TO EDUCATION
That goddess of garnered ages that sows
For flowers of virtue perennial seeds,
As upward dispensing her light she goes,
Handfast the fatherland, too, she leads.
The breath of her quickening summons she blows
Like winds that bear life to the blossomless meads,
And Wisdom along her pathway upsprings
And Hope is revived in new bourgeonings.
Ay, she has put by for this fatherland
The mortal allures of sleep and of rest,
To weave green laurels with her white hand
On the forehead of Science or Art to be prest!
If on some aureate morrow we stand
Forth gazing as one from a mountain’s crest,
Her spirit that led us from steep to steep
There will our faltering footsteps keep.
Wherever her gleaming white throne may arise,
There with bared brow goes resolute youth;
Error gives back from the glance of her eyes,
Larger and luminous made with Truth;
Vice before her cowering lies,
Pallid and hurtless, with Crime the uncouth.
For she has a magic all potent to make
Wild nations tamest for her sweet sake.
[[353]]
Beneath that throne the fountain is flowing
That waters the plants, the forests, the plains;
Her placid abundance for ever outgoing
For ever increases the store that remains;
In the groves that along her rivers are growing
The spell of her quiet loveliness reigns;
If thence to rude conflict the summons sound
In her is man’s ultimate triumph found.
In her lips is all lore to hearten and guide
The pilgrim that heavenward plods his way,
In her spirit a voice sagacious to chide
Him that has purpose but for a day;
As a shore lashed vainly of impotent tides
Is her faith that knows not of fear or dismay,
As she rises with hand outstretched toward the portals
Where beckon the vistas celestial to mortals.
Where misery sits in its darkness and need,
Behold her lighting the living flame;
She fetters the filching fingers of Greed,
Gives joy for sorrow and honor for shame.
Who takes to his heart her uttermost creed
Makes nobler his life and loftier his aim,
And hers is the cool and dextrous art
That heals the old hurts in the generous heart.
The lighthouse stands on the eternal rock
By the storm-harried seas oft beaten and battered;
The hurricane bellows, the mad waves shock—
On its stirless walls they rise and are shattered,
Till Ocean drives back his disorderly flock
By their futile assailings affrighted and scattered.
So with this goddess it is, whose light
Ill cannot dim through the stormiest night.
[[354]]
Sapphires might serve of her splendors to tell,
Or diamonds weigh out the worth of her glory,
And still fall short of the virtues that swell
In the breasts of her sons that have mastered her story.
From flowers of her planting, their sight or their smell,
Vanishes Self, foul, haggard, and hoary,
But boundless her blessings on them whose thought
Traces the plan that the Nazarene wrought.
Around the ocean’s chrysoprase brim
The Dawn, approaching, broadcast will send
Purple and scarlet, now bright and once dim,
And yet their gorgeous painting suspend
When the sun draws nigh, and in honor of him
Show nothing but golden. So shall ascend
The goddess of knowledge and pour from above
Transfiguring light on the land we love.
—Translated by C. E. R. [[355]]
APPENDIX B
RIZAL AS A PATRIOT, AUTHOR, AND SCIENTIST
By Francis Burton Harrison, Governor-General 1915–21
[Of all the governor-generals the Philippines have had, Mr. Harrison was the most beloved by the islanders. He seemed to have an instinctive sympathy with them and after his retirement from office testified to their worth in a remarkable book, “The Cornerstone of Philippine Independence.” The comments that follow are extracts from an address he delivered at the laying of the corner-stone of Rizal Hall, Philippine University, December 15, 1919.]
Addressing a university audience, I have selected three points in the life and writing of Dr. Rizal for your consideration. First is his patriotism. This university must devote its best efforts to teaching the students of to-day and those of coming generations that form of pure and unselfish patriotism that we find in the writings and sayings of Dr. Rizal. We have been gratified to follow the course in debate and in action of the students of this university in devoting their attention in a purely non-partizan way to the consideration of public questions of the day, but I address myself to the faculty as well as to the students for consideration of the form which that patriotism should take. In the days of my grandfather young men in America went to Germany to study at the universities. That was the golden age when the teachings and memory of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Heine inspired the youth of the land and brought about a political movement that was crushed and ended in 1848 in the death of liberalism and the beginning of modern autocracy. Those of us that [[356]]were educated in German literature can scarcely understand the Germany of the last three decades, and yet, in my opinion, their devotion to the religion of brutality and force is to be found in the teachings of their modern university professors—an example that has terrified all mankind and threatened the liberties of the world. So I say the teaching of pure patriotism must always be dedicated to the promotion of liberties, the liberty of thought, of the individual, to the care of the welfare of the common people, and for the progress and advancement in modern science of learning of the people of the Philippine Islands.
