Devoid of education, living in a family of fanatical orthodoxy, the lad had no encouragement to lean towards rebellion. His brother José was a young iconoclast, it is true, with a destructive aversion for objects of piety. But Francisco was quiet and respectful. I do not labour the obscure details of his boyhood. We have graver matters to consider. All that one need note is that, as Francisco advanced into youth, his younger spirit responded to the cries that echoed from over the hills, and he began to differ profoundly from his father. At the age of thirteen he was sent to Barcelona, some twelve miles away, to take service in a drapery establishment. The proprietor had known religious persecution, and his anticlerical temper was communicated to the industrious and intelligent boy, who became a great favourite. By his twentieth year he openly declared himself Republican, and the family link was broken. A few years later he joined the Freemasons.
It is important to understand Ferrer's early revolutionary career, because some of the documents which were embodied in the charge against him belong to this early period. Those who framed the charge were well aware of the real nature of these documents. They knew the recent history of Spain, and the part that Ferrer had played in it. But few people outside the country are acquainted with the stirring and complicated story of Spain's political development in the later nineteenth century, and Ferrer's murderers found it possible to surprise foreigners with revolutionary documents and insist, mendaciously, that they were of recent date. They belonged to Ferrer's early manhood, and were curious relics of a phase in his career that he had long outlived.
The figure in Spanish political life that caught the eye of the young Catalonian was that of Ruiz Zorrilla, the brilliant and passionate leader of the Republican Progressist party. Zorrilla had been one of the leading spirits in the revolution of 1868, and had then joined in the importation of Amadeo of Savoy, under whose short reign he occupied the post of Minister of Public Instruction. Ferrer was destined to enter into close co-operation with him, and in Zorrilla's anti-clerical, Republican ideal and zeal for education one can see the early source of his inspiration. If the reader finds the atmosphere of rebellion unfamiliar, I must remind him of the long decades
