ter erased and now unknown. On the previous
page was the entry of a suicide's death, and following it is that of
the British Consul who died on the eve of Manila's surrender and whose
body, by the Archbishop's permission, was stored in a Paco niche till
it could be removed to the Protestant (foreigners') cemetery at San
Pedro Macati.
The day of Rizal's execution, the day of his birth and the day of
his first leaving his native land was a Wednesday. All that night,
and the next day, the celebration continued the volunteers, who
were particularly responsible, like their fellows in Cuba, for the
atrocities which disgraced Spain's rule in the Philippines, being
especially in evidence. It was their clamor that had made the bringing
back of Rizal possible, their demands for his death had been most
prominent in his so-called trial, and now they were praising themselves
for their "patriotism." The landlords had objected to having their land
titles questioned and their taxes raised. The other friar orders, as
well as these, were opposed to a campaign which sought their transfer
from profitable parishes to self-sacrificing missionary labors. But
probably none of them as organizations desired Rizal's death.
Rizal's old teachers wished for the restoration of their former
pupil to the faith of his childhood, from which they believed he had
departed. Through Despujol they seem to have worked for an opportunity
for influencing him, yet his death was certainly not in their plans.
Some Filipinos, to save themselves, tried to complicate Rizal with the
Katipunan uprising by palpable falsehoods. But not every man is heroic
and these can hardly be blamed, for if all the alleged confessions
were not secured by actual torture, they were made through fear of
it, since in 1896 there was in Manila the legal practice of causing
bodily suffering by mediaeval methods supplemented by torments devised
by modern science.
Among the Spaniards in Manila then, reenforced by those whom
the uprising had frightened out of the provinces, were a few who
realized that they belonged among the classes caricatured in Rizal's
novels--some incompetent, others dishonest, cruel ones, the illiterate,
wretched specimens that had married outside their race to get money
and find wives who would not know them for what they were, or drunken
husbands of viragoes. They came to the Philippines because they were
below the standard of their homeland. These talked the lou
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