The literary aspect of Rizal’s works should commend itself to each of you as an inspiration to do your own duty. I think no man can read Rizal’s novels without feeling his powerful impulse of sympathy for and understanding of the people of this country. We can be moved not only by his profound reading of human nature, but we can also be inspired to emulate, if we may, the high level of talent for which his name will ever be famous in the history of literature. Here in the Philippines I would, if I could, arouse you to more earnest devotion to a literary career. You have natural advantages second to no country in the world. Your history is replete with incidents and romance and your present latter-day development is a true inspiration to the youth of the world in all countries. Last winter when I returned to New York for my first vacation home I remember one particularly dark and gloomy day when the people on the streets, which are nothing more than cañons between high buildings of stone and glass, were jostling one another without a spark of human sympathy or appreciation, conscious competitors in the struggle for the survival of the fittest; and my mind went back to those scenes of every-day life in the Philippines, to this land of lofty mountains, of clear water running to the sea, the sunsets across Mariveles Mountain, the dawn over Mount Arayat, the blue haze upon the rice-fields in the evening—all the familiar [[357]]scenes and sounds of a life animate by the sun and made happy by the richness of nature. As I remembered the deep and tender lights of the coconut groves and the busy industry of your daily life, I said to myself, “There is a country which could inspire any man to literary efforts with all its wealth of romance.” When I recall the history of the Philippine Islands, the coming of the Christians with the sword and flaming cross, the coming of the Mohammedans, with the crescent and the crooked creese and their cry in many a hard-fought battle, the enterprise of the Spaniard in spiritual teachings as well as in material investments, the shouts of Legaspi’s sailors across Manila Bay, the guns of Dewey so many generations later, the efforts of our country to establish here our principles of democracy, it seems to me that any young man or woman born upon this soil and inspired by these ideas has an opportunity to take a place in the very foremost ranks of literature and history and show to the world not only what has been done here in education but what the world may expect of the Filipino people when they take their rank as an independent member of the brotherhood of nations.
In the scientific aspect of his teachings Rizal ranked high in public appreciation, higher indeed in other countries than at that time he was allowed to rank here. He was recognized for his scientific work in ethnology, in zoölogy, and in botany in England and in the leading universities of Germany. Upon his death, the most distinguished scientist in Germany of that day, Professor Virchow, stated that this was a murder of the most prominent scientist that Spain possessed. In my opinion Rizal’s greatest services to the cause of the human race were those scientific impulses which he gave to the world of his duty, and the martyrdom which he suffered was but another example of the determination of organized society in every age to eliminate those that by the pure processes of reason have arrived at new theories for the conduct and welfare of [[358]]mankind. From the day of Socrates, who was put to death by the citizens of Athens for teaching the young men to think for themselves, down to that morning in December, 1896, when Rizal was done to death by the firing-squad at Bagumbayan, the pages of history have run red with the murder of men of science. In Europe of the Middle Ages the names of Roger Bacon, Giordano Bruno, Galileo, Agrippa, Campanella, Kepler, Lavoisier, of Priestly, and many others of less distinction in the annals of history have shown what struggles the human mind has been called upon to endure and to what stress the human body has been put in the efforts of science to liberate the human mind.…
Bearing all these things in mind, it seems to me that we can justly appreciate Rizal’s love of science and his final martyrdom as the greatest contribution to the freedom of thought ever given by any one man to the Filipino people. This hall which we are about to dedicate, reserved as it is to be for the study of science, is the most fitting monument to the name of Rizal that could be devised. Were he alive to-day I have no doubt he would feel an infinitely greater inspiration in the thought that his name was to be attached to this great edifice and that his memory was to be preserved by the study of young Filipinos, men and women, in the natural sciences than he would be in that splendid statue erected down there on the Bagumbayan to perpetuate the memory of his patriotic death.
