Note 15 — THE FRIAR MEMORIAL OF 1898

That, your Excellency, is the watchword that has been given to all the filibusters, and to all who will procure the emancipation of the country in one way or another, for their separatist ends, and especially since the treaty of Biac-na-bató. “There is nothing against España, nothing against the king, nothing against the army, nothing against the Spanish administration: say if you have seized arms that it has been exclusively because of the abuses of the clergy, that you were not attempting separation from the mother-country; that you wished only modern liberties and the disappearance of the orders. And even though all the documents, judicial and extrajudicial, in which appear the plans of the conspirators, and all the acts of the canton of Cavite, during its ephemeral emancipation, demonstrates the contrary, let us exert ourselves to say that that was not the intention of the rebels, that that was an affair of some enthusiasts or madmen, but that the great mass of the insurgents seized arms only through coveting those liberties. The multitude of lay Spaniards of every class and profession sacrificed; the countless natives killed or harassed in innumerable ways, because of their unswerving loyalty to the fatherland; the cries of ‘Death to the Castilas!’ and ‘Long live the Tagálogs!’ the stamps of a Tagálog republic, a Filipino republic,15 an army of freedom; the speeches and circulars of the assembly or supreme council; the fiery Katipunan constitution written in characters of a mysterious key, and that written at Biac-na-bató; and in their style, an infinite number of deeds and documents, many of them very recent, which even to satiety evidently demonstrate the anti-Spanish and separatist character of the insurrection: all that we shall now conceal by crying ‘Down with the friars!’ ‘Long live democratic liberties!’ ‘Long live España!’ and with those cries are we certain of being heard, and in that way shall we be able to more easily attain the final goal of our desires.”