Ministry of Finance. Then came May Day, 1890, and the General Strike in several provinces. Striking reigned in the Basque provinces and Barcelona was decreed to be in a stage of siege. In Valencia, the workers attacked a Jesuit convent and the residence of a Carlist aristocrat. Two years later came a plot to release the "Black Hand" prisoners from the prison of Jerez de la Frontera. This ended in an attempt to sieze the town. This attempt was made on 9th January, 1892, and the next month, four Anarchists were executed and others sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. But the workers were unquelled.

There are no more rebellious spirits in the world, than the people of Barcelona. Before the days of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco, the fortress of Montjuy has controlled the town and made the rebellion of no avail. Risings were futile and foredoomed to defeat. But the courage of the people vindicated Ferrer and took possession of Montjuy. Anarchism controlled Montjuy. Against the spirit of Anarchism, entrenched in Montjuy, Franco was but the embodied futility of the ages, reaction sprawling through hysteria towards paralysis and extinction; the extinction of authority and class society.

In 1896, the Spanish Anarchists were in revolt again. No persecution subdued their powers of organization. Following upon an attack on the Madrid palace, the clericalists of Barcelona staged an attack on a clerical procession, which injured only working men and women. This was to enable Don Antonio Canovas del Castillo, who was then Prime Minister, to lay before the Cortes his Bill to suppress the Anarchists. From this time on, Castillo was a doomed man, and the Spanish people merely waited to learn of his deserved execution. He was shot dead, on 8th August, 1897, by the Italian Anarchist, Michele Angiolillo. No man more richly deserved execution. Angiolillo's deed inspired the beautiful American Anarchist soul, Voltairine De Cleyre, to write the most pathetic poem, entitled: "Angiolillo," in which she visions the triumph of Anarchism in Spain and the world.

In Barcelona, Barril wounded the chief of police, and in October, Queen Cristina replaced the avowed Conservative Ministry with a nominal Radical one, under Praxedas Mateo Sagasta. The latter made some pretence of restoring liberty of the press, raising the state of siege in Barcelona, and releasing all untried prisoners from Montjuy. In 1899, Silvela succeeded Sagasta, and middle class revolts occurred, as well as working class ones, in Barcelona. In 1901, and again in 1904, and during the Intervals, strikes are the rule in Barcelona. In 1906, comes the infamous marriage of Alfonso to Princess Ena, the bomb thrown by Mateo Morral of Roca, son of a wealthy cotton spinner of Sabadell, in Catalonia, and the first frame-up of Ferrer. The execution of Ferrer in 1909 for alleged complicity in the general strike in Barcelona belongs to history.

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