Now, my friends, in dedicating this edifice to progress, I believe that it will stand for progress as long as the Filipino people themselves remain progressive and as long as you will fight the battle for liberty of thought and of reason, and, I believe, also, that Dr. Rizal, if he has any conscious knowledge in those ethereal spaces to which his soul has been summoned, will summon the youth of his beloved country to dare all, to endure all, and, if needs be, to suffer all that he himself had dared, endured, or suffered in order that science may not perish from the face of the earth. [[359]]
APPENDIX C
REPRESENTATIVE COOPER’S TRIBUTE
Delivered in the House of Representatives, Washington, June 19, 1902
It has been said that if American institutions had done nothing else than furnish to the world the character of George Washington, that alone would entitle them to the respect of mankind. So, sir, I say to all those that denounce the Filipinos indiscriminately as barbarians and savages, without possibility of a civilized future, that this despised race proved itself entitled to their respect and to the respect of mankind when it furnished to the world the character of José Rizal.
[Mr. Cooper then recited to the House Rizal’s “Last Farewell” as described on a foregoing page. The profound silence that fell upon the chamber at the end of this recital he broke by saying:]
Pirates! Barbarians! Savages! Incapable of civilization! How many of the civilized Caucasian slanderers of his race could ever be capable of thoughts like these, which on that awful night, as he sat alone amidst silence unbroken save by the rustling of the black plumes of the death angel at his side, poured from the soul of the martyred Filipino? Search the long and bloody roll of the world’s heroic dead, and where, on what soil, under what sky, did Tyranny ever claim a nobler victim? Sir, the future is not without hope for a people that, from the midst of such an environment, has furnished to the world a character so lofty and so pure as that of José Rizal. [[360]]
APPENDIX D
RIZAL’S VIEWS ON THE RACE PROBLEM
From an Article on Rizal in the “International Archiv für Ethnographie,” by Ferdinand Blumentritt, in part translated and abridged by R. L. Packard in the “Popular Science Monthly,” July, 1902.
Rizal devoted himself particularly to the analysis of the sentiments with which the white and the colored races mutually regard each other. No one was so well qualified as he to study this question, which is of such importance to folk-psychology, for he was of himself of a colored race, had lived among his fellow-countrymen at his own home as well as among the whites, those of mixed bloods, and other classes at Manila, and had besides come to know Hong-Kong, Japan, Europe, and the United States and that in a thorough way and not as a mere tourist. His extensive acquaintance with languages opened for him the ethnological writings of all civilized nations, and his penetrating intellect prevented him from remaining content with the surface of things. It should be said, however, that Rizal concerned himself wholly with the relations between the white and the colored peoples of the Pacific because, as he explained, he knew nothing of the psychology of other colored races.
He said that as a boy he was deeply sensible that the Spaniards treated him with contemptuous disregard for the sole reason that he was a Filipino. From the moment when he discovered this attitude of theirs he endeavored to find out what right the Spaniards and the other whites generally had to look down upon people who think as they think, study [[361]]the same things they study, and have the same mental capacity they possess, simply because these people have a brown skin and stiff, straight hair.
Europeans regard themselves as the sovereign masters of the earth, the only supporters of progress and culture and the sole legitimate species of the genus Homo sapiens, while they proclaim that all other races are inferior by refusing to acknowledge their capability of acquiring European culture, so that, according to the European view, the colored races are varieties of the genus Homo brutus. Rizal then asked himself, Are these views just? He began asking this question when he was a school-boy and at the same time began to answer it by observing his white fellow-students closely while he studied his own mental processes and emotions in order to make comparisons.
He soon remarked that in school, at least, no difference could be detected between the intellectual level of the whites and Filipinos. There were lazy and industrious, moral and immoral, dull and intelligent boys among the whites as well as among the Filipino scholars. Soon this study of race spurred him to exert himself to the utmost in his school studies, and a kind of race rivalry took possession of him. He was overjoyed whenever he succeeded in solving a difficult problem that baffled his white companions. But he did not regard these events as personal successes so much as triumphs of his own collective people. Thus it was in school that he first became convinced that whites go through the same intellectual operations as Filipinos and—ceteris paribus—progress in the same way and to the same extent. From this observation he came to the conclusion that whites and Filipinos have the same intellectual endowment.
