of the mother country and selfishly abused the ample and unrestrained
powers with which Spain invested them.

And what may seem the exaltation of the Anglo-Saxons at the expense of
the Latins in these pages is intended only to point out the superiority
of their ordered system of government, with its checks and balances,
its individual rights and individual duties, under which men are
"free to live by no man's leave, underneath the Law." No human being
can be safely trusted with unlimited power, and no man, no matter
what his nationality, could have withstood the temptations offered by
the chaotic conditions in the Philippines in past times any better
than did the Spaniards. There is nothing written in this book that
should convey the opinion that in similar circumstances men of any
nationality would not have acted as the Spaniards did. The easiest
recognized characteristic of absolutism, and all the abuses and
corruption it brings in its train, is fear of criticism, and Spain
drew her own indictment in the Philippines when she executed Rizal.

When any nation sets out to enroll all its scholarly critics among
the martyrs in the cause of Liberty, it makes an open confession of
guilt to all the world. 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. It was evident that Rizal's fate might have been that of any
of his countrymen, and the thinking world saw that events had taken
such a course in the Philippines that it had become justifiable for
the Filipinos to attempt to dissolve the political bands which had
connected them with Spain for over three centuries.