THE FERRER CASE 33 



where approaching the same average as the State of New 

 York at that date had in her public schools. This is excluding 

 high schools, seminaries, and the ten universities. Spain has 

 largely increased her educational facilities in the ten years 

 since 1900. The Spanish school-teachers of to-day seem fairly 

 intelligent, and have their congresses for improvement in edu- 

 cation, just as here in America. 



We Americans, in the strenuous swiftness of our civic Hfe, 

 often forget our own history, or at least do not call it sharply 

 to mind. We had in the United States, some twenty-five years 

 ago, the very duplicate of the Ferrer case, except that here 

 the death and devastation was not so great as in Barcelona. 

 On May 4, 1886, a bomb was thrown in Haymarket Square 

 in Chicago, which killed six policemen, and together with the 

 firing which followed, wounded sixty persons. For this crime 

 August Spies, Albert Parsons, Michael Schwab, Samuel 

 Fielden, Adolph Fischer, George Engel, and Louis Lingg were 

 found guilty and executed. At the trial it was conceded that 

 none of the convicted persons threw the bomb with his own 

 hands, for the man who was believed to have done so was 

 blown to pieces by its explosion. The prisoners were charged 

 with having aided, advised, and encouraged the throwing of 

 the bomb. Their guilt was shown by numerous extracts 

 from papers published by them advocating riot and dynamite, 

 by the fact of their speeches encouraging the workman to rise 

 against the capitalist by force, and the incitement of their fel- 

 lows to anarchy. The nearest overt act was the making of 

 impassioned speeches at a meeting by Spies, Parsons, and 

 Fielden, which was concluded just before the police came 

 upon the scene and the bomb was thrown. The wording of 

 these newspaper articles, the general tenor of the speeches, 

 and the history of the events can be read in the law reports of 

 the case of Spies (Volume 122 of the Illinois Reports, pages 

 1-266), and the whole reads singularly like the events in 

 Barcelona for which Ferrer and others suffered death. We 

 have forgotten that we have had our own Ferrer case, in 

 which we acted exactly as the Spanish Government did ; and 

 we have forgotten, too, the principles of law carried out in 

 our own case of riot and anarchy. In this Chicago case, the 

 court said : 



"He who inflames people's minds, and induces them by vio- 



