Yet he drew considerable numbers about
him, for this man, though almost entirely unlettered, seems to have
been quite a personality among his own people, especially possessed
of that gift of oratory in his native tongue to which the Malay is
so preeminently susceptible.
In Manila a special tribunal was constituted and worked steadily,
sometimes through the siesta-hour, for there were times, of which
this was one, when even Spanish justice could be swift. Bagumbayan
began to be a veritable field of blood, as the old methods of
repression were resorted to for the purpose of striking terror into
the native population by wholesale executions, nor did the ruling
powers realize that the time for such methods had passed. It was a
case of sixteenth-century colonial methods fallen into fretful and
frantic senility, so in all this wretched business it is doubtful whim
to pity the more: the blind stupidity of the fossilized conservatives
incontinently throwing an empire away, forfeiting their influence over
a people whom they, by temperament and experience, should have been
fitted to control and govern; or the potential cruelty of perverted
human nature in the dark Frankenstein who would wreak upon the rulers
in their decadent days the most hideous of the methods in the system
that produced him, as he planned his festive holocaust and carmagnole
on the spot where every spark of initiative and leadership among
his people, both good and bad, had been summarily and ruthlessly
extinguished.
Pages:
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85