Page:The Martyrdom of Ferrer.djvu/68

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62
THE REPLY OF CORRUPTION

issuing, bomb in hand, from the Escuela Moderna. He is shaking the hand of someone whose face is not seen. In the lower part is depicted the honest, industrious workman who is turned out "in thousands" from the Catholic schools. Ferrer has lightly written on it that "the Jesuits are not backward," and sent it to an English friend. The date stamped on it is March 2, 1907. In other words, this infamous inculpation of Ferrer was circulated over Spain while he still awaited trial in the prison at Madrid. In England we should know what to do with those Jesuits. In Spain they pursued the same tactics this year.

However, as we shall find ample proof of the guilt of the clergy and of their unscrupulous poisoning of the public mind while Ferrer awaited trial this year, we need not delay. The action of the Fiscal was not less instructive; the evidence he gathered not less hypocritical. At first, in the absence of anything with the remotest pretension to be proof of complicity in the bomb outrage, he demanded that Ferrer be imprisoned for life as "a man who was extremely dangerous on account of his anti-religious views"; and this note was struck repeatedly throughout the trial when evidence broke down. During the twelve months' wait in jail (June 3, 1906, to June 3, 1907), moreover, the evidence for the prosecution was communicated to the Press (as in the present year), and garbled versions of it were disseminated through Spain and the rest of Europe. A Madrid magistrate, Santiago Mataix, showed the case for the prosecution to several journalists, with the express object of condemning Ferrer in advance. One of these, Urales, editor of the Diario Universal resigned his position, and exposed the scandalous action in the España Nueva. Urales also interviewed Becerra del Toro. "Have you any proof of Ferrer's guilt?" he asked. "No," the Fiscal answered; "we have no proof of Ferrer's guilt, but we have a moral conviction of it."

It was the shameful story of 1909 in anticipation. The determination to kill Ferrer was dressed as a conviction that he was the "moral author" of outrages; and the reader may guess whether, in a country where officials do not even need to trouble that the end justifies the means, since the end itself has no justification, the collection of evidence would be