Joseph McCabe

“ By one of the most singular pieces of hypocrisy in the whole sordid campaign for the support of all acknowledged corruption, the crowd which broke into the Jesuit convent at Barcelona found the shells of bombs therein! For a long time this was widely suspected in Barcelona, where the Jesuits are known to be capable of any enormity. It is not many years since a drama—Paternidad—was staged at Barcelona, in which the Jesuits were loaded with all the most shameless and criminal excesses that any Protestant ever believed them capable of perpetrating. ”

“ A new force, a new centre of strength and inspiration, had come into the province—the educational work of Ferrer. Workers were no longer compelled to send their children to learn servility to corrupt priests and corrupt politicians at Catholic schools, or to leave them illiterate. A magnificent enthusiasm ran through the scattered ranks of the rebels. Something tangible, a positive institution, was now before their eyes; and its influence was spreading slowly over all Catalonia and a good deal of Spain. Then, on May 31, 1906, an Anarchist threw a bomb at the young King and his bride. ”

“ After this Catholic testimony I need not linger over the morality of the Spanish clergy. As an ex-priest I have always refused to create prejudice against my late co-religionists by discussing this side of their affairs; but when a body of priests like those of the Spanish Church egg on the civic or military officials to murder in their corrupt interests it is time to speak. There is immorality enough even among the priests of this country. ”

“ By an inevitable reaction the Press of Europe has been employed by a corps of anonymous contributors to besmirch the memory of the dead man, and to vindicate those who are responsible for his death. While leaders of culture, such as Sudermann, Maeterlinck, and Anatole France, have branded the execution of Ferrer as a judicial murder, a flood of stories and documents has been poured out which, if one-half the statements were true, would place the Spanish Government in the position of the most tolerant power on earth for its long forbearance. ”

“ New ideas sprout in the minds of the Spanish people, as they do in the minds of civilised nations. In civilised communities, with no more than a normal and incidental corruption to conceal, we agree to let the new ideas vent themselves and fight their intellectual battle. But in Spain the two systems, Church and State, with which these new ideas would wage war, are essentially, fundamentally, and incurably corrupt. Hundreds of thousands of men, drafted into or dependent on the two great corporations, clerical and political, see the very bases of their economic life threatened. ”

“ Intensely Republican and disdainful of the corruption of Church and State, Sabadell lost its head in the whirl of news of riot from all parts of Spain. It cut its communications, disarmed its police, and proclaimed the Republic. In the afternoon messengers arrived from Sabadell in Barcelona with the news, adding that 1,500 armed Sabadellians were ready to come and help to found the Republic. It is profoundly pathetic to picture these few thousand badly armed men, feverish and reckless with anger, cutting the wires which might have informed them that Spain was not rising. ”

“ I will show that the device of "suspending the constitutional guarantees"—or suspending civilisation—is a scandalous trick for throwing on legally incompetent military men the work of ridding the corrupt system of its critics without the inconvenience of a trial. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mendacity is essential and habitual to the pro-Catholic and pro-Spanish writers. As far as they are concerned, I know that my plainest words will be completely misrepresented. But I will make it plain, nevertheless, that I have no sympathy with the burning of convents, however corrupt, no leaning to the political Anarchist ideal, and no inclination to criticise Spain for punishing violence. What I say is that the violence has been made the pretext for imprisoning thousands for totally different and corrupt reasons. ”

“ The crowds gathered in the streets, stopped the trams—women everywhere taking the leading part in the work—and cut the telegraph wires. The strike drifted towards riot, and there were collisions with the police. The troops were then called out, and, on the crowd appealing to them, refused to fire. All organisation was now broken, and no step that was taken after this point was in the least premeditated, as the Protestant ministers of Barcelona have written. The crowd developed, under the influence of its own passions and the stupid provocation of the Civil Guard, into an insurgent mob. ”

“ With their private interests at stake—most of the chief witnesses are purchasing their liberation from prison—their hearsay evidence, their moral convictions, and the complete irrelevance of more than half of them, a cross-examining lawyer would have had an easy time. Even as it is, not a single witness testifies that he personally saw Ferrer commit violence; every witness who assigns Ferrer an active leadership does so on hearsay evidence: the rest report conversations with Ferrer, which he entirely denies, and which secured "provisional liberty" for themselves. ”

“ I write as one who, after laborious search for the true features of the case, feels that a man of noble aspirations has been murdered by corrupt politicians, at the instigation of an equally corrupt Church, and I trust that an exposure of their corruption will enable English men and women to keep in memory the name of one more man who has died in what he believed to be the cause of humanity, and to watch the course of events in Spain with more enlightened interest. ”

“ The real truth—I mean the demonstrable truth—is that since the fatal and horrible crime of Salvador in 1893—sixteen years ago—not a single Anarchist, out of many thousands, has been convicted of throwing or possessing bombs in Barcelona! The remarkable thing is that the horrors of 1896, the attempt on Ferrer in 1906, and the prevailing corruption did not evoke violence earlier, if Barcelona is such a city of desperadoes. ”

