Widnes Examiner. — 1909-10-16 (Widnes, Cheshire, England)

SCANDAL. doubt as to whether  Spain ought to be ranked among nations that are civilised. We can perceive no moral difference between such an event and simple murder. Even such a softening phrase as 'judicial murder" would not apply in this case, for Senor FERRER had no• proper trial. He was not taken "before a regular court. His judges were military officers. There was no evidence against him: He was prevented from making the best defence, which is the right of every man in every civilised country. He was treated from first to last as a destined victim. He might reasonably have entered the court saying to the military officers who had been appointed to condmt the mock trial, "Aye, CEesar ! I, who am about to die,  salute you." But even this brutal and insensate method of conducting a man to his death is not the worst asPect of the affair. The execution was hurried forward because it was perceived that the. method of the trial and the character of the sentence would provoke the condemnation of Europe. It was determined to anticipate all protests, and to make them ineffective in the most absolute sense. "A dead man," ;the Spanish authorities seem to have said, "cannot be resuscitated, whatever may  be said in his favour. Let us kill this man, lest we should be persuaded, or lest we should be alarmed into sparing his life:' The parallel case is that of the SULTAN •OF MOROCCO and _EL .ROGETL The SULTAN threw his relative, the Pretender,to the lion Whilst the European Consuls_were waiting without to protest to him against his cruelty. We see no moral difference between the Spanish and the Moroccan methods, though shooting is more merciful than torture by wild beasts.  Spain is obviously in bad hands. The ,war against the Riffs is a stock-jobbers' war. It is true that four men were murdered, and that a country isl under obligation to see justice done in such cases. Our •own Ashantee war was undertaken under rather less provocation. Happily there was no suspicion of stock-jobbing behind it. There was not the slightest ground for supposing that the events out of Which it arose were what is vulgarly known as a fake. In the Spanish case, however, there seems the least possible reason to doubt •that the mining speculators Wanted a war, and that the murder of their four men was one of the arranged preliminaries. The assassination of Senor FERRER by semilegal forms is one of the direct consequences of the war. The war occasioned the Barcelona riots as a protest, and those who put down the riots seized on SENOR FERRER as a scapegoat, although he had taken no tart in them. It appears to have been alleged that the books used at his school had a " Modernist " tendency. That is a priest's reason. Then, as he admitted he had written more than sixteen years since a draft appeal on the occasion of the Madrid Congress of Free Thought, this was resucitated and treated as if it were a quite recent document. In addition, the "Modernist " character of his school books—that is, the quality which made them real school books —had produced the Barcelona outbreak! It is on such grounds as these that he has been put to death before the outraged feeling of Europe had time to express itself. Such an insensate exercise of power does not give us much confidence in the future of