On this date in 1831, one of the great Spanish liberal officers was shot along with dozens of comrades attempting to spark a revolution. It was a dark time for Spanish liberals under the autocratic rule of Ferdinand VII. Jose Maria Torrijos y Uriarte (Spanish Wikipedia page) was one of the heroes of that downtrodden cause from way back, a noble-born officer who had been made a captain at the precocious age of 13 and been around for all of Spanish liberalism’s greatest early 19th century tragedies. He was in Madrid for the ill-fated uprising against its French occupiers in...