Sixteen years after Jagor printed his almost unheeded prophecy, other men less gifted might have seen that his views on Philippine evolution were soundly based. The conditions existing in the Islands could not last much longer. Six or seven discontented millions could not continue to be overawed with soldiery and great guns and managed upon a plan they hated. No matter how assiduously they might be kept from all weapons more deadly than jack-knives and toothpicks, the existing state could not endure. The mere physical fact of the United States, forging ahead upon a totally different principle, would be an influence that soon or late would overturn these sagging bulwarks of antiquity. What was to be the future of the Islands? For a long time the students of Barcelona tried to settle this question, sometimes with debate and sometimes with vociferation. Thence with similar futility it spread to Madrid and elsewhere, and finally Rizal took it up in a series of articles entitled “The Philippines a Century Hence.” [119] What he thought about Philippine independence he here set down as plainly as the law and the Spanish Government would allow. That any one should try to muddle his views on this subject is strange enough when he left thus a testament reasonably explicit in its text and still more in its deductions. Although much latitude was allowed to public discussion in the Spain of that day, plotting to overthrow Spanish rule in the Philippines was still sedition, and under that term the police sometimes included much that was extraneous—in Spain, as elsewhere. Rizal had no fear for himself on this occasion nor any other, but one can easily understand that he wished to save “La Solidaridad” from the ash-can. Hence with admirable skill he steers as close as he can to the forbidden line and yet escapes it. Against one bugaboo of the timid, and even to this day a favorite device of the crafty, he brought to bear a destructive logic. It was urged that if the Philippines were free they would instantly be snapped up by some powerful and greedy neighbor. The functions of a shield against these ravenous wild beasts, a function later supposed to be performed unselfishly by the United States, was then imagined to fall to the lot of mighty Spain. But for her frowning guns and men-of-war, behold the Philippines a breakfast any morning for Japan or for Great Britain! In those days there were a few Filipinos that were impressed with these fantasies, or said to be; in later times the superior white man often seemed strangely infected with them. To one inclined to take them seriously Rizal’s words might have been commended then, or may be now. It appears that he had been applying to his country the lessons of the American Revolution.