A futile insurrection had been followed by terrible reprisals and a hardening everywhere of the articulated tyranny, terrorism, and espionage with which the Government ruled. Such from the beginning had been its practice in the long and uninspiring record of the Spanish occupation of the Philippines: sore oppression leading to inevitable revolt and then savage vengeance that sowed the seed of more revolt. Now, as always in that delirious procedure, innocent natives were swept to punishment indiscriminately with the guilty; men that had taken part in the uprising and men that had never heard of it. With the rest of these victims of insensate rage, marched, on the morning of February 28, 1872, three beloved priests and servants of God, of whose complicity in the plot was never a shred of ponderable evidence. One of them, lifting up his voice in prayer for his assassins as he went along, was eighty-five years old. Not his years nor his gray hairs nor those good works that had brought him honor [1] availed to save Father Mariano Gomez from the most ignominious of deaths. With Fathers Burgos and Zamora, he was garroted on Bagumbayan Field, fronting the sea at Manila; a place consecrated in the Filipino mind to memories terrible and yet grand. Native poets and orators that have seen there every blade of grass springing from the blood of heroes are hardly over-imaginative. On that spot to the same cause the same dull power sacrificed victim after victim, ending with the nation’s greatest and best. But now, in 1872, forgotten medieval brutalities seemed to be brought back to darken life in a region the sunniest and of right the most cheerful. Prisoners were tortured with instruments the world believed to exist only in museums; tortured with thumb-screws, great pincers, and machines of devilish ingenuity that produced and reiterated the agonies of drowning. [2] The whip was busy in the hands of men hired for their expert knowledge of how it could be used to yield the largest fruition of pain; many a wretched Filipino that had in his heart no more of disloyalty than you or I was flogged naked in the presence of officers in whose ears his shrieks seemed to sound like music. Hysteria and fear in the minds of the dominant class were added to the racial hatred always festering there. Under the empire of this triad of the beast, men that had worn the gloss of the almost classic society of Madrid became in the Philippines no better than hooting devils.