d to despotism, as with his
opposition to discipline and restraint. Discipline and
restraint--are they not back of all the evils in the world?
Slavery, submission, poverty, all misery, all social iniquities
result from discipline and restraint. Indeed, Ferrer was dangerous.
Therefore he had to die, October thirteenth, 1909, in the ditch of
Montjuich. Yet who dare say his death was in vain? In view of the
tempestuous rise of universal indignation: Italy naming streets in
memory of Francisco Ferrer, Belgium inaugurating a movement to erect
a memorial; France calling to the front her most illustrious men to
resume the heritage of the martyr; England being the first to issue a
biography:--all countries uniting in perpetuating the great work of
Francisco Ferrer; America, even, tardy always in progressive ideas,
giving birth to a Francisco Ferrer Association, its aim being to
publish a complete life of Ferrer and to organize Modern Schools all
over the country; in the face of this international revolutionary
wave, who is there to say Ferrer died in vain?

That death at Montjuich,--how wonderful, how dramatic it was, how it
stirs the human soul. Proud and erect, the inner eye turned toward
the light, Francisco Ferrer needed no lying priests to give him
courage, nor did he upbraid a phantom for forsaking him. The
consciousness that his executioners represented a dying age, and that
his was the living truth, sustained him in the last heroic moments.

A dying age and a living truth,
The living burying the dead.

[1] THE BEEHIVE.

[2] MOTHER EARTH, 1907.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Black crows: The Catholic clergy.

[5] MOTHER EARTH, December, 1909.

THE HYPOCRISY OF PURITANISM

Speaking of Puritanism in relation to American art, Mr. Gutzen
Burglum said: "Puritanism has made us self-centered and hypocritical
for so long, that sincerity and reverence for what is natural in our
impulses have been fairly bred out of us, with the result that there
can be neither truth nor individuality in our art."

Mr. Burglum might have added that Puritanism has made life itself
impossible. More than art, more than estheticism, life represents
beauty in a thousand variations; it is, indeed, a gigantic panorama
of eternal change. Puritanism, on the other hand, rests on a fixed
and immovable conception of life; it is based on the Calvinistic idea
that life is a curse, imposed upon man by the wrath of God. In or