The book starts with a gibe at the people with whose tardiness to respond to progressive ideas Rizal was becoming impatient. [[217]]
One morning in December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer, almost round, like the taboo from which she derived her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretentious whiteness, majestic and grave from her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was held in great affection in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the fact that she bore the characteristic impress of things in the country, representing something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that was not a steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect, yet unimpeachable, which, when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the happy steamer was genuinely Filipino! If a person were only reasonably considerate, she might have been taken for the Ship of State, constructed, as she had been, under the inspection of Reverendos and Ilustrísimos.
As before, Rizal uses with photographic accuracy the materials of Philippine life that had passed under his own observation. The wanderings of Simoun the jeweler give him the needed occasions; he hangs upon them startling pictures of actual conditions, the power of the friars, the brutality and cowardice of the governing class, the terrible wrongs of the people; even the story of Maria Clara’s parentage he had from an incident in his own neighborhood. Poverty, chastity,[1] and obedience were the oath of the degenerate successors to a noble race of Christianity’s pioneers. [[218]]How lightly they regarded the second item in this creed he had shown in “Noli Me Tangere.” As to poverty, their corporations had become the wealthiest institutions in the Islands. He is now about to show how they had obtained the wealth that made their power supreme and pervasive.
Tandang Selo is a native wood-cutter that by industry and self-denial has saved a little money. He has a son, Tales, industrious and thrifty like himself. Tales works for a rich landowner and saves enough to buy two carabaos, to marry, and to accumulate a capital of several hundred pesos. He has ambition; he wishes to rise in the world. There is the jungle, unclaimed, untilled, but fertile. With his father, his wife, and children he goes into it, clears away the forest, and makes tillable fields.
To cut for the first time the jungle turf is supposed to release a dangerous malaria. Of this, Tales’s wife and eldest child fall ill and die. The others continue to plant and to cultivate.
As they begin to harvest the first crop, an agent of the friars appears, notifies them that the land belongs to one of the orders, and levies on the crop for the rent.
Tales has every reason to believe that the claim is fraudulent, but he is only an Indio; the courts are organized against him and his people, and he pays tribute rather than risk a lawsuit.
The next year the crops are good and the friars double the rent.
Nevertheless the family works hard and saves a little money. The desire of the father’s heart is to send his eldest daughter, Juli, to school in Manila. [[219]]Next year the rent is again increased, and the hope of education begins to fail.
When the rent has risen from thirty to two hundred pesos, Tales refuses to pay the latest increase. Then the friars’ agent tells him to prepare to be evicted, for another tenant will come and till the fields Tales has won from the jungle.