CHAPTER XIII
THE SAFE-CONDUCT
Failure was all he reaped at Madrid in his efforts to win some measure of justice for his family, a fact that hardly could have astonished him then and seems but normal now. In the seats of authority was no man that loved justice so much as he feared the huge political machine set up by the friars and administered (through particularly appropriate selection) by the ruffian Weyler. Early in 1891, Rizal returned to Paris, where he revisited his former friends, and so passed to Ghent. There he settled himself to the finishing of “El Filibusterismo” and worked without further interruption until the book was done and on its way to the publisher.
Powerful influences now seemed to draw him again to the East; it is likely that but for his book he would have gone thither direct from Madrid when he learned how little help he might expect from the gross and inert government. The situation of his family caused him a harrowing anxiety.[1] It was for his sake that they were subjected to the abominable persecutions of the petty tyrants of the existing System. His soul revolted at the idea that they should be thus tormented while he was safely out of the range of his enemies’ venom. After his consultations with the Filipinos in Madrid the gloomy outlook in the Philippines was [[234]]more than before a burden on his thought. He must have known that this time, as he had forecasted in his writings, revolt would be more than local. He could hardly hope to be allowed to land in the Islands, but Hong-Kong was a convenient point from which to watch developments and to put forth his influence; and as to his family he began to have a purpose that if carried out would take them beyond the power of Spanish officers to hector and to wound. In October, 1891, he sailed for Hong-Kong, where he hoped to establish himself in his profession, to gather his family, and to be ready to help his countrymen with the cautionary wisdom of which he held them to be most in need.
His hopes of professional success were better founded than he knew. Almost at once he stepped into a large practice. This is not the usual experience of new physicians in a new field, but his fame as an oculist had gone before him. For the first time in his life he had unpledged money in his purse. He sent to the Philippines for his sister Lucia, who happened then not to be in jail nor exiled nor pinioned to the miseries of procrastinating law-courts, and in her company he tasted something of the novelty of ease. The project he had half formed about the rescue of his harassed relatives took him in the following spring to Borneo. As it seemed to him virtually certain that his enemies would continue to pursue any one known to be near or dear to him, and there was no career for them in Hong-Kong, he purposed to found a new homestead for them under another flag. They were [[235]]a numerous family, and inasmuch as the peculiar ideas of revenge we have found to be current in the Spanish colony made his second cousin or his great-grandmother a quite feasible substitute for himself in the way of vicarious atonement, it was necessary to remove them all. In North Borneo the British authorities offered him on attractive terms an area of fertile land adapted to his purposes. He went to look at it, found it in all respects suitable, and resolved to carry out his plan of a Rizal family refuge.[2]
From his happy country of those days not a soul could depart without the sanction of the Government. To secure this for anybody connected with him would be hard enough; even for an individual and a temporary absence like Lucia’s it was hard. How much harder it would be to rescue a whole tribe, and all so hated! Revenge was not so to be cheated, nor the account of “Noli Me Tangere” left unsettled. If passports were to be had at all, a personal explanation and appeal offered the best chance. This he determined to attempt, if he could have some reasonable promise of safety, being more inclined to go because thereby he might again see his father and mother.