Note 1 — Chapter IV · VOICES OF PROPHECY

Sketch-book in hand, the cause and occasion of all this uproar pursued his way in peace, recording types among his fellow-passengers and sopping up information like some form of sponge. From Singapore he journeyed by French mail-boat through the Suez Canal to Marseilles, and so to Barcelona. There he tarried some months and observed without infection the extreme revolutionary movement that centered always in that restless city.1 Many Filipinos were in Barcelona; it was passing strange to one late escaped from the gag-law and press-gang conditions of the Philippines to a place under the same flag where men could say and print what they thought. There were publications in Barcelona that in the Philippines would have brought out the executioner and added martyrs to the overcharged lists of Bagumbayan Field. The Socratic mind of Rizal, with a question for every phenomenon, could not fail to note this nor to find the cause of it. Government loved freedom of speech no better in Barcelona than in Manila. But in Barcelona the people were ready to fight for their rights as they had fought for them more than once. In this fact lay all the contrast.