Note 10 — Chapter I · A PEOPLE’S WRONGS

The seventh of her children, José, was then eleven years old and a student in a preparatory school in Manila. Upon his mind the reports that came to him of the successive steps in her degradation stamped themselves as if in iron. Even when he had become a mature man, famous, accomplished, absorbed in studies and achievements at the other side of the busy world, the thought of that great wrong haunted and goaded him. Yet it had been no novelty, even in his short experience; it had been no more than a focus, upon the one household he knew best, of wrongs with which other households were familiar and of which he had often heard. All his conscious days he had been aware, and ever better aware, of the cold, black, implacable despotism that had yoked and now drove and lashed his people. He knew well the hateful excesses of the Civil Guard, the license and arrogance of the governing class, the extortion and thefts, the infinite scorn in which the subject race was held, the intolerable parody of justice, the bitter jest of the code and the court-room, the flogging of men, the violating of women, the protected murderers, the rapists that went untouched and unabashed. When he was only five years old he used to sit on the shore of that beautiful green lake, the Laguna de Bay, and look across it and wonder if the people that lived on the other side were as wretched as the people of Calamba, whether they were beaten, kicked and trodden upon, whether they dwelt in the same terror of the Civil Guards and the flogging-rods.10 He said years afterward that even then he had a distinct conviction that these things were not necessary and that there must be some region on the earth where its children could be happy and enjoy the sunshine, the flowers, and the beautiful things that seemed made for their delight.