As to how José Rizal would stand such a test applied to his career and all of it, take this testimony of Retana, who from antecedent probability at least would invent no extravagance of praise. Even in his youth, said Retana, every injustice, every crime, every wrong, struck home to his sensibilities. He walked with unsmirched garments through a world filled with the reek of a sordid time and the cruelty that man works upon man, trying to make a protest against all oppressions and busy to the end with the troubles of his fellows but not with his own. To this sketch of his moral self, not less engaging than his physical portraiture, remains to be added one line. Pursued indefatigably by bigotry and prejudice, he was himself of a singular tolerance. The wrongs of his people he resented with towering indignation, and his own he viewed with an astonishing calm. To the gibes and sneers and taunts of his foes he had but the one habitual response: “To understand all is to forgive all!” CHAPTER XII “EL FILIBUSTERISMO” For Spanish or Filipino ears, “filibuster” has nothing of the comic or disreputable suggestion that it bears to the American. In the Philippines of Rizal’s day it denoted a person opposed to the existing régime, an insurgent, whether advocating peaceful or violent means of separation from Spain. “El Filibusterismo” means a movement for Philippine independence. In this novel again, the chief figure is Ibarra, the hero of “Noli Me Tangere.” It was Elias, not Ibarra, that was struck with the bullets of the Civil Guards when they were pursuing his banca; Ibarra escaped unhurt. He made his way out of the country and now returns after some years, disguised and under an assumed name, to seek the revenge upon which all this time his heart has been brooding. The difference between the Ibarra that refused Elias’ prayer to lead the people and this Ibarra become now hopeless of any peaceful remedy betrays once more the change we have already noted as coming over Rizal’s most cherished convictions and in spite of himself. A struggle was going on between what he still wished to believe and what his judgment told him was inevitable, and in the conflict he grew in hardihood. From the savage vengeance that pursued his sisters, brothers, father, and mother when it had failed to reach him, he was beginning to learn how idle was the hope to win reform by merely ladylike appeals. Yet the book was not of purpose any signal to popular revolt. What he intended was solemn warning. So far the Filipino has stood and asked for justice, still patient, still holding out the friendly hand. Wronged hearts will not always accept scurvy affronts; men will not always put up with kicks when they ask fair play. This Filipino whom you despise and trample on nineteen years in twenty and who, in the twentieth, throws you into a panic, is not the human dish-cloth you are pleased now to imagine him.