Part 25 (1/2)

”But we found them there.”

”Let me call the customhouse officers.”

The court refused the request.

”Let me summon the owner of my room.”

The court refused the request.

”The witness against me is a convict, a spy, and a perjurer.”

The court found him guilty.

He was sent into exile. The injustice of the trial was a flame of liberty; the British consul protested against it, and riots broke out in Cavite against the officials that countenanced such a mockery of justice.

He went again to Hong Kong. Weyler had left Luzon, and had been succeeded by Despajol.

His case aroused the Patriot Club. The patriots resolved to go to Spain and lay their cause before the throne. They were mobbed in Spain and sent to Manila for trial.

The trial was a farce; Dr. Rizal was again condemned.

On December 6, 1896, he was led out of the Manila prison into the courtyard. A file of soldiers awaited the coming. A sharp volley of shots broke the stillness of the air; and that heart, so true to liberty, was broken and lay bleeding on the earth. So perished one of the n.o.blest patriots of the islands of the China Sea.

AGUINALDO.

AGUINALDO, called ”the greatest of the Malays,” in that he rose against Spanish tyranny, is one of the interesting characters of the closing century. His true character can hardly be determined at the present time. Future events must reveal it. He is of mixed blood, and is said to more resemble a European than a Malay.

He was born in the province of Cavite, and is supposed to have European blood in his veins. He was brought up as a house boy in the apartments of a Jesuit priest--a house boy being an errand boy; a boy handy for all common work.

It has been the policy of Spain for centuries to keep her subjects on the Pacific islands in partial ignorance; but this bright boy had an impulse to learn, to acquire knowledge, to grasp the truth of life. He had a remarkable memory, and he became such an apt scholar as to excite wonder. When he was fourteen years old he entered the medical school at Manila. He lost the favor of the Church by joining the Masonic order.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Aguinaldo.]

In 1888 he went to Hong Kong, where was a Philippine colony. Here he sought and obtained a military education, and studied military works, and the historical campaigns of the world's greatest heroes. He learned Latin, English, French, and Chinese.

At the breaking out of the insurrection of the Philippines against Spain in 1896, Aguinaldo espoused the cause of liberty, and was made an officer and became a leader. The revolution grew and affected the native troops, and its spirit filled the archipelago. It became the purpose of the more fiery patriots to ”drive the Spaniards into the sea.”

Aguinaldo advocated the acceptance of concessions by the Spanish Government, by which the rights of the native races should be recognized and protected. His policy was accepted, and the insurgents disbanded. He received Spanish gold to abandon the war for independence, and fell under the suspicion that his patriotism was purchasable. This suspicion has shadowed his fame. He went to Hong Kong.

The island Hong Kong, which is English, is a school of good government.

Here Aguinaldo seems to have conceived an ambition to free the native races of the archipelago, and form a republic of the confederated islands. The Spanish-American War revealed to him an opportunity to strike for liberty. He said to the Filipinos: ”The hour has come.”

The Filipinos looked upon him as the man for the crisis.

An article in the Review of Reviews represents the chief as saying to an American naval officer:

”There will be war between your country and Spain, and in that war you can do the greatest deed in history by putting an end to Castilian tyranny in my native land. We are not ferocious savages. On the contrary, we are unspeakably patient and docile. That we have risen from time to time is no sign of bloodthirstiness on our part, but merely of manhood resenting wrongs which it is no longer able to endure. You Americans revolted for nothing at all compared with what we have suffered. Mexico and the Spanish republics rose in rebellion and swept the Spaniard into the sea, and all their sufferings together would not equal that which occurs every day in the Philippines. We are supposed to be living under the laws and civilization of the nineteenth century, but we are really living under the practices of the Middle Ages.

”A man can be arrested in Manila, plunged into jail, and kept there twenty years without ever having a hearing or even knowing the complaint upon which he was arrested. There is no means in the legal system there of having a prompt hearing or of finding out what the charge is. The right to obtain evidence by torture is exercised by military, civil, and ecclesiastical tribunals. To this right there is no limitation, nor is the luckless witness or defendant permitted to have a surgeon, a counsel, a friend, or even a bystander to be present during the operation. As administered in the Philippines one man in every ten dies under the torture, and nothing is ever heard of him again. Everything is taxed, so that it is impossible for the thriftiest peasant farmer or shopkeeper to ever get ahead in life.

”The Spanish policy is to keep all trade in the hands of the Spanish merchants, who come out here from the peninsula and return with a fortune. The Government budget for education is no larger than the sum paid by the Hong Kong authorities for the support of Victoria College here. What little education is had in the Philippines is obtained from the good Jesuits, who, in spite of their being forbidden to practice their priestly calling in Luzon, nevertheless devote their lives to teaching their fellow-countrymen. They carry the same principle into the Church, and no matter how devout, able, or learned a Filipino or even a half-breed may be, he is not permitted to enter a religious order or ever to be more than an acolyte, s.e.xton, or an insignificant a.s.sistant priest. The State taxes the people for the lands which it says they own, and which as a matter of fact they have owned from time immemorial, and the Church collects rent for the same land upon the pretext that it belongs to them under an ancient charter of which there is no record.