what Spain spends on education! And this is one small item of the total cost to the country of its religious system. Add to this the millions obtained in the ordinary way of fees and collections, the millions received for bulas, the millions charged (on one pretext or another) for scapulars, rosaries, bullet-proof prayers, agnus-deis, and the whole medieval magazine of charms, the millions received for obtaining dipensations to marry, for baptisms, funerals, masses (each of which costs from two to twenty pesetas), and other ceremonies, the millions acquired by wills, by taking over the goods of monastic aspirants, and in other ways. And the whole of this vast proportion of an impoverished circulation goes to feed the parasitic growth, with no spiritual vitality or social usefulness, which I have described. Let the light fall on the mind of Spain, and this decrepit and corrupt agglomeration of medieval vices and abuses will be swept ruthlessly away. Rebellion against the Vatican has followed immediately upon the extension of popular enlightenment in France, in northern Italy, and in those South American Republics which have dared to educate. Beyond all question, it is following the same course in Spain.
Will this effete and corrupt body, with all its dependent industries, contemplate impartially the spread of education in Spain? Will that colossal revenue from bulas and other medieval barbarities continue when Spain is Europeanised—to use the phrase of its own social students?
The reader will see that we are coming back to the question of Ferrer and his work. It was quite impossible to set that work in its true perspective without first describing the institution it imperilled. Assuredly Ferrer was disseminating an explosive—the explosive of an enlightened spirit and a sense of dignity and independence. We shall see how the Church marked him out for destruction. A few years ago the greatest Spanish writer, Perez Galdos, put a drama (Electra) on the stage at Madrid, in which a beautiful young girl hesitated between the sombre call of the Jesuits and the call to life and happiness of sane heretics. It ended with her choosing life, instead of the living death of the medieval Church. The figure of the young girl was meant to be, and was recognised as, a symbol of Spain; and that
