Sri Aurobindo
Karmayogin
Political Writings and Speeches — 1909-1910
Karmayogin: A Weekly Review
Saturday 6th November 1909 — No.18
Facts and Opinions
The Death of Senor Ferrer
The extraordinary commotion in Europe over the execution of the enthusiast and idealist Ferrer, a judicial murder committed by Court Martial, has revealed a force in Europe with which statesmen and Governments will have very soon to deal on pain of extinction.
We have no sympathy with the philosophy or practice of Anarchism, holding, as we do, that the Anarchist philosophy is some millenniums ahead of the present possible evolution of humanity and the Anarchist practice some millenniums behind.
But Se๑or Francisco Ferrer was no mere Anarchist.
He was a man of high enthusiasms and ideas, engaged, at great sacrifice and, as it turns out, risk to himself, in freeing the Spanish mind by education from the fetters of that bigoted Clericalism which has been the ruin of Spain.
For a man of this kind a man of eminent culture and unstained character, the friend and fellow worker of distinguished men all over the occidental world, to be shot without any reputable evidence by a military tribunal regardless of universal protest, was an outrage on civilisation and an insult to European culture.
Such an incident, however, might have happened formerly with no result but a few indignant articles in the Continental Liberal Press.
This time it has awakened a demonstration all over the Western world which is, we think, unprecedented in history.
The solidarity and deep feeling in that demonstration means that the huge inert Leviathan, on whose patient back the aristocratic and middle class of Europe have built the structure of their polity and society, is about to move.
When he really uplifts his giant bulk, what will become of the structure?
Will it not tumble into pieces off his back and be swallowed up in the waters of a worldwide revolution?