of its leaders, number of its followers, and extent of its operations, would have made the whole affair somewhat ridiculous, had it not been represented that behind this humble organization of perhaps forty thousand initiates in the Tagálog towns there was a great program for setting up an independent government and that the upper-class Filipinos were simply using this organization as a stalking-horse. The truth appears to be that, while these over-important Katipunan leaders thought in terms grandiloquent, and led their humble followers in the towns around Manila most affected by the propaganda to indulge in futile and ridiculous dreams of a coming millennium (while some of themselves were quarreling over the obols contributed), the movement was mostly talk even up to the time when an Augustinian curate in Manila made himself the hero of the rabid Spanish element in Manila by "exposing" an organization about which the governmental authorities had had partial information for some weeks, or even months. Bonifacio started this separate organization in 1894, but Calderón seems to be correct in saying that work in the towns outside of Manila was only begun in the spring of 1896. The humble followers were assured that the Japanese government would help them oust Spain, and that rifles to arm the whole population would come from there. But Japan never in the least violated her obligations to Spain, and, if the leaders even bought any rifles in Japan, they must have been few indeed. [143] When Bonifacio sent an emissary to Dapitan in the spring of 1896, to propose to Rizal a plan of armed revolt and that he should escape on a steam vessel sent for the purpose, and join in this campaign, Rizal rejected the proposition as folly, and displayed his great impatience with it. [144] On every ground, it seems probable that, had not Friar Gil and the Spanish press of Manila been so insistent on giving great publicity to some Katipunan engraving-stones, receipts for dues, etc., kept in hiding by the affiliated employes of a Spanish newspaper, the revolt might never have come about at all. Certainly, no date was set for it (though various future dates had been vaguely discussed), till the sudden arrests of August 19 and 20, 1896, sent Bonifacio and his companions fleeing to Bulakan Province where, practically without arms, they appealed to their fellow-workers in Bulakan, Manila, and Cavite provinces to rise in revolt on August 30. The friars and the rabid element of Spanish patriots were so anxious to force the hand of Blanco, and to discredit him, that, it may be, they forced upon a military commander whose troops were mostly in Mindanao a revolt that, a few months further on, might either have dissipated itself or have been avoided by an adequate show of force. [145]