This is a story founded on truth. Practically every incident told
about really happened; yet some liberty has been taken with the
arrangements of these incidents into a story. Events are sometimes
grouped outside of their natural order and place of occurrence,
and the time of action is shortened. Conversation is necessarily
invented, and is used to bring out the setting of the story and give
it life. Another thing: Every writer recognizes that it is desirable
to not have too many characters in a story, and to not drag it through
unimportant incidents. Therefore, I have omitted many incidents of
the occupation of the Philippines, and have in places ascribed to one
person, in an effort to keep down the number of characters, acts which
properly belonged to other persons, so that some of the characters
are representative and composite. To illustrate my meaning--that a
love story in the simplest form might run through the tale I have
made Saguanaldo appear as a lover as well as a general, though this
is acknowledged to be fiction. In other places I have one character
doing a work that was really done by a different person; but it
would have been difficult and confusing to use all the actors in the
stirring drama or to refer to all the many incidents. This shortening
of the period of action, and this combining in one person the deeds of
several, is something which Shakespeare did in his historical dramas;
so that this is historical in the same sense that some of his plays
are historical--not as to the truth of every word and the time and
place of every act, but in spirit and in incident. The truth is there,
but the grouping is made to meet the author's need.
There is no personal bias in this work. It is nothing to the author
that in this case the center of the plot hinges about churchmen. It
is no more than if it should center around secular affairs. It is the
old story of personal ambition which has appeared in a thousand forms
and has influenced all conditions of people. It is not a matter of
religion or irreligion, but a picture of what ambition will do for
even the best of aims and men.