In the next place, the heart of the system the Americans had thrown over was the idea that the royal authority imposed upon them was of God and resistance to it was an impiety God would surely punish. One nation, according to this record, had not only resisted such authority but cast it off and trampled upon it, and, behold, its reward was not the curse but the apparent blessing of God in richest measure. He studied the history of this nation, considered its work in the world, and deemed the conclusions of Jagor to be sound and just. But Jagor had supplied also a certain warning. “It seems to be desirable for the natives [Filipinos] that the above-mentioned views should not speedily become accomplished facts, because their education and training hitherto have not been of a nature to prepare them successfully to compete with either of the other two energetic, creative, and progressive nations.” Nothing could be plainer; this was the great work to which he should apply himself. His people must be trained and educated for the freedom they were one day to have. They must be educated first and then aroused. Therefore, whatever learning, discipline, equipment of facts and knowledge, power and resources he could gain were capital, energy, equipment laid by for their service. Toward two sorts of men the world has never warmed while they lived; toward a man of melancholy and a man with a fixed and serious purpose other than material. Rizal was both of these in one. A school is a microcosm of the world outside it. He was admired at the Ateneo but went his way there essentially alone. He seems to have felt that this must be so and accepted loneliness in the spirit of his philosophy and as part of the task laid upon him. The natural complement of his loneliness was an unusual capacity for friendship; the natural complement of his melancholy was a keen sense of humor and a flashing wit; for so do men seem to be made up and (except in novels and plays) never of one piece. Being real and breathing and not a lay figure of romance, Rizal was like the rest of us, subject to gusts of this and that and a gamut of moods; and yet, like other men of strong will, managed to steer fairly straight for one landfall. When the fit was on him he was wont to draw for his family vastly funny sketches, to write quips, to make jokes, and even to fashion comic verses. His gift of portraiture, a singular power to reproduce with convincing strokes any face he had ever noted, ran over at the least provocation into rollicking burlesque. In later times he would have been a priceless cartoonist; to illuminate any thought that crossed his mind a humorous or grotesque or inspiring picture fell easily from his pencil. It was from his brooding introspection that he reacted to his excruciatingly funny caricatures, and if he had not some such vent might have gone mad or (terrible thought!) even have become a prig.