to take serious notice of such charges. Anonymity of writers is bad enough; anonymity of quotations usually means forgery or falsification.
I have examined many of the works in question; informants of mine who possess the whole series report that no such passages occur in them. Again, one must reflect whether the Spanish authorities would have waited so long to entrap Ferrer, and would have shrunk from a civil trial, if they could have put before a court works containing the passages alleged. The civil courts of Spain would suffice to deal with schools in which children were taught "literally" to shoot or to pillage. Even before the Military Council these books were not produced, and no allusion was made to them whatever.
The plain truth—and it is the plain truth I submit in contrast to a crowd of anonymous allegations, resting on no proof or authority—is that the spirit of the teaching in some of the manuals was democratic. Ferrer, seeing the political and clerical corruption about him, would have thought it cowardly to conceal his social ideal or his views of religion. His schools were founded to inaugurate the elevation of the Spanish people, and protests against injustice and war had a legitimate place in them. This is a matter on a totally different plane from the incitements to kill and to pillage which have been fraudulently ascribed to him. Not a single word of that nature ever occurred in the Modern Schools, and not the least attempt has been made to prove that it did. The well-known Anarchist, M. Malato, informed me that Ferrer expressly directed him to avoid Anarchism in the one or two works he compiled for the schools. Only such sentiments were communicated to the children as will be found in any democratic school in England. The dissemination of such sentiments in so corrupt a country as Spain is dangerous to the corruption. But even there no law is broken by the peaceful propaganda of advanced social views. The case of the murderers of Ferrer rests entirely on allegations that he, directly or indirectly, incited to murder or the destruction of property. We have shown that this was utterly foreign to the spirit in which he left Paris. We shall see that it is a gross and groundless calumny.
The real spirit in which Ferrer set about his work is made
