[[Contents]]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[Dr. José Rizal] Frontispiece
FACING PAGE
[The house at Calamba in which Rizal was born] 32
[The Ateneo de Manila] 64
[Leaves from Rizal’s travel notes and sketches through Europe] 81
[Drawings by Rizal] 112
[The original cover of the great novel, “Noli Me Tangere”] 129
[Photograph of an oil painting of his sister by Rizal—Miss Saturnina Rizal] 144
[Wood carving by Rizal] 161
[Sculpture by Rizal when a mere student, “The Power of Science over Death”] 176
[Remnants from Rizal’s Library] 208
[The outline of the constitution of the “Liga Filipina”] 240
[Rizal’s cell at Fort Santiago] 257
[Specimens of Rizal’s modeling when an exile at Dapitan, both self-explanatory] 264
[Photograph of the original of “My Last Farewell”] 304
[The Rizal Monument at the Luneta decorated for Rizal Day, December 30] 321
[A float, Rizal Day, December 30, 1922] 328

[[1]]

[[Contents]]

THE HERO
OF THE FILIPINOS

[[3]]

CHAPTER I

A PEOPLE’S WRONGS

A futile insurrection had been followed by terrible reprisals and a hardening everywhere of the articulated tyranny, terrorism, and espionage with which the Government ruled. Such from the beginning had been its practice in the long and uninspiring record of the Spanish occupation of the Philippines: sore oppression leading to inevitable revolt and then savage vengeance that sowed the seed of more revolt. Now, as always in that delirious procedure, innocent natives were swept to punishment indiscriminately with the guilty; men that had taken part in the uprising and men that had never heard of it. With the rest of these victims of insensate rage, marched, on the morning of February 28, 1872, three beloved priests and servants of God, of whose complicity in the plot was never a shred of ponderable evidence. One of them, lifting up his voice in prayer for his assassins as he went along, was eighty-five years old. Not his years nor his gray hairs nor those good works that had brought him honor[1] availed to save Father [[4]]Mariano Gomez from the most ignominious of deaths. With Fathers Burgos and Zamora, he was garroted on Bagumbayan Field, fronting the sea at Manila; a place consecrated in the Filipino mind to memories terrible and yet grand. Native poets and orators that have seen there every blade of grass springing from the blood of heroes are hardly over-imaginative. On that spot to the same cause the same dull power sacrificed victim after victim, ending with the nation’s greatest and best.