The Katipunan.--We come now to the parting of the ways. Just as Marcelo del Pilar had concluded that the time was at hand for more vigorous measures, so on the other hand some of the Filipinos of education and social position (cautious also, in some cases, because of their property) had become discouraged and faint-hearted. The deportation of Rizal had its effect in 1892, and the local government reforms of 1893-94 were followed by a reactionary government in Spain which might nullify even such concessions, in the face of the constant demand for a check upon the half-liberal régime of Blanco. Some of the middle-class leaders of Manila, who had been drawn into the Masonic movement, had decided that the time had come to organize the masses, at least in the Tagálog provinces. Andrés Bonifacio, an employe of a foreign business house in Manila, was the leading spirit; gathering his ideas of modern reform from reading Spanish treatises on the French Revolution, he had imbibed also a notion that the methods of the mob in Paris were those best adapted to secure amelioration for the Filipinos. His ideas were those of a socialist, and of a socialist of the French Revolution type, and he thought them applicable to an undeveloped tropical country, where the pressure of industrial competition is almost unknown, and where with the slightest reasonable exertion starvation may be dismissed from thought. There was in this new propaganda an element of resentment toward the wealthy, upper-class Filipinos, the landed proprietors in general, as well as toward the friar landlords and the whole fabric of government and society resting on them. Summing up all the evidence he has been able to obtain on the Katipunan, the writer agrees with Felipe G. Calderón, a Filipino, in his opinion [141] that its socialistic character negatives the assertion of the Spanish writers that the upper-class Filipinos were its real supporters and directors, working in the background; and that, while this propaganda from below looked to independence and the substitution of Spanish rule by Filipino rule, yet it was without any political program, properly speaking, and there was merely a crude idea in the minds of the masses that they were somehow going to shake off their masters, get rid of the whites, and divide up the big estates not only of the friars but of Filipino landholders as well. Calderón does not discuss the alleged plan of the Katipunan to assassinate the whites, especially the friars. It is certain that such bloodthirsty ideas were in the minds of some of the leaders; but the more direct documentary evidence that has been produced on this point is perhaps open to the suspicion that it was manufactured in connection with the courts-martial which operated with such fury after the outbreak of revolt in 1896. [142] After all the furore that had been made, the actual revelations as to the importance of the organization, character