Aggrieved members of the governing class must have joyed to learn of so excellent an opportunity to salve their hurts, also, in this medicament of revenge. Here was the father of the hated José Rizal delivered into their hands. They took the case from the justice of the peace at Calamba, in whose jurisdiction it rightfully belonged, and sent it before a judge whose decision they must have felt sure they could control. There had now become involved in the case a question of broader moment. Mr. Mercado’s sturdy resistance had heartened the other tenants to revive the ancient and unsettled issue of the title to the lands. For many years careful men had held that the Dominicans, who assumed to own all this region and to collect all rents from it, had no right to any of it. The select judge before whom came these questions lost no time in deciding them against Mercado and the other tenants. Mercado appealed, and thereby precipitated one of the strangest incidents of the story. Of a sudden appeared at Calamba a battery of artillery and a company of soldiers, who ostentatiously took possession of the town as if it had been in a state of armed revolt. At this the inhabitants blinked and gasped, for nowhere on earth lay a more peaceable community. They were not left long in doubt as to what was toward. The commandant of the troops issued a curt order to Mercado and the other tenants involved in the litigation to remove within twenty-four hours all their buildings from the land they had occupied. An appeal was pending, a fact that in all civilized countries would have been sufficient to stay proceedings until the appeal could be decided. It was of no such validity here. To comply with the savage order was physically impossible; there were not hands enough in Calamba nor in all the country around. At the end of the next day the agents of the authorities set fire to all the houses, and among them perished from human sight and treasuring the house where José Rizal was born. [112]