Note 1 — Chapter XVI · “I CAME FROM MARTYRDOM UNTO THIS PEACE”

But of anything civilized men could call evidence against him or of reason for anything such men could call a trial there was no trace nor suggestion. Say that the Katipunan was all that hysteria described it; not a scrap of paper connected Rizal with it. He was not a member; he had expressly disapproved of its aims; he had been an exile in Dapitan while it was being formed. How then? And what then? In all such dilemmas it had been the practice of the Government of the Philippines to resort to those medieval precedents that best befitted the theory upon which its authority was based. Where required testimony was not to be stumbled upon it was usually to be produced with the thumb-screw and the lash; to torture somebody into perjury was the sovereign specific. Upon these promptings the authorities seized Paciano, Rizal’s brother, and exercised upon him their most recondite arts. To his left hand was fitted the terrible screw; at his right were pen and ink and a statement that his brother had part in the Katipunan conspiracy. Then the screw was applied until the victim fainted with the pain. But he would not sign; no, not for all the ingenious torments of their devising. There was iron in the Rizal blood; father and mother had shown it. When the mother had started to trudge around Laguna de Bay, when the father had refused to submit to the tyranny of the friar’s agent, when José had dared to write “Noli Me Tangere,” they had vindicated their tribal inheritance. Paciano was all of the same stern race. Day and night the horror continued; he was trussed up until he fainted again, and then was revived with stimulants for new sufferings, and still he would not sign. Then his mind began to wander; he was plainly unable to sign anything, and the torturers released him.1