McClure's and the Ferrer Case
After a critical review of the Ferrer case in two numbers of "McClure's," Mr. William Archer says: I reject, then, the theory of any criminal conspiracy against Ferrer. Malignant stupidity, coupled with the absence of the most rudimentary sense of fair play, is sufficient to account for all that occurred. But certainly it has a good deal to account for: the arbitrary banishment of all Ferrer's friends; the studied neglect to call for their evidence; the pettifogging refusal of that evidence when offered; the wantonly harsh treatment of the untried prisoner. . . . Mr. Archer thinks that Ferrer was guilty of indiscretions, and in sympathy with revolution, but — he was certainly not the "author and chief of the revolt;" that accusation was a monstrous absurdity. Comparing this famous Spanish case with the Dreyfus case in France, Mr. Archer says: In each case we see militarism, inspired by clericalism, riding roughshod over the plainest principles and practises of justice. The victim in each case is a personage hated by the [Roman Catholic] church — in France a Jew, in Spain a freethinker. One can not read the results of Mr. Archer's painstaking investigation without feeling that the whole proceeding against Ferrer was a pitiful travesty of justice, and that the fervid reports of the revolution and of his influence therein, circulated by his enemies, are gross exaggerations. Whatever his character or teaching, he was entitled to a fair trial.