Note 5 — Chapter VII · AGAIN IN THE PHILIPPINES

Long experimentation with the surviving methods of the Inquisition had made the Government expert in these matters. It issued at once a decree excluding from the pious Islands a work of such sacrilege and ordered diligent search to be made for any copies that might have slipped in to corrupt virtue and overthrow the king. Wherever such copies might be found they were to be burned by the public executioner. Most rigorous punishments waited upon the heels of this decree. Any Filipino found after a certain date in possession of a copy of “Noli Me Tangere” was to suffer imprisonment or deportation, with the loss of all his property; this to be confiscated for the benefit of whomsoever should inform against him. Despite all this valorous resolving and proclaiming and shaking of the long ears of senile decrepitude, the book continued to come in and to be circulated. One may suspect that what the Government chiefly effected was gratuitous advertisement. In a short time “Noli Me Tangere” became the first topic of conversation throughout the educated circles in the islands. The classes whose vices and villainies were most fiercely attacked in it were its most determined readers. Let the Government do its utmost to annihilate the book; in the teeth of decrees, Civil Guards, spies, and inquisitors, Rizal’s purposes were already accomplished. The corrupt, greedy, tyrannical friar, the plundering, swaggering, brutal Spanish officer, the beneficiaries of the System and those consenting to it, saw themselves for the first time pilloried in print.5