Everywhere is dense ignorance. The world that three hundred years before left all these conditions behind still goes rolling in advance, and hardly a Filipino knows of its passing. A great population endowed with the potentialities of free minds, free limbs, free souls, free ideas, is submitting to a yoke pressed down into men’s very flesh by superstition on one side and brute force on the other. We know that many of the incidents were but transcripts of what Rizal himself had seen and known; many of the characters transferred themselves from Calamba to his pages. Even when we read them for the first time, and have, maybe, no previous knowledge of the locale, this conviction of truth and sincerity possesses us; how much more it must have reached and stung those whose enormities it paints! “It is only the truth that hurts.” CHAPTER V “NOLI ME TANGERE” The story is of a young Filipino, Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra, whose father had wealth, was respected by the Spaniards, and wielded much influence among his own people. Juan, still in his boyhood, is sent to a school in Europe, that his education may be of the best. All prosperous Filipinos hoped to send their sons, if they had any, on this quest for the classical golden fleece. While Juan is gone his father becomes involved in a dispute with the local friar magnate, the virtual dictator of all the region about, as always; but this man brutal, arrogant, revengeful, and lawless beyond the average of his peers. The quarrel is about land; most quarrels with the friars had to do with land or rents or fees or graft or some fancied lack of crawling humility toward overblown pomp. As a rule the ill will of a friar meant for the layman involuntary exile taken at utmost speed or a persecution to the grave and without defense; it being part of the friars’ system of government that of any person that dared to offend them a salutary warning should be made. In the pursuit of this serviceable design, men put to death for alleged sedition but really because they had fallen out with the friars were sometimes quartered and hideous fragments of their bodies nailed up in the towns, [72] as in Spain five hundred years before. Father Damaso is the friar that the elder Ibarra has offended. The power of the System has been put forth. Ibarra, though innocent of any crime, is arrested and thrust into prison, where he is kept without examination or trial until he wilts away and dies, crying out the name of his son. All ignorant of these events, Juan comes home; he knows his father is dead, but he suspects nothing of foul play. Gradually the truth is unfolded to him. He has returned full of hope for the Islands, full of faith in their Government. Gradually he is disillusioned, as one ugly development after another shows him the blight under which his people drag out their lives. Still he knows nothing against Father Damaso. That dark and scowling figure he greets as his father’s friend.