality, of a Fatherland which
was not Spain, and put their feet on the road to progress. What matters
it, then, if his historical references are not always exhaustive, and
if to make himself intelligible in the Philippines he had to write in
a style possibly not always sanctioned by the Spanish Academy? Spain
herself had denied to the Filipinos a system of education that
might have made a creditable Castilian the common language of the
Archipelago. A display of erudition alone does not make an historian,
nor is purity, propriety and precision in choosing words all there
is to literature.

Rizal charged Spain unceasingly with unprogressiveness in the
Philippines, just as he labored and planned unwearyingly to bring
the Filipinos abreast of modern European civilization. But in his
appeals to the Spanish conscience and in his endeavors to educate his
countrymen he showed himself as practical as he was in his arguments,
ever ready to concede nonessentials in name and means if by doing so
progress could be made.

Because of his unceasing efforts for a wiser, better governed and
more prosperous Philippines, and because of his frank admission that
he hoped thus in time there might come a freer Philippines, Rizal was
called traitor to Spain and ingrate. Now honest, open criticism is
not treason, and the sincerest gratitude to those who