r 



McCLURE'S, ARCHER AND FERRER 49 



For instance, he says: "More than fifty per cent of the 

 Spanish population is illiterate; and most of those who can 

 read and write have been miserably taught by underpaid mas- 

 ters in unsanitary and ill-provided schools." He knows, or 

 should know, that that statement is not true. In reality it is 

 copied from pages 44 and 53 of McCabe's "Martyrdom of 

 Ferrer," and pages 8 and 24 of "Un Martyr des Pretres" ; so 

 that Mr. Archer need not have gone to Spain for that. The 

 census of Spain in 1900 showed that the general illiteracy then 

 was not over 30 per cent; and Spain has made large strides 

 since 1900 in all branches of education. That percentage of 

 illiteracy includes the peasantry of Galicia and the Basque 

 mountaineers of the Pyrenees, neither of whom are anarchists 

 or in rebellion, although they are woefully lacking in book 

 knowledge. 



Barcelona was the focus and hotbed of the uprising; and, 

 as a matter of fact, the illiteracy of Barcelona in 1908- 1909 

 was between six and eight per cent, as Mr. Archer could easily 

 have ascertained by consulting "La Estadistica Escolar de 

 Espafia," published at the beginning of 1910. Any one 

 who has ever been in Barcelona knows the prevalent habit of 

 cabmen, porters, etc., of reading their books of rules to a 

 traveller upon the slightest controversy as to fees, prices, and 

 the like. Certainly the obvious was overlooked in regard to 

 the statement about illiteracy, for Barcelona is one of the 

 cities abundantly provided with schools, and about the first 

 thing the mob did was to destroy a great many of them. 

 About the only schools in that city which are small and miser- 

 able in comparison with most of the others are the Ferrer 

 schools ; only eight or ten of them were of good size and 

 comfortable, usually they were in the cramped quarters of a 

 private school. It was not the lack of schools and education in 

 Barcelona that caused Ferrer to start his propaganda ; it was 

 the lack of the particular kind of schools which Ferrer fa- 

 vored, and which would teach the elements of anarchy and 

 revolution. It is evident that Mr. Archer made no attempt 

 to visit and compare the real schools of Barcelona with those 

 which Ferrer established. 



Then, too, he insists continually in his article that "it was as 

 'author and chief of the rebellion' — '<mtor y jefe de la rehelion* 

 — that he [Ferrer] was found guilty and shot," and again and 



