Note 16 — Chapter VII · AGAIN IN THE PHILIPPINES

This time there was no difficulty about his passport and no need that he should, like an escaping criminal, steal at night from the city. The responsible powers were but too glad to have him go. He sailed from Manila on February 28, 1888, going first to Hong-Kong. There and in the neighboring city of Macao he visited and talked with many refugees and exiles of 1872, annus hystericus in Philippine history. By deportation or flight that year the islands had lost hundreds of their best minds and ablest servitors. That many of these were afterward proved to have had nothing to do with the uprising for which they were banished or hunted is superfluous evidence of the mad psychology of the time. In most of these cases there were no trials, no investigations, no queries. Some one frenzied with fear imagined the man across the street to be behaving in a way that indicated conspiracy; to the Ladrones with him! Some one else saw two men in the street salute each other with suspicious gravity; the next morning both were on their way to the Carolines.16 The Herrara family had maintained a back yard quarrel with the Venturas. Mr. Ventura was denounced and spent the rest of his life in loneliness at Macao. It was the Lion’s Mouth and the cachets of the Bastile, revived for the astonished instruction of the age of steam. Cases are in the records of men that were seen carrying home bundles—fish, maybe, or steak. “Bombs!” cried the officers, under the sway of emotion, and that night haled the unfortunate householder from his bed. Sometimes the intended victims of these maniacal manifestations received friendly hints before the blow fell and had time to flee to the woods, whence they made their way out of the country, to live, very likely, in the utmost poverty.