PILAR, MARCELO H. DEL (1850-1896).  Journalist and patriot.  A lawyer by profession, Marcelo H. Del Pilar was an early participant in the revolutionary movement through his readings of Jose Rizal’s novels.  He founded the Diariong Tagalog and in its columns agitated for reforms.  He denounced the “friarocracy” or government of friars and was consequently blacklisted by the Spanish friars.  Forced to flee to Spain, he continued to denounce the abusive policies of the civil government in the Philippines.  With anticlerical ferment brewing at home, Del Pilar in Spain stoked the fires of the revolution with his fiery articles in La Solidaridad, which he took over after its first editor, Graciano Lopez Jaena, resigned.  During his six-year editorship, he wrote numerous editorials, articles, and pamphlets on the theme of liberty and equality for the Filipinos.  Copies of the pamphlets written in simple Tagalog were smuggled into the Philippines and read by the revolutionists with great interest.  He was preparing to return home when his life was cut short by tuberculosis.  He died in Barcelona, a pauper, just weeks before the revolution began.

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Taken from Artemio R. Guillermo and May Kyi Win.  Historical Dictionary of the Philippines.  Asian / Oceanian Historical Dictionaries, No. 24.  (Lanham, Maryland and London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc.  1997), pp. 192-193.