ABSTRACT
What life meant for average millions in the Philippines, how shifty and blackguard was the Government imposed upon them, the authors may glimpse from what happened as soon as Jose Rizal's absence was discovered. Paciano, the brother, who had been a confidant in this desperate plot to take ship and go, was reduced to a kind of play-acting, running about Rizal's lodging and inquiring frantically for his lost brother as if he conjectured suicide, assassination, or kidnapping. 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. To be thus vivid and convincing about any phase of life is not easy; to make intimate to the European a life in the world's remotest outskirts, of whose terms the European has no conception, difficulties.
