Francisco Ferrer; his life, work and martyrdom, with message written ...

36 Francisco Ferrer,
only the initiate will recognize therein the philosophy of
Anarchism. In this chapter, he fuses, as it were, his works
of pure scholarship with his works of propaganda, and
harmonizes his ethnography with his humanitarian aspirations.
It is a confession of religion (using the term
in a broad sense), a message of love and of cheer, couched
in the language of reason, of concord and of pity, a
veritable hymn of enlightened altruism, of hope and of
fraternity.
Elisee Reclus, with all his noble confidence in the future
of humanity, is not dazzled by the showiness of modern
life. He discerns clearly the seamy life of contemporaneous
civilization. Several epochs of the past, he
points out, have produced individuals— geniuses—unsurpassed
in modern times and in all likelihood unsurpassable.
Furthermore, in the history of humanity, several
primitive tribes (styled "barbarous" because they were
inferior to us in their intellectual comprehension) have
approached closely the ideal of mutual help and mutual
love. Simple in their social organization, naive in their
general conception of the universe, they have achieved a
state of serene justice, of well-being and of happiness far
surpassing anything that has been achieved in the same
line by the most advanced of our so-called civilized societies.
Our present vaunted civilization, Reclus argues,
is merely a semi-civilization, because only a minority
enjoy all its benefits. The development of industry has
created a proletariat, the development of commerce has
corrupted or exterminated whole races of aborigines.
The modern laborers are totally devoid of personality;
all have the same faces, livid from their youth up, the
same stolid, expressionless gaze. The slums of our cities
are more repulsive than anything to be found among the
so-called savage tribes. Hundreds of thousands, millions
probably, beg bread at the doors of churches and barracks.
Accidents, diseases, deformities and congenital
defects of every sort, complicated more often than not
by the random application of bogus remedies, aggravated
by poverty, by the lack of indispensable care, by
the absence of gaiety and of hope, produce decrepitude
long before the normal period of old age. The success
of some involves the failure of others in contemporaneous
society and in all the countries called civilized. The moral