McCLURE'S, ARCHER AND FERRER 51 



reason no bank or public building was attacked, was because 

 they were all well protected ; and that very fact left no police 

 to protect churches, schools, and convents. It was not due to 

 any thought fulness on the part of the revolutionists; it was 

 only because they did not dare to take the risk of being shot. 



In speaking of the three days' unbridled rioting, Mr. Archer 

 is at exceeding great pains to minimize it. Yet he might easily 

 have interviewed a hundred persons who could have given 

 him the details. Had he done so, or had he even gone around 

 and looked at the blackened ruins throughout the newer part 

 of Barcelona, he need not have condensed his story of ruin, 

 terror, and destruction into twenty-two short lines, thus indi- 

 cating that it was a matter of hardly any consequence at all. 

 He might even have discovered that the Padres Esculapios are 

 chiefly lay brothers of the Pious Schools (Escolapios) . It 

 does not appear in his story of investigation that he ever con- 

 sulted with any one who was on the side of law and order, or 

 who suffered from the awful series of events. But he seems 

 to have taken particular pains to get in touch with all the 

 Ferrerites of high and low degree. This is hardly the work 

 of an unbiassed investigator. 



Yet, notwithstanding that Barcelona had about 600,000 pop- 

 ulation, Mr. Archer sums up the case of the destruction of 

 the schools, colleges, and convents of the religious orders with 

 the words : "They [the religious orders] are, in truth, almost 

 entirely outside the law ; and the populace in moments of 

 revolt is apt to pronounce and execute sentence of outlawry 

 upon them." But he knows, or ought to know, that eight or 

 ten thousand rioters and revolutionists in a city of that size 

 are most emphatically not "the populace." They are, how- 

 ever, the pliable tools which master-minds in the background 

 can most easily use ; minds, which, when use has been made 

 with disastrous result, are the quickest to deny any participa- 

 tion in anarchy or riot. 



In endeavoring to smooth over and minimize that diabolic 

 outrage, the disinterment of the buried nuns, he says : "But 

 it is no less certain that the motive of this profanation was a 

 desire to ascertain whether there was any sign of the nuns 

 having been tortured or even buried alive. It was found, as 

 a matter of fact, that many of the bodies had their hands 

 and feet bound together, and although this is susceptible of 