“ Señor Sanchez de Toca (in El problema cubano) not only roundly denounces the whole system as corrupt, but traces the corruption to "the demoralisation of those who hold the highest political offices" (p. 234) . It is "a government by the worst": honest men hold aloof from politics. Dr. Madrazo (El pueblo Español ha muerto?) tells us that "all the institutions of Spain are framed to put abilities at the service of the oligarchs," that the Liberals and Conservatives are "branches of one tree," and that the Church "shrinks from no means, however unjust, to attain its end." ”

“ It is the "open sore" of Spanish life, and is discussed in terms of scorn, anger, or despair by scores of recent Spanish writers who are far removed from either Anarchism or Socialism. One does not love to lay bare the shame of a neighbour nation. But when those who control this political system dip their hands in the blood of an innocent and noble-spirited man, it is time to tell the truth. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In Seville, a town renowned for its Catholicism, a French Catholic writer, M. Bazin, was told by a priest, he says in his Terre d'Espagne, that more than half the unions of men and women were "free unions." While the Church parades before the world its high ideal of chastity, and speaks hypocritically of the growth of immorality in the wake of heresy, it is precisely in those regions where it retains enormous power to-day, and has held absolute sway for ages, that we find the most immoral parts of Europe. ”

“ The figure of the young girl was meant to be, and was recognised as, a symbol of Spain; and that Madrid theatre, and many a theatre after it, shook with the ringing applause of the Spanish audiences.
But if Spain is so largely anti-clerical, how comes the Church to retain the power it does? Spain is seething with anti-clericalism. Mr. Isaacson, in his Rome in Many Lands, quotes an orthodox Spanish paper, El Correo Español, to the effect that only 1,500,000 men and 3,500,000 women, in a population of 18,500,000, now obey the clergy in Spain. ”

“ In fine, he concludes, Ferrer is at the bar solely because he is a Rationalist; and he makes an impassioned demand for justice.
The magnificent audacity and honesty of the officer took the court by surprise. His speech redeems the honour of Spain to some extent, and brands the prosecution with all the marks of a preparation for judicial murder. The civilised world should interest itself in the obscurity that has fallen on that brave officer. ”

“ 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. ”

“ These concordant testimonies are a few out of the many that have been published, and agree entirely with the words of the seven or eight personal friends of Ferrer with whom I have spoken. We shall find him, true to that ideal, looking on, passively and wonderingly, when the crowds are seething about him in the fatal days of July at Barcelona. The fifteen years of study, observation, and reflection at Paris had induced him to turn from revolutionary ways to an ideal of education. Of “revolution” he still spoke and wrote frequently; but he always said “social revolution.” ”

“ Many besides Ferrer have been shot, without trial. We have no idea whether they were innocent or guilty. About three thousand men and women are suffocating in the jails of Catalonia, without trial. Soledad Villafranca, against whom it would be stupid even to manufacture evidence, is "detained," broken-hearted and seriously ill, her heritage confiscated. Hundreds upon hundreds of men and women have been torn from their homes, and condemned to long imprisonment, solely because they were known, in one way or other, to oppose the corrupt political system and the corrupt Church Of Spain. ”

“ Incredible as the facts will seem to most readers, there is only one quibble which the zealous Catholic, in his misguided wish to defend the Spanish Church, can raise: he will demur to the phrase "bought" and "sold." I may safely leave that question of casuistry to the British reader. From this appalling traffic the Spanish Church draws millions upon millions of pesetas every year—from the rich, who thus pay for its political support, and from the densely ignorant peasantry, whose hard-won centimos are stolen by this abominable chicanery. ”

“ Through streets equipped with the latest achievements of modern science there still marches the medieval troop, crying in the ears of educated Madrid that Spain still lives in the fifteenth century. I have only to add that until 1870 the Vatican openly took a percentage on this sordid traffic. In these days of inquisitive American and English converts we do not know what the understanding is between the Papacy and the Archbishop of Toledo, who issues and seals those symbols of the Spanish Church's degradation. ”

“ Is there not a very wide suffrage in Spain? I have quoted half-a-dozen writers of great weight to the effect that there is "no electoral system" in Spain, and that the elections are largely comedies. Incredible as it seems to English voters, the "oligarchs" settle by agreement how many deputies of each party are to be returned, and manipulate the electoral results accordingly. ”

“ This is the opportunity of the clergy. Driven from other lands, they make their last stand in Spain and Portugal. From France, from Cuba, from the Philippines, they have concentrated on the land where only a few millions can read and write, and the political power is manipulated by a system as corrupt as their own. Within a few years, probably, they will be reinforced by the exiled monks of Italy. So long as Spain is ignorant, or only taught a smattering of letters and a vast amount of terrifying superstition in their own schools, they are safe. ”

“ A very intelligible ideal in Spain. Occasionally, one in a thousand Anarchists may reach so uncontrollable a pitch of indignation at the existing corruption that he vents his feeling in an isolated outrage.
Anarchism is the most popular social theory among the workers of Barcelona, as Socialism is in North Italy. So long as it does not seek to remove the Government by violent means, it has, in any civilisation, as much right as any other social ideal to existence. It is in the position of the Liberal who plots humanely to overthrow a Conservative Government. ”

“ But who in modern Spain could seek a man's life for erecting schools in which violent insurrection was not suggested? Here is the second part of my task. By a similar collection of authoritative proof I have to show how education alone, without any inspiration of violence, endangered certain corrupt interests and moved high-placed men to perpetrate a thinly veiled crime. ”