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

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74 Francisco Ferrer^
an evident determination to oust the clergy and educate
the people. All this within one year of the assassination
of Ferrer and as a direct consequence of it ! Ferrer
gladly would have laid down his life for such a result.
Rome trembles to-day, and the Pope feels his throne
crumbling beneath him.
When the Papacy is but a memory—a foul-smelling
recollection of barbarity and superstition—the world will
be honoring the immortal name of Francisco Ferrer.
The last words of this twentieth-century martyr, an
ardent expression of hope that his educational work
would long survive, are being fulfilled
"Long live the Modern School !"
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ANATOLE FRANCE'S WARNING
Just previously to the death of Ferrer, Anatole France,
the greatest living Frenchman of letters, wrote to Alfred
Naquet : "If Francisco Ferrer be condemned, either by
a civil or military tribunal, there is not a soul in the wide
world that will not insist that his judges were not free
agents, that they acted under orders in sacrificing a just
man to the hatred of the Party which can never forgive
him for having consecrated his life to the education of
the young. For everybody knows full well that Ferrer's
sole crime consists in this : He founded schools. If he
is condemned it
will be for this offence."
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ALFRED NAQUET'S TRIBUTE
Alfred Naquet, of the Paris Committee of Defence of
the Victims of the Spanish Repression, wrote, in The
Nineteenth Century, of the Ferrer tragedy as follows: "I
do not weep for him ; we are all under sentence of death
from the moment of our birth, and to die, like Ferrer,
sacrificed for the most exalted sentiments of humanity, is
to escape death in order to enter into immortality. Ferrer
will live forever enshrined in history like all those who
have fallen for the enfranchisement of human thought
the men like Giordano Bruno, Etienne Dolet, John Huss,
and all the martyrs of the Inquisition of which he is the
last in order of date, but not in glory."
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