I spent many, many hours of my childhood down on the shore of the lake, Laguna de Bay. I was thinking of what was beyond. I was dreaming of what might be over on the other side of the waves. Almost every day, in our town, we saw the Guardia Civil lieutenant caning and injuring some unarmed and inoffensive villager. The villager's only fault was that while at a distance he had not taken off his hat and made his bow. The alcalde treated the poor villagers in the same way whenever he visited us. We saw no restraint put upon brutality. Acts of violence and other excesses were committed daily. The officers whose duty it was to protect the people and keep the public peace were the real outlaws. Against such lawbreakers, our authorities were powerless. I asked myself if, in the lands which lay across the lake, the people lived in this same way. I wondered if there they tortured any countryman with hard and cruel whips merely on suspicion. Did they there respect the home? Or over yonder also, in order to live in peace, would one have to bribe tyrants? THE SPANISH SCHOOLS OF MY BOYHOOD From the introduction which Doctor Rizal put to his Spanish version of an article on "The Transliteration of Tagalog". His advocacy of the English style used in other Malay countries as more akin to the genius of Filipino dialects was considered extremely unpatriotic by most Spaniards. You perhaps attended a village Spanish school to learn your letters. Possibly, you have had to teach the letters in Spanish to others smaller than yourself. In either case, you must have noticed what I have, that children find great difficulty in mastering certain syllables. These are ca, ce, ci, co, ga, ge, gua, gui, etc. It is because Filipino children do not understand the reasons for such irregularities. Nor do they know the cause for the changes in value of the sounds of certain consonants. In the old times, blows fell like rain. Many pupils were whipped every day. Sometimes the schoolmaster broke the ferule and sometimes he broke the children's hands. The first pages of their primers fell to pieces from long and hard use. The children cried. Even the monitors had to suffer at times. Yet those syllables which cost the children so many tears are of no use to them. Those syllables are necessary only in the learning of Spanish, which language in my time only three boys in a thousand ever really learned. These three learned it in Manila, by hearing Spanish spoken, and by committing to memory book after book. I often wondered what was the use of learning it at all when in the end one spoke only Tagalog. But I kept my wonder to myself. I felt that to try to make reforms in the Philippines at that time would be to embark on a stormy voyage.