The paper stood for the moderate aims of representation of the Philippines in the Cortes, or Spanish parliament;

secularization of the clergy; legalization of Spanish and Filipino equality; creation of a public school system
independent of the friars; abolition of the polo (labor service) and vandala (forced sale of local products to the
government); guarantee of basic freedoms of speech and association; and equal opportunity for Filipinos and
Spanish to enter government service

The fact, that they wrote in Spanish, was certainly an important factor limiting the influence of the propagandists,
because Spanish was a language virtually unknown to the masses. Additionally censorship seriously limited the
inflow of such reading matter and made it`s possession very risky.

Jose Rizal, a Filipino nationalist and medical doctor, conceived the idea of writing a novel that would
expose the ills of Philippine society after reading Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He
preferred that the prospective novel express the way Filipino culture was backward, anti-progress, anti-
intellectual, and not conducive to the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment. He was then a student of
medicine in the Universidad Central de Madrid.

In a reunion of Filipinos at the house of his friend Pedro A. Paterno in Madrid on 2 January 1884, Rizal
proposed the writing of a novel about the Philippines written by a group of Filipinos. His proposal was
unanimously approved by the Filipinos present at the party, among whom were Pedro, Maximino and
Antonio Paterno, Graciano López Jaena, Evaristo Aguirre, Eduardo de Lete, Julio Llorente and Valentin
Ventura. However, this project did not materialize. The people who agreed to help Rizal with the novel
did not write anything. Initially, the novel was planned to cover and describe all phases of Filipino life,
but almost everybody wanted to write about women. Rizal even saw his companions spend more time
gambling and flirting with Spanish women. Because of this, he pulled out of the plan of co-writing with
others and decided to draft the novel alone

Rizal finished the novel on December 1886. At first, according to one of Rizal’s biographers, Rizal feared
the novel might not be printed, and that it would remain unread. He was struggling with financial
constraints at the time and thought it would be hard to pursue printing the novel. A financial aid came from
a friend named Máximo Viola. Rizal at first, however, hesitated but Viola insisted and ended up lending
Rizal P300 for 2,000 copies; Noli was eventually printed in Berlin, Germany. The printing was finished
earlier than the estimated five months. Viola arrived in Berlin in December 1886, and by March 21, 1887,
Rizal had sent a copy of the novel to his friend Blumentritt