This was why the organisers of the demonstration so urgently appealed to their followers not to be provoked into recrimination by “persons subsidised by the other party, who would place themselves among the demonstrators with the intention of causing disturbances.” They thought it necessary to warn the public that what might seem the merest act of personal aggression on the part of an ordinary loafer might really be the initiation of an organised plan to raise a serious revolt. And they prayed their friends to bear in mind that persons committing such acts of aggression might be the secret agents of the Jesuits, and therefore on no account to be induced to retaliate. These appeals were issued in leaflets which were distributed by the thousand in all the towns where demonstrations were to be held, and no doubt contributed largely to the self-restraint and good conduct of the crowd everywhere. If the organisers were justified in believing that the Jesuits wanted to create disturbances, the angry and exceedingly untruthful comments on these leaflets in the Ultramontane Press might be accounted for. They were described as deliberate incentives to the usual list of crimes--incendiarism, sacrilege, &c.--and “good Catholics” were ordered to destroy any that fell into their hands without reading the infamies uttered by the “anarchist canaille.” Naturally the description given by the Clericalists of their opponents’ circular only excited the curiosity of the “good Catholics.” The “good” working man read the paper with the added interest given by its prohibition, and finding nothing criminal in it, went with the rest to the meeting to hear what it was all about. It is quite likely that the Church’s anathema of the essentially constitutional leaflets issued in most of the industrial cities on the first two Sundays of November, 1909, resulted in making new converts to Liberalism among the small minority of working men who till then were still following the dictates of the priests. BARCELONA AND THE LAY SCHOOLS CHAPTER IX BARCELONA AND THE LAY SCHOOLS I have already referred to the popular belief that the riots in Barcelona in July, 1909, were deliberately instigated by the Jesuits and the Carlists acting in concert, the object of the Churchmen being primarily to provide an excuse for closing the lay schools established by Ferrer, the hope of the Pretender and his party being that the disturbances would spread and assume the proportions of a revolution, “on the waves” of which he hoped to ride to the throne. As the course of events in Barcelona which culminated in the “Red Week” has not unnaturally perplexed foreign observers, it may be worth while, in the absence of any proof as to who was at the bottom of the trouble, to suggest a hypothesis which at any rate has the merit of giving a plausible explanation of the incidents.