Spain is exceedingly small. I trust that this plain and fully documented story of the real situation will prevent that fine and promising people from having its annals again stained, by those who hold power over it, with another such crime against humanity as the murder of Francisco Ferrer.
For Ferrer was murdered. He had no connection whatever with the fatal disturbances which recently wet the streets of Barcelona with blood. He was in England a few weeks before the outbreak, and intended to remain in England for some months. The news that a dearly-loved niece was dangerously ill caused him to return to Barcelona. The child died; but another accident, a request for information from Paris, detained him in Barcelona over the fatal day. He wrote to a friend from Barcelona in the midst of the riots—wrote as a spectator, wondering what would happen next. Every word of this was proved by his letters to intimate friends. And when those friends sent these decisive letters to his advocate at Barcelona they were stolen by the officials, and not suffered to be used in his defence.
Ferrer had for many years held aloof from politics. Of the two chief groups of advanced political enthusiasts in Barcelona, the Republicans and the Anarchists, neither recognised him as entirely belonging to them. His work was education alone, and not one line of his school-books has yet been quoted, with chapter and verse, in the journals of any country in support of the calumny that his schools taught violent rebellion. They did not. Ferrer had political ideals, which I will duly describe; but his personal task was to make the people of Spain competent to use their judgment on political, social, and religious subjects. With single aim and noble self-sacrifice he used a comfortable estate in providing the schools which the Government refuses—in
