He has in him the capacity for a great and memorable revenge, and upon your heads he will pull down your structure if you do not hear him. Other characters of the first book reappear in this. Father Salvi, the lascivious friar whose machinations brought about Ibarra’s downfall; Capitán Tiago, Doña Victorina, and Basilio, the son of Sisa. Ibarra calls himself Mr. Simoun. His pretended business is that of a traveling merchant of jewelry and laces; his real occupation is to spy out the land, to lay plots against the governing class that ruined him, and, if possible, to release Maria Clara from her convent prison. The narrative is chiefly concerned with these plots and their failure; but behind them always seems to show a grim figure telling Government that such plots will not always fail. The book starts with a gibe at the people with whose tardiness to respond to progressive ideas Rizal was becoming impatient. One morning in December the steamer Tabo was laboriously ascending the tortuous course of the Pasig, carrying a large crowd of passengers toward the province of La Laguna. She was a heavily built steamer, almost round, like the taboo from which she derived her name, quite dirty in spite of her pretentious whiteness, majestic and grave from her leisurely motion. Altogether, she was held in great affection in that region, perhaps from her Tagalog name, or from the fact that she bore the characteristic impress of things in the country, representing something like a triumph over progress, a steamer that was not a steamer at all, an organism, stolid, imperfect, yet unimpeachable, which, when it wished to pose as being rankly progressive, proudly contented itself with putting on a fresh coat of paint. Indeed, the happy steamer was genuinely Filipino! If a person were only reasonably considerate, she might have been taken for the Ship of State, constructed, as she had been, under the inspection of Reverendos and Ilustrísimos. As before, Rizal uses with photographic accuracy the materials of Philippine life that had passed under his own observation. The wanderings of Simoun the jeweler give him the needed occasions; he hangs upon them startling pictures of actual conditions, the power of the friars, the brutality and cowardice of the governing class, the terrible wrongs of the people; even the story of Maria Clara’s parentage he had from an incident in his own neighborhood. Poverty, chastity, [149] and obedience were the oath of the degenerate successors to a noble race of Christianity’s pioneers. How lightly they regarded the second item in this creed he had shown in “Noli Me Tangere.” As to poverty, their corporations had become the wealthiest institutions in the Islands. He is now about to show how they had obtained the wealth that made their power supreme and pervasive.