THE FERRER CASE 35 



driven off by the Riffians. Troops were sent to protect them ; 

 they, too, were beaten by the Moorish mountaineers ; battles 

 ensued, and in the month of June, 1909, Spain had a Httle 

 war on her hands. Reserves were called to the colors, and 

 in Barcelona this was sharply resented. The Barcelonese 

 were something like our former militia ; they wanted no mili- 

 tary service outside of Spain. Besides, they thought the war 

 debt would be largely paid by them, being one of the wealthi- 

 est provinces in Spain. Moreover, the whole war seemed to 

 be a Madrid scheme to enable a syndicate to make money on 

 its contract with Germans. Hence feeling ran high and all 

 political parties in opposition to the government in power 

 aroused the Barcelona public by continual agitation. But the 

 ministry insisted on the reserves going to the front, and dur- 

 ing the early part of July, 1909, troop-ships sailed from Barce- 

 lona to Melilla. Just after the departure of the last one, on 

 July 23, and after a week's incessant political agitation and 

 fiery speech-making, a general strike was ordered to express 

 the workingmen's opposition to the government measures. 

 The factories closed, thousands of idle workmen met or 

 paraded the streets ; all was at a fever-heat, and it needed but 

 a spark to start the explosion. We know too well in America 

 how strikes in a flash degenerate into disorder. 



This was the supreme occasion for which Ferrer and his 

 school had been waiting. For eight years he had carried on 

 the so-called Escuela Moderna (Modern School), a name he 

 did not invent, but boldly filched from the works of one of 

 the ablest scholars in Spain, Don Rafael Altamira, and used 

 for a time as a disguise to cover his teaching. His associates 

 who managed the teaching and direction of the school were 

 all anarchists or of the anarchistic type. They were not 

 merely the advocates of disorder ; they went deeper than that. 

 They sought to eliminate from the pupil's mind all basic ideas 

 of religion, patriotism, and morality. It was not a mere teach- 

 ing against Catholicism or religious orders, as the correspond- 

 ents of our newspapers have suggested, but, along with con- 

 crete intellectual training given in their schools, the very ideas 

 of the flag, the country, lawful marriage, property, the family, 

 and the reciprocal relation of State and citizenship were de- 

 stroyed in the minds of their pupils. 



It would take too much space to give extracts from the 



