He was born in the working-class, was almost wholly self-educated, and at the time he began to be powerful in Philippine destiny was a porter in a maritime warehouse of Manila. In his youth he developed a passion for reading; he read when other persons slept, ate, or idled. By diligent study in the night-time he acquired a knowledge of history and its philosophy that in a man of his handicaps and employment was not less than marvelous and alone would have indicated a phenomenal capacity. [195] He studied deeply the stories of other peoples oppressed, the Israelites in Egypt, the Dutch under Spain, the American colonies under England, the French under their monarchical system, and formulated from these a church militant of democratic faith and principles of which he was first the acolyte and then the devout minister. In the end it mastered all his thought and waking hours and became essentially his life. Something of the great truth he saw clearly that the substance of all real progress in civilization has been progress in democracy, and for the most part this has been won by hard blows, rude encounters, and illimitable sacrifices. He caught a glimpse of the magical stimulus that came to the world from the successive emancipations of the American and the French peoples and another glimpse of the probable effect of a similar emancipation on his own. Upon the condition of those countrymen of his, dragging at a chain that stifled in them all mental vitality with all self-respect, he stared with growing impatience while he burned and fretted for another Bunker Hill and another Yorktown. He was of somewhat violent passions and such deficiencies in self-control as were to have been expected from his experiences and inadequate training. Nevertheless, he had great sincerity, a mind of extraordinary fertility, and a readiness for swift decision and action. He showed himself to be indomitable when wholly concentered upon the one cause; and his contribution to it is not now to be disparaged because he happened to come no nearer the academic walk than Lincoln came.