Take the best of these schools, or so-called schools, and at their best. “They amount,” says Rizal, “to five or ten years each of 150 days at most, in which the youth comes in contact with those very priests that boldly proclaim that it is an evil for the natives to know Castilian [Spanish], that the native should not be separated from his carabao, [139] that he should not have any further aspirations, and so on; five to ten years in which the majority of the students have grasped nothing more than that no one understands what the books say, not even the professors themselves, perhaps; and these five to ten years have to offset the daily preachment of the whole life, that preachment which lowers the dignity of man, which by degrees brutally deprives him of the sentiment of self-esteem, that eternal, stubborn, constant labor to bow the native’s neck, to make him accept the yoke, to place him on a level with the beast. “Deprive a man, then, of his dignity, and you not only deprive him of his moral strength but you also make him useless even for those that wish to make use of him. Every creature has its stimulus, its main-spring. Man’s is his self-esteem. Take it away from him and he is a corpse, and he that seeks activity in a corpse will encounter only worms.” [140] Finally there was the paralysis laid upon the Filipino because he was divested of the infinite sustaining and guiding strength of a national sentiment. Without this no people can realize the good that is potential within them, no people can ever attain to the self-expression that is their due, and no people will ever manifest their normal activities. “A man in the Philippines is only an individual—he is not a member of a nation. He is forbidden and denied the right of association, and is therefore weak and sluggish. The Philippines is an organism whose cells seem to have no arterial system to irrigate it or nervous system to communicate its impressions.... The result of this is that if a prejudicial measure is ordered, no one protests: all goes well apparently until later the evils are felt. Another blood-letting and as the organism has neither nerves nor voice the physician proceeds in the belief that the treatment is not injuring it. It needs a reform, but as it must not speak, it keeps silent and remains with the need.” [141] Thus of the possible contribution of these people the world was deprived because a grotesquely unintelligent tyranny stifled the expression of their natural forces. It is the office of absolutism to try to make men think alike. This absolutism tried to keep them from thinking at all. Once the Filipino was active, alert, industrious, prosperous. Now he had become inert, often inept, indifferent, poor. For these transformations, behold here the reasons. They are enough.