lves, were those who most resented it,
and the opinion of them which they knew the Filipinos held but dared
not voice, rankled in their breasts. They welcomed every disparagement
of the Philippines and its people, and thus made profitable a
senseless and abusive campaign which was carried on by unscrupulous,
irresponsible writers of such defective education that vilification
was their sole argument. Their charges were easily disproved, but they
had enough cunning to invent new charges continually, and prejudice
gave ready credence to them.

Finally an unreasoning fury broke out and in blind passion innocent
persons were struck down; the taste for blood once aroused,
irresponsible writers like that Retana who has now become Rizal's
biographer, whetted the savage appetite for fresh victims. The
last fifty years of Spanish rule in the Philippines was a small
saturnalia of revenge with hardly a lucid interval for the governing
power to reflect or an opportunity for the reasonable element to
intervene. Somewhat similarly the Bourbons in France had hoped to
postpone the day of reckoning for their mistakes by misdeeds done
in fear to terrorize those who sought reforms. The aristocracy of
France paid back tenfold each drop of innocent blood that was shed,
but while the unreasoning world recalls the French Revolution with
horror, the student of history thinks more of the evils which made
it a natural result. Mirabeau in vain sought to restrain his aroused
countrymen, just as he had vainly pleaded with the aristocrats to end
their excesses. Rizal, who held Mirabeau for his hero among the men of
the French Revolution, knew the historical lesson and sought to sound
a warning, but he was unheeded by the Spaniards and misunderstood by
many of his countrymen.

At about the time of the arrival of the Spanish political exiles
we find in Manila a proof of the normal mildness of Spain in
the Philippines. The Inquisition, of dread name elsewhere, in the
Philippines affected only Europeans, had before it two English-speaking
persons, an Irish doctor and a county merchant accused of being
Freemasons. The kind-hearted Friar inquisitor dismissed the culprits
with warnings, and excepting some Spanish political matters in which
it took part, this was the nearest that the institution ever came to
exercising its functions here.

The sufferings of the Indians in the Spanish-American gold mines, too,
had no Philippine counterpart, for at the ins