future you prepare for them, and they have to thank you for a life
of humiliation and suffering! Good enough, young man! When a body
is inert, it is useless to galvanize it. Twenty years of continuous
slavery, of systematic humiliation, of constant prostration, finally
create in the mind a twist that cannot be straightened by the labor
of a day. Good and evil instincts are inherited and transmitted from
father to son. Then let your idylic ideas live, your dreams of a
slave who asks only for a bandage to wrap the chain so that it may
rattle less and not ulcerate his skin! You hope for a little home
and some ease, a wife and a handful of rice--here is your ideal man
of the Philippines! Well, if they give it to you, consider yourself
fortunate."

Basilio, accustomed to obey and bear with the caprices and humors
of Capitan Tiago. was now dominated by Simoun, who appeared to him
terrible and sinister on a background bathed in tears and blood. He
tried to explain himself by saying that he did not consider himself
fit to mix in politics, that he had no political opinions because
he had never studied the question, but that he was always ready to
lend his services the day they might be needed, that for the moment
he saw only one need, the enlightenment of the people.

Simoun stopped him with a gesture, and, as the dawn was coming,
said to him: "Young man, I am not warning you to keep my secret,
because I know that discretion is one of your good qualities, and
even though you might wish to sell me, the jeweler Simoun, the friend
of the authorities and of the religious corporations, will always
be given more credit than the student Basilio, already suspected
of filibusterism, and, being a native, so much the more marked and
watched, and because in the profession you are entering upon you