ferocity, the author of the outrage, Salvador, was caught. He explained that he had acted quite alone, to avenge his friend. To avoid discomfort, he pleaded repentance and conversion, was petted by the clergy until the day of execution, and then laughed in their faces.
What proof is there of these inhuman tortures? The sworn testimony, the lacerated bodies, the atrophied genital organs, of the men themselves. One of them, Cerezuela, smuggled a full account to the Republican journal El Pais. The others in time obtained liberty, recanted the evidence wrung from them, and described the tortures. Their letters were collected and published by a Spanish schoolmaster, J. Monsey, in a work entitled El Proceso de un gran crimen. He observed that, if in the course of time people were informed that he had retracted, they would know that he was being tortured in prison. At the next "suspension of constitutional guarantees" he was put in prison.
This "suspension" occurred in 1896, and needs very careful examination. In the month of June, on the festival of Corpus Christi, the great religious procession of the Sacrament was marching through the streets of Barcelona. At the head were the chief clerical and military and civic dignitaries; in the tail walked the poorer groups of Catholics. A bomb was thrown from a window, with deadly effect, not at the head, but at the tail, of the procession. A strange thing for an Anarchist to wait until My Lord the Bishop, the Civil Governor, and all that he hated most fiercely had gone by, and then throw his bomb at a group of innocent men and women of his own class! The criminal was never discovered, but the Freethinkers and Radicals of Barcelona began to suspect that there were bomb-factories in unexpected places. We shall see that two police-agents have since been caught red-handed, and exposed in civil trial; and that the recent rioters at Barcelona found a bomb-factory in a convent.
What earthly object could civic or clerical authorities have in countenancing such a deed, the astounded Briton asks? I will only say that the throwing of that bomb was singularly profitable to the clergy and their allies. At once the constitutional guarantees were suspended. Jesuits and lay confraternities of Catholics ran about with denunciations
