patients, even to that distant corner of the Archipelago. He performed cures which seemed miracles to the Filipinos, and gradually began to take on among all classes of the oppressed the character of deliverer of the Filipino people from the burdens that crushed them to the very earth. When war broke out in Cuba he offered his services as a military physician, and was permitted to leave the Philippines for Cuba via Spain. But before he had arrived in the peninsula the cable had carried certain accusations to Madrid, and once more he was thrown into prison. Returned to Manila as a prisoner, he was tried and convicted of sedition and rebellion. His condemnation had been determined before the trial began, and sentence of death followed as a matter of course. True, the insurrection was then being waged. But what part could this man have had in it? He had been a prisoner of state for four years, closely confined in a distant island. He left the Philippines at the very outbreak of the insurrection in August, 1896. He had no opportunity even to correspond with its leaders, as he was arrested on his arrival in Spain, and returned under the heaviest of military guards. No; his offense was that he dared to think! This was a crime too heinous for forgiveness. So on the morning of the 30th of December, 1896, Dr. Jose Rizal, the brightest intellectual light that has shone thus far in the Philippines, was publicly blindfolded and shot in the back on the execution grounds facing the bay in Manila. About two thousand troops formed on three sides of a square about him. Hundreds of friars were present witnessing the deed of blood with ill-concealed joy. Many of them, as an eye-witness told me, smoked cigars all the time their victim was being prepared for death, and their faces told of their relief that this troubler of their Israel

was silenced! But no one act of the friars so hastened their overthrow. Thousands who had held aloof from the insurrection, hoping for wiser counsels to prevail, saw in his death the doom of their hopes, and took up arms resolving to die fighting, if die they must, that their children might enjoy a liberty of thought and action which they never had. The brother of Dr. Rizal, Sr. Ponciano Rizal, took the field against Spanish authority immediately. He gathered a large force, and with them, and with troops who flocked to his standard as he fought his way into the interior, he drove all Spaniards out of the province of Laguna de Bay, which was a stronghold of the orders, and captured an entire Spanish garrison with arms and accouterments, besides lake gunboats and other materials most helpful to the insurrecto cause.

Senor Paulino Zamora, of Manila, was sent into banishment for several years for the crime of owning and reading a copy of the Bible. The friars infuriated the people through a stubborn and irritating enforcement of Church laws against freedom of thought and speech until the loyalty they bear the Catholic Church has suffered a severe strain, and in many cases has entirely given way, and friar and Church are together hated and shunned. No name is so popular in the Philippines to-day as that of Jose Rizal. His picture is on the walls of tens of thousands of homes, from the best houses of Filipino principales in Manila and the large provincial cities, to the humblest neepa bahay (or house) of the tao (or la

a) in remote villages. He is regarded on all hands as a martyr to their common cause against the intolerance of the friats. The three native priests, Burgos, Gomez, and Zamora, who were ignominiously killed for presuming to say that friars should keep the laws relating to the

occupation of parish curacies, are venerated as martyrs also. The doing to death of these four good citizens is only a small part of the indictment which might be brought against the friars in proof of their merciless intolerance. Time and space would forbid a recital of secret poisonings, assassinations, of numberless arrests, imprisonments, and deportations, of countless open and secret intimidations, which left the people in a state of constant fear, and finally begot within them a hatred which nothing can ever allay.

CHAPTER VII.

WHY THE FRIARS ARE HATED-Continued.

CONTINUING the statement of the chief causes which have produced the deep hatred which Filipinos cherish toward the friars, the next in order of importance is,3. Their insatiable greed for money.

Between the four great orders represented in the Philippine Mission a constant rivalry has existed from the earliest times. Every member of the orders was made to feel the heavy hand of his superiors if he failed to make his masses and marriages and handling of properties of the order yield the last centavo of income for the central treasury. Corresponding praise and promotion was for the friar who showed the most zeal for the enhancement of the revenues of his order. If one order secured a plum in the way of a well-located estate, the others sought to keep the accounts balanced by securing a better and larger one.

While there is little direct proof that individual friars violated their vows of poverty by appropriating moneys collected for ecclesiastical services to their own use, it is clear that the demand for money, and always for money, goaded the people into hatred of the members of the religious orders. We are not without proofs that friars did make a gain of their positions. I know a lawyer in Manila who is the guardian for the children of a prominent priest, and he has made handsome provision for them in the form of landed properties near Manila. How he could gain and hold them and keep his vow of poverty is not

clear to the non-friar mind. Probably he felt that, having trampled on his vow of chastity, it was a light thing to break the lesser vow of poverty. In any case such are

the facts.

I shall quote from Foreman, and from Senate Document No. 190, referred to in the last chapter, for proof of the contention that the friars have estranged the people through their insatiable greed for money. And to all that these witnesses state I can add my own conviction of the entire accuracy of their statements-a conviction growing out of months of contact with native life, during which innumerable proofs of this greed for their orders have come to my own attention.

Foreman says (page 226):

"The clergy also (in addition to the income from their estates) derived a very large portion of their incomes from commissions on the sale of cedulas (poll-tax certificates), sales of Papal Bulls, masses, pictures, books, chaplets and indulgencies, marriage, burial, and baptismal fees, benedictions, donations touted for after the crops were raised, legacies to be paid for in masses, remains of wax candles left in the church by the faithful, fees for getting souls out of purgatory, alms, etc. The surplus over and above parochial requirements were supposed to augment the common Church funds in Manila. The corporations were consequently immensely wealthy, and their power and influence were in consonance with that wealth. The Church as a body politic dispensed no charity, but received all. It was always begging. It claimed immunity [from taxation], proclaimed poverty, and inculcated in others charity to itself."

On page 221, Foreman tells in detail of,

"A money-grubbling parish priest-a friar-who publicly announced raffles from the pulpit of the church from which he preached morality and devotion. On one occasion a $200 watch was put up for $500, and at another