Page:The "Trial" of Ferrer - A Clerical Judicial Murder (IA 2916970.0001.001.umich.edu).pdf/36

 sers-by told him so, although it is well known that there were no passers-by on that day since the posting of the proclamation declaring Barcelona under martial law, whereby it was announced by the Captain General that groups intercepting the public way would be shot down without warning. All the people who had to go out on some urgent need carried a white handkerchief and were careful to walk alone and stop to speak to nobody.

Finally, this witness volunteered his official declaration the last day before the closing of the summary, although his first denunciation appeared in his special correspondence a month and a half before. This throws a dubious light on it. When we compare the assured tone of his first accusation in a newspaper, "I saw him," and the reticent tone of his second accusation, deposited before the law, we cannot help wonder. It looks as if Colldefrons had first carelessly told a lie, making himself the echo of what he heard around him, with all the chivalrous courage of the man who thinks nobody will challenge him. But the Prosecution, at its wit's ends to find some positive proof of an actual fact, probably discovered this gratuitous assertion and pounced upon the man, menacing him, if he did not repeat his declaration before the judge, with the laws against slander. We do not say this is so, we merely wonder.

We have examined the evidence against Ferrer (all of which, be it noted, was denied by the accused). Let us now consider the evidence in his favor, without forgetting the principle, so often repeated by the Editor of our party paper, the Daily People, in regard to the detractors of the Socialist Labor Party, that it belongs to the accusers to prove their accusations, not to the accused to disprove them.

This is how Ferrer accounted for his time on the day he was in Barcelona, the 26th of July, the first day of the