conclusion that the education of the child alone would lead to the betterment of men and to the dawn of happier days for his unhappy country.” Marinelli adds that Ferrer wrote (May 27, 1907) from his prison cell to a group of Barcelona youths: “Do not let us play with words. Liberals, Republicans, or Anarchists—these were, and are, words to be avoided by us who march with all our hearts towards the ideal of human regeneration.”
These concordant testimonies are a few out of the many that have been published, and agree entirely with the words of the seven or eight personal friends of Ferrer with whom I have spoken. We shall find him, true to that ideal, looking on, passively and wonderingly, when the crowds are seething about him in the fatal days of July at Barcelona. The fifteen years of study, observation, and reflection at Paris had induced him to turn from revolutionary ways to an ideal of education. Of “revolution” he still spoke and wrote frequently; but he always said “social revolution.” He gained belief in the power of ideas. To the end he had cherished friends of the revolutionary school. He did not criticise their hopes and methods, but followed his own.
A distinguished Anarchist said to me: “To the Republicans he was an Anarchist; to the Anarchists he was a Republican.” It is the finest statement of the political position he had reached. The works of Professor Reclus and Prince Kropotkin had a fascination for him. With them he believed—little wonder after his experience of the Spanish political world—that a decentralised administration of a nation's affairs, leaving the maximum of liberty to the individual, was the best ideal of society. This is the real gist of Anarchism. Its accidental alliance in a few cases—about one in a thousand Anarchists in Spain, a Spanish Anarchist tells me—with the use of dynamite must not blind us. As a social ideal it has a right to plead at the bar of public discussion like any other. But the work to be done immediately in Spain was to educate, and Ferrer eschewed political organisation to turn teacher.
He was then nearing his fortieth year. A teacher of merit in a small institution, unknown to the world, he moved restlessly under the burden of his ideal. The great contrast
