In Manila, though not at the Ateneo, he had been preceded by his elder brother Paciano, long a student at the College of San José, where that Father Burgos, whose death at the hands of the terrified governing class in 1872 we have recounted, was an instructor. Paciano lived at Father Burgos’s house and was his intimate friend. What ideas and ideals dominated the Mercado household at Calamba we may surmise from incidents of Paciano’s own school life. He was pilloried at San José as a notorious patriot; because he spoke with some freedom against the tyranny that blasted his country the authorities refused to allow him to pass his examinations. [31] It appears that Father Burgos, although unjustly accused of complicity in the Cavite affair, was likewise a sturdy Filipino and convinced that the iniquities of the existing System could not long be maintained. In all probability he was sentenced for holding these views. No one will ever know this, because the trial was in secret, no testimony (if any was taken) was afterward to be found, and he that was called the witness for the Government was garroted by that same Government before the public could learn the nature of his inventions. [32] A belief that Father Burgos was a general-principles victim is justified by the habitual proceedings of the Government. He was not the only man that perished in those days for what he thought and not for what he did. The slayings of Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora took place a few months before José Rizal went to Manila. Almost before Paciano’s face his friend and teacher had been dragged to death. What communication about these things Paciano made to his brother, or how Paciano was moved by the tragedy, we can gather only from what happened afterward; but what it meant to José we know well, for as to that he has left eloquent testimony. Sixteen years afterward he compressed into twenty-two lines of bitter irony the scorn he had of Spain for that day’s work. The tragedy on Bagumbayan Field came at the time when his mother’s persecution was beginning; his departure from home had been delayed by her arrest. He was already burning under the sense of an intolerable wrong; this sharp and gratuitous access of injustice must have pierced him with another wound to brood over. [33] All the rest of his life he seemed a lonely and rather melancholy figure. It was here at the Ateneo that his aloofness began. A feeling grew upon him that he was alone in the midst of crowds. It was the counterpart of a sense equally developing in him that the misfortunes of his people were to be the business of his life.