nd
catechism; the punishments prevailing in them were "cruel and
disgusting."

As to the location of the schools, a report of the Minister of
Education to the Cortes, the Parliament of Spain, sets forth as
follows:

More than 10,000 schools are on hired premises, and many of
these are absolutely destitute of hygienic conditions. There
are schools mixed up with hospitals, with cemeteries, with
slaughter houses, with stables. One school forms the
entrance to a cemetery, and the corpses are placed on the
master's table while the last responses are being said.
There is a school into which the children cannot enter until
the animals have been sent out to pasture. Some are so small
that as soon as the warm weather begins the boys faint for
want 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 m