In consequence of this conclusion there manifested itself in Rizal, as he himself avowed, a sort of national self-exaltation. He began to believe that the Tagalogs must stand higher intellectually than the Spaniards (the only whites he had known [[362]]up to that time) and he used to like to tell how he came to this fallacious conclusion. In the first place, he said, in his school the whites received instruction in their own language while the Filipinos had to worry with strange idioms in order to receive instruction which was given in it alone. The Filipinos, therefore, must be better endowed intellectually than the Spaniards, he inferred, since they not only kept up with the Spaniards in their studies but even surpassed them, although handicapped by a different language. Still another observation caused him to disbelieve in the superiority of the European intelligence. He noticed that the Spaniards believed that the Filipinos looked up to them as beings of a superior nation and made of a finer clay than themselves. But Rizal knew very well that the respectfulness the Filipinos manifested toward the Spaniards did not proceed from self-depreciation but was simply dictated by fear and self-interest.
By fear because they saw in the Spaniard their lord and master who oppressed them arbitrarily even with good intentions; by self-interest because they had observed that his pride of race lays the European open to flattery and that they could get large concessions from him by a little subserviency. The Filipinos do not therefore have any real respect for the European but cringe and bow to him from interested motives alone. Behind his back they laugh at him, ridicule his presumption, and regard themselves as in reality the shrewder of the two races. Because the Spaniards never divined the real sentiment of the Filipinos toward themselves, young Rizal felt justified in regarding them as inferior in intelligence to his own countrymen. But in later years he found it necessary to change this false impression of his youth, especially as he had found by his own personal experience how easy it is to draw mistaken conclusions about people of a different race from one’s own. “Whenever,” he used to say, “I came upon condemnation of my people by Europeans either in conversation or in books I recalled these foolish ideas of my youth, my [[363]]indignation cooled, and I could smile and quote the French proverb, ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.’ ”
Dr. Rizal’s sojourn in Spain opened to him a new world. His intellectual horizon began to widen with his new experiences. New ideas thronged in upon him. He came from a land which was the very home of bigotry, where the Spanish friar, the Spanish official, and the Spanish soldier governed with absolute sway. But in Madrid he found the exact opposite of this repression. Free-thinkers and atheists spoke freely in disparaging terms of religion and the church; the authority of the Government he found to be at a minimum, while he not only saw Liberals contending with the Clerical Party but he beheld with astonishment Republicans and Carlists openly promoting the development of their political ideas.
Still greater was the influence upon him of his residence in France, Germany, and England. In those countries he enlarged his scientific information, or it would be better, perhaps, to say that there the spirit of modern philology was revealed to him and there he learned the meaning of the word “ethnology.”
The personal influence of the late Dr. Rost of London was most marked in the philological training of Dr. Rizal. His teachings and the study of the works of W. von Humboldt, Jacquet, and Professor H. Kern opened a new world for the Filipino scholar. He formed a plan to write a work upon the Tagalog verb, which he afterward modified, and while an exile in Dapitan in Mindanao he began to write a Tagalog grammar in English and at the same time prepared an essay upon the allied elements in the Tagalog and Visayan languages. The former work he intended to dedicate to Professor Kern, in the name of the Malay race; the latter he wished to inscribe to the memory of Dr. Rost. It was not granted to him to complete the manuscript of either, for he was interrupted in the midst of his work to be dragged about [[364]]from tribunal to tribunal until his final sentence and death by public execution.
Fortunately, his work upon the transcription of Tagalog remains to us, a translation having appeared in the “Bijdragen” of the Indian Institute. Unfortunately, this work only increased the hatred of his political opponents, for the Spaniards were very much opposed to any independent work on the part of the Filipinos, being convinced that everything of the kind was merely a cloak for separatist views, and whatever was suspected of separatism in the Philippines was certain of meeting an unhappy fate.
Rizal, brought up among the Spaniards, was no better instructed than they themselves in modern ethnology, and, indeed, it was through Professor Blumentritt’s instrumentality that his attention was first directed to the defects in his education in that direction, whereupon he began with ardor to enlarge his knowledge in comparative ethnology. The works upon general ethnography by Perschel, F. Müller, Waitz, Gerland, and Ratzel, the ethnographical parallels of André, Wilkins’s work, the culture-historical publications of Lippert and Helwald became at once the subject of his industrious and thorough study, a study, furthermore, that not only enlarged his knowledge but afforded him the consolation of the assurance that his people were not an anthropoid race as the Spanish asserted, for he found that the faults and virtues of the Tagal are entirely human, and, moreover, he became convinced that the virtues and vices of any people are not mere peculiarities of a race but inherited qualities, qualities that become affected by climate and history.
