and the people had no leaders and no plan. The notion that the outbreak was organised, by Ferrer or anybody else, is grotesquely untrue to every account we have of the course of events. The slightest acquaintance with Barcelona politics shows the absurdity of such a notion. Advanced bodies in Barcelona are so fundamentally opposed to each other that the moment a question of construction arose it would be utterly impossible to take a single step. The Separatists would demand the autonomy of Barcelona; the great body of the Republicans, under Alejandro Lerroux, would oppose it (because the Separatist movement has a suspicious proportion of Catholic adherents); the Socialists would plead for an entirely new economic system; the Anarchists would strongly oppose all their plans.
But the spontaneity and aimlessness of the outbreak are palpable. I will add only two curious testimonies. I was permitted to see a letter written secretly from one of the Anarchists of Barcelona, who had eluded the police, to a sympathetic leader outside Spain. In this candid and intimate account the working-man writer says, exultantly: "The people did the whole thing, without anybody's help." The next witness is the South American Anarchist daily, La Protesta. Writing to this journal from Barcelona on July 30, before the reaction has begun, Alejandro Sux remarks on "the absolute lack of aim" in the disturbances. No leaders were seen, he says. It was a spontaneous outburst of "the indignation of men and sorrow of the women" on account of the corruptly engineered war, which fell on the poor. Anselmo Lorenzo tells exactly the same story.
The sequel need be recalled in few words, before we return to Ferrer. Fresh troops were introduced, and the insurgents were at once repressed. The barricades were swept with artillery. The number of rioters and soldiers killed is differently reported, and may be roughly set down at about a hundred. Then the "white terror" set in. The constitutional guarantees had been already suspended, and there was no pretence of seeking evidence. Within a few weeks 3,000 men and women and some children were packed in the jails of Catalonia. In many cases, the official journal (Correspondencia Militar) admitted, there, was "no time" to frame
