of air and ventilation.  One school is a manure-heap in process of fermentation, and one of the local authorities has said that in this way the children are warmer in winter.  One school in Cataluna adjoins the prison.  Another, in Andalusia, is turned into an enclosure for the bulls when there is a bull-fight in the town.

These conditions excited the indignation of a Spanish educator by the name of Francesco Ferrer.  He founded what he called a “modern school”, in which the pupils should be taught science and common sense.  He drew, of course, the bitter hatred of the Catholic hierarchy, which saw in the spread of his principles the end of their mastery of the people.  When the Barcelona insurrection took place, they had Ferrer seized upon a charge of having been its instigator; they had him tried in secret before a military tribunal, convicted upon forged documents, and shot beneath the walls of the fortress of Montjuich.  The case was thoroughly investigated by William Archer, one of England’s leading critics, a man of scrupulous rectitude of mind.  His conclusion is that Ferrer was absolutely innocent of the charges against him, and that his execution was the result of a clerical plot.  Of Ferrer’s character Archer writes: 

Fragmentary though they be, the utterances which I have quoted form a pretty complete revelation.  From first to last we see in him an ardent, uncompromising, incorruptible idealist.  His ideals are narrow, and his devotion to them fanatical; but it is devoid, if not of egoism, at any rate of self-interest and self-seeking.  As he shrank from applying the money entrusted him to ends of personal luxury, so also he shrank from making his ideas and convictions subserve any personal ambition or vanity.

#The Menace#

There are, of course, many people in America who will not rest idle while their country falls into the condition of Spain.  There are anti-Catholic propaganda societies, which send out lecturers to discuss the Church and its records; and this is exasperating to devout believers, who regard the Church as holy, and any criticism of it as blasphemy.  So we have opportunity to observe the working out of the doctrine that the Church is superior to the civil law.

On June 12th, 1913, there came to the little town of Oelwein, Iowa, a former priest of the Catholic Church, named Jeremiah J. Crowley, to deliver a lecture exposing the Papal propaganda.  The Catholics of the town made efforts to intimidate the owner of the place in which the lecture was to be given; the priest of the town, Father O’Connor, preached a sermon furiously denouncing the lecturer; and after the lecture the unfortunate Crowley was surrounded by a mob of men, women and boys, and although he was six feet three in size, he was beaten almost to death.  At the trial which followed it developed that Father O’Connor and also his brother, a judge on the Superior Bench, were accessories before the fact.