At the same time he continued what he called his “course in practical ethnology”; that is to say, he studied the life of the French and German peasants, because he thought that a peasantry preserves national and race peculiarities longer than the other classes of a people, and also because he believed he ought to compare only the peasantry of Europe with his own [[365]]countrymen, because the latter were nearly all peasants. With this object in view he withdrew for weeks to some quiet village where he observed closely the daily life of the country people.
He summed up the results of his scientific and “practical” studies in the following propositions:
1. The races of man differ in outward appearance and in the structure of the skeleton but not in their physical qualities. The same passions and pains affect the white, yellow, brown, and black races; the same motives influence their actions, only the form in which the emotions are expressed and the way the actions are directed are different. Neither is this particular form of conduct and expression constant with any race or people but varies under the influence of the most diverse factors.
2. Races exist only for the anthropologists. For a student of the customs of a people there are only social strata, and it is the task of the ethnologist to separate and identify these strata. And just as we mark out the lines of stratification in the mountain ranges of a geological sketch so ought we to mark out the social strata of the human race. And just as there are mountains whose summits do not reach to the highest strata of the geological system, so there are many people that do not reach the highest social strata, while the lowest strata are common to all of them. Even in the old established civilizations of France and Germany a great proportion of the population forms a class which is upon the same intellectual level with the majority of the Tagal, and is to be distinguished from them only by the color of the skin, clothing, and language. But while mountains do not grow higher, peoples do gradually grow up into the higher strata of civilization, and this growth does not depend upon the intellectual capacity alone of a given people, but it is also due to some extent to good fortune and to other factors, some of which can be explained and others not.
3. Since not only the statesmen who conduct colonial affairs but scientific men as well maintain that there are races of limited intelligence that could never attain the height of European culture, the real explanation must be as follows: The higher intelligence may be compared to wealth—there are rich and poor peoples just as there are rich and poor individuals. The rich man that believes he was born rich deceives himself. He came into the world as poor and naked as his slave, but he inherits the wealth that his parents earned. In the same way intelligence is inherited. Races that formerly found themselves compelled by certain special conditions to exercise their mental powers to an unusual extent have naturally developed their intelligence to a higher degree than others and they have bequeathed this intelligence to their descendants, who in turn have increased it by further use. Europeans are rich in intelligence but the present inhabitants of Europe could not affirm without presumption that their ancestors were just as rich in intelligence at the start as they themselves are now. The Europeans have required centuries of strife and effort, of fortunate conjunctions, of the necessary ability, of advantageous laws, and of individual leading men to enable [[366]]them to bequeath their intellectual wealth to their present representatives. The people that are so intelligent to-day have become so through a long process of transmission and struggles. History shows that the Romans thought no better of the Germans than the Spaniards think of the Tagalog, and when Tacitus praises the Germans he does so in the same style of philosophical idealizing that we see in the followers of Rousseau, who thought that their political ideal was realized in Tahaiti.
4. The condemnatory criticism of the Filipinos by the Spaniards is easy to explain but appears not to be justified. Rizal demonstrated this in the following way: Weaklings do not emigrate to foreign lands but only men of energy that travel hence already prejudiced against the colored races and reach their destination with the conviction, which is usually sanctioned by law, that they are called to rule the latter. If we remember, what few white men know, that the Filipinos fear the brutality of the whites, it is easy to explain why they make such a poor showing in works written by the white while they themselves cannot reply in print. If we consider further that the Filipinos with whom the whites had dealings belong, for the most part, to the lower strata of society, the opinions of them given by the whites have about the same value as that of an educated Tagal would have who should travel to Europe and judge all Germans and French by the dairy-maids, porters, waiters, and cab-drivers he might meet.
5. The misfortune of the Filipinos is in the color of their skin and in that alone. In Europe there are a great many persons that have risen from the lowest dregs of the populace to the highest offices and honors. Such people may be divided into two classes, those that accommodate themselves to their new position without pretensions and whose origin is consequently not imputed to them as a disgrace, but on the contrary they are respected as self-made men; and the conventional parvenus, who are ridiculed and detested universally.
