What life meant for average millions in the Philippines, under what chill shadows of the jail and visions of the firing-squad they must draw breath, how shifty and blackguard was the Government imposed upon them, we may glimpse from what happened as soon as Rizal’s absence was discovered. Civil Guards and official eavesdroppers were busy at Calamba; all members of the family were dogged, watched, waylaid, and cross-questioned as if suspected of murder. They must do more than lie to protect themselves. Paciano, the brother, who had been a confidant in this desperate plot to take ship and go, was reduced to a kind of play-acting, running about Rizal’s lodging and inquiring frantically for his lost brother as if he conjectured suicide, assassination, or kidnapping. All the Government seems to have been thrown into chill alarm by the fact that one college student, not yet of age, had left Manila without its permission. If there has been upon this earth a tyranny that existed without the finger of fear upon it history, surely, has no mention of it, and in the case of the Spanish tyranny in the Philippines the vague and kindergarten terrors that assailed it had long been notorious. To be afraid of a solitary student whose most dangerous manifestation had been a taste for radical poetry may seem fantastical to steadier pulses but was real enough to the anxious souls that then steered Spain’s sovereignty through unquiet waters. In due time the fact could no longer be concealed; gone he had indeed and in very truth—gone, quite gone. Then, in characteristic fashion, the Government proceeded to revenge itself upon the fugitive’s relatives. It was again a case of a second cousin where the offender or his brother was not available. In vengeance the taste of the Government was never overnice. To make somebody suffer was its length and breadth, and not too much haggling as to the identity of the victim.