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Updated: June 12, 2025
Rizal's congenial situation in the British capital was disturbed by his discovering a growing interest in the youngest of the three girls whom he daily met. He felt that his career did not permit him to marry, nor was his youthful affection for his cousin in Manila an entirely forgotten sentiment.
Neither is exact in its representation, but each serves its purpose the better because it magnifies the important and minimizes the unimportant. In his disunited and abased countrymen, Rizal's writings aroused, as he intended they should, the spirit of nationality, of a Fatherland which was not Spain, and put their feet on the road to progress.
Rizal's memory has one safeguard against the misrepresentations which the absence of any witnesses favorable to him make possible regarding his last moments: a political retraction would have prevented his execution, and since the execution did take place, it is reasonable to believe that Rizal died holding the views for which he had expressed himself willing to suffer martyrdom.
Rizal's former reply had dealt with the difficulty the government was in respecting the land troubles, since the tenants who had taken the old renters' places now also must be considered, and he pointed out that there was, besides, a bitterness between the parties which could not easily be forgotten by either side.
He loved Spain as he did his own country, and repeatedly used his influence against the rebellious measures proposed by other Filipino leaders. His execution was only one of the numerous outrages which characterized Spain's reign in the Philippines. In closing this short sketch of Rizal's life we can do no better than to quote the estimate of him made by Dr.
Still in the main Rizal's judgment was correct, and he was the victim of mistimed, rather than of misplaced, confidence, for as soon as the knowledge of the real Rizal became known to the Spanish people, belated justice began to be done his memory, and then, repentant and remorseful, as is characteristically Castilian, there was little delay and no half-heartedness.
"Noli Me Tangere" circulated first among Doctor Rizal's relatives; on one occasion a cousin made a special trip to Kalamba and took the author to task for having caricatured her in the character of Doña Victorina.
An inspection of the colonial prison with him inspired Rizal's article, "A Visit to Victoria Gaol," through which runs a pathetic contrast of the English system of imprisonment for reformation with the Spanish vindictive methods of punishment.
It had caused the succession of the revolutionary Katipunan to the economic Liga Filipina, with talk of independence supplanting Rizal's ambition for the return of the Philippines to their former status under the Constitution of Cadiz. But the victim of the arrest was at peace as he had not been in years.
For a quarter of a century Spain had been ruling in the Philippines by terrorizing its subjects there, and Rizal's execution, with utter disregard of the most elementary rules of judicial procedure, was the culmination that drove the Filipinos to desperation and arrested the attention of the whole civilized world.
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