Basilio shook his head and remained pensive.  “All the tardy vindications of justice, all the revenge in the world, will not restore a single hair of my mother’s head, or recall a smile to my brother’s lips.  Let them rest in peace—­what should I gain now by avenging them?”

“Prevent others from suffering what you have suffered, that in the future there be no brothers murdered or mothers driven to madness.  Resignation is not always a virtue; it is a crime when it encourages tyrants:  there are no despots where there are no slaves!  Man is in his own nature so wicked that he always abuses complaisance.  I thought as you do, and you know what my fate was.  Those who caused your misfortunes are watching you day and night, they suspect that you are only biding your time, they take your eagerness to learn, your love of study, your very complaisance, for burning desires for revenge.  The day they can get rid of you they will do with you as they did with me, and they will not let you grow to manhood, because they fear and hate you!”

“Hate me?  Still hate me after the wrong they have done me?” asked the youth in surprise.

Simoun burst into a laugh. “’It is natural for man to hate those whom he has wronged,’ said Tacitus, confirming the quos laeserunt et oderunt of Seneca.  When you wish to gauge the evil or the good that one people has done to another, you have only to observe whether it hates or loves.  Thus is explained the reason why many who have enriched themselves here in the high offices they have filled, on their return to the Peninsula relieve themselves by slanders and insults against those who have been their victims. Proprium humani ingenii est odisse quern laeseris!"

“But if the world is large, if one leaves them to the peaceful enjoyment of power, if I ask only to be allowed to work, to live—­”

“And to rear meek-natured sons to send them afterwards to submit to the yoke,” continued Simoun, cruelly mimicking Basilio’s tone.  “A fine 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.