Stranger death-dirge no man and system
ever had. Carnival revelers now dance about the scene and Filipino
schoolboys play baseball over that same spot.
A few days later another execution was held on that spot, of members
of the Liga, some of them characters that would have richly deserved
shooting at any place or time, according to existing standards, but
notable among them there knelt, torture-crazed, as to his orisons,
Francisco Roxas, millionaire capitalist, who may be regarded as the
social and economic head of the Filipino people, as Rizal was fitted
to be their intellectual leader. Shades of Anda and Vargas! Out there
at Balintawak--rather fitly, "the home of the snake-demon,"--not
three hours' march from this same spot, on tile very edge of the city,
Andres Bonifacio and his literally sansculottic gangs of cutthroats
were, almost with impunity, soiling the fair name of Freedom with
murder and mutilation, rape and rapine, awakening the worst passions
of an excitable, impulsive people, destroying that essential respect
for law and order, which to restore would take a holocaust of fire and
blood, with a generation of severe training.
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