Meantime, in the great events that had shaken this ancient theater of bold deeds, the freedom of which Mabini and his fellows had dreamed had more than once lightened before them. With the news of the discovery of the Katipunan and the cruelties of the hysteria in high places that followed next, the revolution spread swiftly to the provinces. Cavite, Batangas, Zambales, Tarlac rose as the clans rose in Scotland; a remarkable fact, for here had been no preparation, and the Katipunan had not gone far beyond Manila walls. Nothing would seem to show more plainly that the psychology of the people had been all misread. At Rizal’s school he had noticed that the Spaniards deemed the natives submissive to kicks and insults when in reality wrath burned in the native heart. It was so here; while the “miserable Indio” had borne in silence the lash of the governing class he had not ceased at any time to resent its sting, and at the first call to revolt the whole Island went aflame. In a week the comfortable fictions about Filipino incapacity were shattered by such ponderable facts as shot and shell, and Spain was retreating before the gravest crisis it had known in its 325 years of mismanagement. Bonifacio’s forces increased daily. He gave battle to the regular troops sent against him and sometimes he beat them, sometimes he was beaten; but never was he dismayed. He developed captains among the young men that flocked around him; with others, this Emilio Aguinaldo of whom we have spoken. This was a youth lately out of college that had never set a squadron in the field nor the divisions of a battle knew more than Cassio. Yet he quickly showed such natural talents for command that he made his fame enduring among the military leaders of all times. He was born in the city of Cavite in March, 1869, and had studied at the College of San Juan with no more thought of being a soldier than of being a chiropodist. He had read his horoscope in the face of fate and perceived that he was to be a farmer and lead a quiet life among dingles and rice-plots. No sooner had he fingered his degree at San Juan than he hastened to fulfil this modest destiny by taking a farm in Cavite province and trying to better the yield of rice there. He had character, a presence, and a good mind; he had not been farming long when he was made municipal captain of his district. From his youth he seems to have been strong for nationalism, being a type of the class of young men rising in all parts of the Islands on whom the Spanish collar rested uneasily if at all, the class of which Rizal was the best example and natural leader. In 1894 he joined the Katipunan. When Father Gil pulled the strings and revealed, to the fevered imagination of the Spaniards, the lair of this frightful monster, Aguinaldo was one of the first to proclaim the revolution. Chiefly it was his work that made Cavite an insurrectionary stronghold. In whatever he undertook he