There can be no manner of doubt that these were the ideas that controlled him when Terrero “advised” him to depart, and none that in the next few years his views on these subjects contracted as he looked more searchingly upon the troglodyte methods of the Spanish rulers. He was the less reluctant to leave the Philippines because his private life, apart from his career of service, had been darkened by the catastrophe of his love-affair; he had come home to find Leonora married. Two other impulses concurred to urge him away. The success of “Noli Me Tangere” (despite so many and powerful measures taken to suppress the book) and the manifest effect of it upon the Filipino mind must have strongly reminded him of that sequel he had vaguely intended when he completed the last chapters of his novel. He could not hope to accomplish any such work at home; he could not hope, even if he should write it there, to find a publisher for it in the Islands nor to smuggle out the manuscript. To write it he must be abroad. Next, he had seen much of Europe but nothing of that American Republic about which Jagor’s prophecy had so inflamed his youthful mind. Here, by Jagor’s logic, was the power destined some day to transform all the regions bordering upon the Pacific, and he had never seen it. This was also the country whose history and spirit he had glimpsed in the “Lives of the Presidents” that he so eagerly read and returned to. In that country farmers’ boys, canal-boat drivers, tailors’ apprentices, rail-splitters, journeyman printers, any son of the plain people could rise to any place, even the highest. It was a country that conspicuously had won to freedom and independence out of a gross tyranny. Therefore, it had a peculiar claim to his attention. As he must go somewhere, he planned to return to Europe by way of the United States. He was relieved of all anxiety about his mother. The eyesight of her youth had been restored to her.