The hero of the Filipinos

A futile insurrection had been followed by terrible reprisals and a hardening everywhere of the articulated tyranny, terrorism, and espionage with which the Government ruled. Su...

The boy that so early and by this savage tuition came to be initiated into his people’s sorrows was then chiefly remarkable for a gentle, tractable disposition and a liking for...

For the times and the place the Ateneo was a good school, by general consent the best in the Islands, in some respects matching well with an inferior preparatory school in Ameri...

What life meant for average millions in the Philippines, under what chill shadows of the jail and visions of the firing-squad they must draw breath, how shifty and blackguard wa...

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 i...

By the title of his novel Rizal meant not that he was touching a person forbidden, but a subject. The words he had found in a Latin version of the New Testament in the passage w...

Still unaware of the ruin that had come upon his hopes, Rizal was living in Berlin and working on the last chapters of “Noli Me Tangere.” He had taken cheap lodging in one of th...

Though all this time out of the sight of his enemies in Manila, he seems never to have been out of their minds; authoritative evidence that in his novel he had told the truth ab...

Sixteen years after Jagor printed his almost unheeded prophecy, other men less gifted might have seen that his views on Philippine evolution were soundly based. The conditions e...

The Indio that had startled the Spanish colony in Manila by daring to call the Philippines “my fatherland” proved his loyalty to the country he adored by serving it with a discr...

More than the persecutions launched against his family disturbed Rizal in the news he was receiving now from Manila. The fire of discontent was rising among the people of the Ph...

For Spanish or Filipino ears, “filibuster” has nothing of the comic or disreputable suggestion that it bears to the American. In the Philippines of Rizal’s day it denoted a pers...

Failure was all he reaped at Madrid in his efforts to win some measure of justice for his family, a fact that hardly could have astonished him then and seems but normal now. In...

About this was nothing sinister, illegal, revolutionary, affrighting, or incendiary, but the Spanish colony chose to view it with alarm. If Rizal had organized a prayer meeting...

To his father and mother he wrote urging them to come to Dapitan and make their home on the land that he had bought. In this he must have lightly estimated the rancor or the vig...

It was November 3, 1896, when Rizal, heavily guarded, passed again through the dark gateway of Fort Santiago, whence he had issued four years before to go to Dapitan. Now his en...

In this long conflict character shone forth and latent ability, refuting old slanders on the race. The Filipino disclosed himself. By ancient repute the Malayan was cruel and tr...