A Filipino would find himself ordinarily in the second of these two classes no matter how noble his character or how perfect a gentleman he might be in his manners and conduct, because his origin is indelibly stamped upon his countenance, visible to all, a mark that always carries with it painful humiliations for the unfortunate native since it for ever exposes him to the prejudices of the whites. Everything he does is minutely examined; a trifling error in the toilet, which would be overlooked in a shoemaker’s son that had acquired the title of baron, and might easily happen to a pure-blooded descendant of the Montmorencys, in his case excites amusement and you hear the remark: “What else do you expect? He is only a native.” But even if he does not infringe any of the rules of etiquette, and is besides an able lawyer or a skilful physician, his accomplishments are not taken as a matter of course, but he is regarded with a kind of good-natured surprise, a feeling much like the astonishment with which one regards a well trained dog in a circus, but never as a man of the same capabilities as a white man.
Another reason for the mean opinion in which the Filipinos have been held by the whites is found in the circumstance that in the tropics all the servants are colored. They have the defects of their social class and of servants everywhere. Now, when a German housewife complains of her servants, she does not extend their bad qualities to the whole German [[367]]nation; but this is done unblushingly by Europeans that live in the tropics, and they never apparently feel any compunctions but sleep the sleep of the just, undisturbed by conscience.
The merchants also have contributed to the unfavorable judgment of the Filipinos. Europeans come to the tropics in order to get rich as soon as possible, which can only be done by buying from the natives at astoundingly low rates. The latter, however, do not regard this proceeding as a really commercial one, but they believe that the whites are trying to cheat them; and they govern themselves accordingly by trying, on their side, to overreach the whites while their dealings with one another are far more honorable. Consequently the Europeans call the natives liars and cheats, while it never occurs to them that their own exploiting of the ignorance of the natives is a conscienceless proceeding, or rather they believe that, as whites, they are morally justified in dealing immorally with the natives because the latter are colored.
Dr. Rizal finally came to think that he need no longer wonder at the prejudice of the whites against his people after he saw in Europe what unjustifiable prejudices European nations entertain against one another. He himself was always benevolent and moderate in his judgment of foreign peoples. His active and keen mind, his personal amiability, his politeness and manner as a man of the world, and his good and noble heart gained him friends everywhere, and, therefore, the tragic death of this intellectually distinguished and amiable man aroused general concern.
Rizal was an artist of delicate perceptions, a draftsman and sculptor as well as a scholar and ethnologist. Professor Blumentritt possesses three statues made by him of terra cotta which might aptly serve as symbols of his life. One represents Prometheus bound. The second represents the victory of death over life, and this scene is imagined with peculiar originality: a skeleton in a monk’s cowl bears in its arms the inanimate body of a young maiden. The third shows us a female form standing upon a death’s head and holding a torch in her high uplifted hands. This is the triumph of knowledge of the soul over death. Rizal, concludes Professor Blumentritt, was undoubtedly the most distinguished man not only of his own people but of the Malay race in general. His memory will never die in his fatherland. [[368]]
APPENDIX E
SPECIMEN PAGES FROM RIZAL’S DIARY
(It was more a series of notes to assist his memory than a daily record of events. Some of the entries are illegible.)
Saturday, April 28 (1888). We arrived at San Francisco in the morning. We anchored. It is said that we shall be quarantined. The Custom House boat visited us: its flag has this look: [American Customs flag drawn]. The sacks or bags of silk were taken away; a sack costing $700. They are not afraid of the silk; and they were to take their breakfast on board.
Sunday, April 29. Second day of the quarantine. We are greatly troubled and impatient aboard. I have not eaten; it gets my nerve.
Monday, 30. The quarantine is continued. I read in the paper a statement of the Sanitary Doctor against quarantine.
Tuesday, May 1. The quarantine is continued. We signed a petition against the quarantine; and the Englishmen wrote to their Consul.
Thursday, May 3. Six days of quarantine.
Friday, May 4, at 3 P.M. the quarantine is ended. I stayed at Palace Hotel: $4 a day with bath and everything. Stockton-Str. 312. I saw the Golden Gate.… The Custom House. A letter of recommendation. On Sunday stores were closed. The best St. in San Francisco is Market St. I took a walk.—Stanford, the rich man.—A street near the China Town. We left San Francisco on Sunday, the 6th, at 4.30 P.M.—Sailed till Oakland—Railroad—On board from Port Costa to Benicia—Plantations—Herds of cattle—No herdsmen—Stores at the camp—Dinner at Sacramento, 75 cents. We slept in the coach. Regular night. We woke up an hour from Reno, where we took our breakfast at 7.30 of Monday, May 7.… I saw an Indian [Indio] attired in semi-European suit, and semi-Indian suit, leaning against a wall. Wide deserts without plants nor trees. Unpopulated. Lonely place. Bare mountains. Sands. A big extension of white land, like chalk. Far from this desert can be seen some blue mountains. It was a fine day. It was warm, and there was still snow on the top of some mountains.
