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46 schools, which have greatly increased in number and grown in efficiency under the inspiration of Ferrer's fine creations.

It is most important to distinguish between these Republican schools and the Modern Schools established by Ferrer. They existed before Ferrer started his work, they differed from his in giving (often) religious instruction and in political tendency, and of late years their leaders have not been on the best terms with Ferrer, because of the absorption of his funds in purely educational work. But pro-Spanish writers—to be quite correct (since I am a pro-Spanish writer), the anonymous and unscrupulous slanderers who have poisoned our Press in the interest of the corruption of Spain—have found it useful to confuse the Modern and the Republican schools. Much that may have been taught in the Republican schools was certainly not taught in those of Ferrer, to whom a Republic was not the acceptable political ideal. But I will anticipate a later discussion so far as to say that the maxims which correspondents of the Saturday Review and other journals assert they saw on the walls of schools in Spain did not exist in either the Modern or Republican schools in any form whatever. I have questioned on the subject masters of Ferrer's schools; and Alejandro Lerroux, the leader of the Barcelona Republicans, emphatically denies them on his part. A moment's candid reflection would convince anybody that no school would last a week in Spain, or anywhere else, in which injunctions to massacre all officials and the whole middle-class, and indulge in general pillage, were printed in large capitals on the walls.

The Church and the caciques had been content with petty persecution so long as these schools depended on the coppers of the workers. An entirely new era opened where a brilliant professor from Paris, with a capital of £30,000 and a fine capacity to control and employ it, entered the field. The notion that Ferrer gathered about him all the iconoclasts of Barcelona and "literally taught the young idea to shoot," as the Daily Dispatch (October 16) said, in an article with the disgusting anonymous heading of "By One who Knew Him" is a grotesque untruth. Ferrer incurred the annoyance of many of his earlier friends, with whom he wished to remain on terms of personal friendship, precisely because he