In consequence of this conclusion there manifested itself in Rizal, as he himself avowed, a sort of national self-exaltation. He began to believe that the Tagalogs must stand higher intellectually than the Spaniards (the only whites he had known up to that time) and he used to like to tell how he came to this fallacious conclusion. In the first place, he said, in his school the whites received instruction in their own language while the Filipinos had to worry with strange idioms in order to receive instruction which was given in it alone. The Filipinos, therefore, must be better endowed intellectually than the Spaniards, he inferred, since they not only kept up with the Spaniards in their studies but even surpassed them, although handicapped by a different language. Still another observation caused him to disbelieve in the superiority of the European intelligence. He noticed that the Spaniards believed that the Filipinos looked up to them as beings of a superior nation and made of a finer clay than themselves. But Rizal knew very well that the respectfulness the Filipinos manifested toward the Spaniards did not proceed from self-depreciation but was simply dictated by fear and self-interest. By fear because they saw in the Spaniard their lord and master who oppressed them arbitrarily even with good intentions; by self-interest because they had observed that his pride of race lays the European open to flattery and that they could get large concessions from him by a little subserviency. The Filipinos do not therefore have any real respect for the European but cringe and bow to him from interested motives alone. Behind his back they laugh at him, ridicule his presumption, and regard themselves as in reality the shrewder of the two races. Because the Spaniards never divined the real sentiment of the Filipinos toward themselves, young Rizal felt justified in regarding them as inferior in intelligence to his own countrymen. But in later years he found it necessary to change this false impression of his youth, especially as he had found by his own personal experience how easy it is to draw mistaken conclusions about people of a different race from one’s own. “Whenever,” he used to say, “I came upon condemnation of my people by Europeans either in conversation or in books I recalled these foolish ideas of my youth, my indignation cooled, and I could smile and quote the French proverb, ‘Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.’”