Tuesday, May 8: This is a beautiful morning. We stop from place to place. We are near Ogden. I believe with a good system of irrigation this place could be cultivated. We are at Utah state, the 3rd. state we crossed over. In approaching Ogden the fields are seen with horses, oxen, and trees. Some small houses are seen from a distance. From Ogden to Denver. The clock is set one hour ahead of time. We are now beginning to see flowers with yellow color on the way. The mountains [[369]]at a distance are covered with snow. The banks of Salt Lake are more beautiful than other things we saw. The mules are very big. There are mountains in the middle of the lake like the islands of Talim in Laguna de Bay. We saw three Mormon boys at Farmington. There were sheep, cows and horses in the meadows. This region not thickly populated. A flock of ducks in the lake. There were beautiful houses with trees, straight streets, flowers, low houses. Children greeted us at Salt Lake City. In Utah the women serve at the table. It is known that dinner will be cheap (?). We changed train at Ogden, and we will not have any change until Denver. In Provo I ate much for 75 cents. We are passing between two mountains through a narrow channel.
Wed. May 9. We are passing through the mountains of rocks along a river; the river is noisy and its noise gives life to the lifeless scenery. We woke up at Colorado the 4th state we crossed over. At 10/30 we climb up a certain height, and this is why snow is seen along the way. There were many pines. The snow on the mountain top is white and shiny. We passed through tunnels made of wood, to protect the road against snow. Icicles in these tunnels are very bright which gives majestic effect.—The Porter of the Pullman Car, an American, is a sort of thief.—Colorado has more trees than the three states we passed over. There are many horses.
Thursday, May 10. We woke up at Nebraska. The country is a plain. We reached Omaha, a big city at 4 P.M., the biggest since we left San Francisco. The Missouri river is twice as wide as the Pasig river in its wide part. It is marshy. Islands are formed in the middle of the river; its banks are not beautiful. This region has many horses and cattle. The train passed over the Missouri bridge for 2 and 1/2 minutes; the train goes slowly. We are now in Illinois.
Friday, May 11. We wake up near Chicago. The country is cultivated. It shows our nearness to Chicago. We left Chicago at 8:1/4 Friday night. What I observed in Chicago is that every cigar store has an Indian figure, and always different. (27–75 Washington Street. Boston. Miss C. G. Smith.)
Saturday, May 12. A good Wagner Car—we are proceeding in a fine day. The country is beautiful and well populated. We shall arrive at the English territory in the afternoon, and we shall soon see Niagara Falls. We stop for some time to see the points that are beautiful; we went at the side below the Falls; I was between two rocks and this is the greatest cascade I ever saw. It is not so beautiful nor so fine as the falls at Los Baños; but much bigger, more imposing and could not be compared with it. The cascade has various falls, various parts. We left the place at night. There is a mysterious sound and persistent echo.
Sunday, May 13. We wake up near Albany. This is a big city. The Hudson river which runs along carries many boats. We crossed over a bridge. The landscape is beautiful; and it is not inferior to the best in Europe. We are going along the banks of the Hudson. They are very beautiful, although a little more solitary than those of the Pasig. There were ships, boats, trees, hills; and the major part is cultivated. The Hudson is wide. Beautiful ships. Sliced granite rocks were paved along the railroads. Some points widely extended. There were beautiful houses between trees. Day fine. Our grand transcontinental trip [[370]]ended on Sunday, May 13. at 11:10 A.M. We passed through various arches in tunnels:—The Art Age, 75 W. 23 Street.
We left New York on May 16, 1888. There were many people at the dock. The first and second class entrances are separated. At 9 o’clock sharp the bell rang to warn the visitors away. At 9 1/30, the pier was full of people. White handkerchiefs were waved; ribbons and flowers of different colors are seen here and there.
May 24—Arrived in Liverpool. [[371]]