He had done more here, very likely, than he himself knew. The document thus prepared became the rallying-point for another of those struggles between the people and the Government that increasingly signaled the downfall of the existing System. Slowly the nineteenth century was closing in upon the sixteenth, democracy upon the autocracy that at the borders of civilization still outlived the date of its normal demise. Rizal’s work on taxation showed the Filipinos what they could do by uniting their efforts. In their country, too, the exploiter held the exploited by fomenting among them envyings, jealousies, and caste; a process that everywhere attends (and usually comprises) the white man’s burden, and whereof India offers the chief surviving example. In the face of every obstacle and discouragement the Filipinos were now learning the lesson of union, and the only shadow union cast forward was revolt. Rizal’s leadership was a phrase we used in a foregoing paragraph. It is to be noted that he came into that eminence without an effort of his own, without planning or connivance. He was elated to find greatness thus thrust upon him and would not have been human otherwise; yet to be conspicuous had never been any real part of his scheme of life, and when elation was at its height it never obscured the fact that what he really sought was a result for the country and not kudos for himself. But he was the most famous of living Filipinos; knowledge of his place among the world’s scientists was now general among his countrymen; those that had not been able to read “Noli Me Tangere” nor to hear it read were becoming aware by common report of the nature of its protest. He was the one man that had been able to make the bitter cry of the Filipinos audible to the world. He had best formulated and expressed the wrongs under which those people suffered. He alone, with this fierce derision, had dared to defy the power of the friars and the brutal fists of the Civil Guards. Naturally, the people turned to him, and the unanimity with which they sought his counsel might have shown the Spaniards again among what fires they were walking; for the spirit that gave rise to the popularity of Rizal was even more significant than anything he said in his book. Before that book was written the spirit had been there; it was growing while the friars debated the best means to suppress the audacious author; it was certain to break out into open revolt—if not under Rizal, then under some one else.