Francisco Ferrer y Guardia was born at Alella, in one of the quiet vine-clad valleys of Catalonia, January 10, 1859. Nothing in his origin gave promise of the distinguished career which has been brought to so tragic a termination. For half a century Spain had been washed with blood, and the new aspirations of Europe had fought valiantly for a place in its life. Over Spain had been spread the titanic struggle of Napoleon I. and England. To Spain the Holy Alliance had sent back the Catholic monarch, who, with a lying oath to observe the Constitution, had turned on his more enlightened subjects with a ferocity that far outran the "white terror" of France, Austria, and the Papal States. Over Spain had raged, when Ferdinand VII.'s bloody reign was over, the long and violent conflict of Liberals and Conservatives, Clericals and Anti-clericals.
No valley of Spain was so remote or so densely ignorant as to be insensitive to the prolonged and murderous conflict of the old and the new ideas, but it was only a vague and confused echo that rumbled in the ears of the peasantry. Usually only one man in their village could read—the priest—and the version he gave them of the distant battles was couched in the language of the seminary. The Liberals were the forerunners of Antichrist. The mouth of the pit had been suffered to open; the emissaries of Satan were then, in 1859, in power at Madrid. They had ventured, two years earlier, to pass a law of universal elementary education. So the small vineyard-owner Ferrer and his wife—from whom, by a pretty Spanish custom, the martyred teacher took the name of Guardia—shrank closer to their Church, looked on letters as more dangerous than wine or pretty faces, and bought their indulgences of the cura with a complete
