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50 Jesuits very loudly proclaimed it. But, while Spanish agents have somehow persuaded many people in England that a State may fitly confiscate schools and shoot their founder, because of his Agnosticism—an assumption which we should regard as an outrage on civilisation here—the truth is that, bad as Spain is, such a thing is not possible even there, and a lying pretext had to be invented. Ferrer's schools were closed, his property confiscated, and his life ruthlessly taken, because he was a Rationalist. Let us see what there is in the charge that he "literally taught the young idea to shoot."

I will examine in a later chapter the forged documents and the phrases of anonymous origin which Catholic journals began to publish before Ferrer was tried. Not the slightest effort was made to prove that these sentiments were ever, in any shape, disseminated in Ferrer's schools. They are indignantly and emphatically repudiated by the men I have examined who taught in those schools. It is, in fact, preposterous to think that the authorities, who have watched Ferrer assiduously since his trial in 1906, would have allowed such phrases, or any remote approach to them, to be paraded in the Modern Schools. English journals of great weight have admitted to their columns statements of this kind which had not a tittle of evidence or authority, and were in themselves wildly improbable. English Roman Catholic priests have seized and employed them with a blind bigotry, a gross injustice, and a disregard of truth that make one wonder how much of the spirit of the Inquisition lurks beneath their professions of humane conversion.

We shall speak of the origin of these documents later. For the moment we are confronted with the statement that the manuals themselves taught anarchy, revolution, pillage, and massacre. We turn with interest to the "quotations" which Catholics have disseminated, and we find that in not a single instance is there a reference, not merely to a specific page, but even to a specific book. We are left to make our way through a series of thirty-one text-books and fifteen other books published by the Escuela Moderna in search of half-a-dozen phrases. Then we are told by Canon Lynch that we suppress the truth and misrepresent Ferrer. Until a particular passage in the works is submitted to us, we cannot be expected