Calm yourselves, peaceful inhabitants of Calamba! None of you is named Tales, none of you has committed any crime.... You cleared your fields, on them you have spent the labor of your whole lives, your savings, your vigils and privations, and you have been despoiled of them, driven from your homes, with the rest forbidden to show you hospitality! Not content with outraging justice, they have trampled upon the sacred altars of your country! You have served Spain and the king, and when in their name you have asked for justice you were banished without trial, torn from your wives’ arms and your children’s caresses! Any one of you has suffered more than Cabesang Tales, and yet not one of you has received justice. Neither pity nor humanity has been shown to you—you have been persecuted even beyond the tomb, as was Mariano Herbosa. Weep, or laugh, there in those lonely isles, where you wander vaguely, uncertain of the future! Spain, the generous Spain, is watching over you and soon or late, you will have justice! [116] It is the bitter sarcasm of a soul stung beyond endurance with the sense of great wrong. As a work of fictional art, “El Filibusterismo” is not equal to “Noli Me Tangere.” It is likely that Rizal knew this and as likely that he cared not, having now another purpose than to tell a story powerfully. He is working with rather less of a connected story and rather less of the clear dramatic prevision. The fates of such characters as he left unrelated in “Noli Me Tangere” he follows to the end, but on the way stops to picture lives and conditions not vitally interwoven with the climacteric. Yet in one way this book is the superior in interest, for it reveals the change that had been coming over him in these two years. Slowly there had been erased in his creed the belief in the good intentions of Spain; slowly (and reluctantly, no doubt) he had come to face the thought that to appeal to Spain for reforms was useless and the Filipinos must achieve by their own efforts the changes that would lead to their redemption. That these efforts must be of a peaceful character was a sheet-anchor of faith to which he still clung, or tried to cling, and yet there is evidence that he felt it dragging as more and more the hopeless stupidity of Spain was revealed to him. [117] Evidence of the change in his essential point of view may be found even in the dedication of the new book. It is boldly and uncompromisingly to the men that, perishing on Bagumbayan Field, in 1872, the gored victims of the System, made their names immortal. To the memory of the priests [it reads], Don Mariano Gomez (85 years old), Don José Burgos (30 years old), and Don Jacinto Zamora (35 years old), executed in Bagumbayan Field, February 28, 1872.