Spain from Within
Date: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Spain -- Social life and customs; Shaw; Rafael; Spain -- Politics and government -- 1886-1931

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Title: Spain from Within

Author: Rafael Shaw

Release date: January 15, 2018 [eBook #56379]
Most recently updated: January 24, 2021

Language: English

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Contents.

List of Illustrations
(In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers] clicking on the image will bring up a larger version.)

Appendix
Index: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Z.

(etext transcriber's note)

SPAIN FROM WITHIN

KING ALFONSO XIII. IN HIS STUDY IN MADRID.

[Frontispiece.

SPAIN FROM WITHIN

BY
RAFAEL SHAW

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
1910

(All rights reserved.)

“For behold! this monstrous twenty million class,
hitherto the dumb sheep which these others had to
agree about the manner of shearing, is now also
arising with hopes.”
—Carlyle, “French Revolution.”

PREFATORY NOTE

“Truth is an exile from our political world. Every faction and every group tells only that part of the truth which reflects discredit on its neighbour. Thus our political literature is interesting only as an archive of monstrosities. The other part of the truth—that which deals with the good qualities of the neighbour—is so out of fashion that nobody believes in its existence. To tell the truth to our politicians would be the greatest proof of friendship that could be offered to them. But who has sufficient courage to attempt it? No one in this world would venture upon so difficult, so disagreeable, and so dangerous a task. The result is that in Spain the only respect paid to the truth is to leave it unspoken.”—Nuevo Mundo, Madrid, Feb. 24, 1910.

In the following pages I have endeavoured to show what the people of Spain believe to be the truth about those who exercise authority over them, as gathered from conversation with Spaniards of all classes, but principally working people, in town and country, and from my own reading and observation. Whether my informants are right or wrong in their opinions and beliefs I do not pretend to decide; all I can declare is that I have faithfully reported what I have heard and seen. The importance of the opinions I have collected lies in the fact that, whether they are justified or not, the people believe them to be true, and on that belief they will assuredly act as soon as circumstances allow.

I have to acknowledge with thanks the courteous permission of the Editors of the Spectator and the Standard to incorporate in this volume the gist of various articles, notes, &c., which first appeared in their pages. The author and publisher have also to express their thanks to the Editors and Proprietors of the Nuevo Mundo of Madrid for permission to use the illustrations in this book, which are taken from that periodical.

RAFAEL SHAW.

CONTENTS

CHAP. | | PAGE
| INTRODUCTION | 13
I. | RACIAL AND CLASS DISTINCTIONS | 23
II. | THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE | 39
III. | MORALITY AND CEREMONIAL | 61
IV. | THE CONFESSIONAL, AND CHURCH ABUSES | 73
V. | THE POOR AND THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS | 89
VI. | THE MONARCHY AND THE PEOPLE | 111
VII. | THE REVIVAL OF CARLISM | 133
VIII. | THE CHURCH MILITANT | 159
IX. | BARCELONA AND THE LAY SCHOOLS | 181
X. | THE ARMY, PAST AND PRESENT | 199
XI. | THE POLICE | 215
XII. | POLITICS | 227
XIII. | POLITICAL PARTIES | 251
XIV. | EDUCATION | 263
XV. | TAXATION | 285
XVI. | THE PROCESS OF REGENERATION | 303
| APPENDIX. NOTES ON POLITICIANS AND PERIODICALS | 319
| INDEX: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Z. | 325

ILLUSTRATIONS

KING ALFONSO XIII. IN HIS STUDY IN MADRID | Frontispiece
| FACING PAGE
FACTORY GIRLS | 14
PEASANT WOMEN | 39
NEWSPAPER SELLERS AT THE OFFICES OF THE NUEVO MUNDO IN MADRID | 61
THE QUEEN AND THE QUEEN-MOTHER OF SPAIN | 111
SEÑOR MAURA, LEADER OF THE ULTRAMONTANES | 149
DON JAIME OF BOURBON IN MOROCCO | 153
A DEMONSTRATION OF REJOICING AT THE FALL OF THE ULTRAMONTANE MINISTRY | 174
A CONSCRIPT | 199
THE WAR IN MELILLA. A FORT ON MOUNT GURUGU | 203
A RESERVIST AT THE FRONT | 208
DON SEGISMUNDO MORET, LEADER OF THE LIBERAL-MONARCHISTS | 227
SEÑOR CANALEJAS, LEADER OF THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS, AND GENERAL MARINA, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF AT MELILLA | 244
A STREET HAWKER DESCRIBING BATTLE SCENES TO AN ILLITERATE AUDIENCE | 263
SAFFRON PICKERS SORTING THEIR CROP | 285
A SELLER OF PALM-LEAF BRUSHES AND FANS | 289

INTRODUCTION

While a good deal has been written of late years about Spain from the point of view put forward by the governing classes, little or nothing has been said about the people—the mass of the nation—who, unable, the immense majority of them, to read or write, are more inarticulate than their fellows in any country of Europe west of Russia, but who have, nevertheless, very definite aspirations and ideals, entirely distinct from those of their rulers, at whose hands, disheartened as they are by long years of misgovernment, they have almost abandoned any hope of amelioration of their lot.

Circumstances have afforded the writer opportunities of seeing a great deal of the inner life of the people, and of learning what are the grievances, the aspirations, and the desires of the Spanish working classes, gathered from conversation with them, and from years of close personal observation.

Generalisations about an entire nation are usually of doubtful value; still, it is safe to say that the Spaniard of the working classes is not the turbulent rascal he is so often depicted, who in the intervals of pronunciamentos and civil wars occupies his leisure moments in “holding up” the wayfarer with a blunderbuss. On the contrary, he is a quiet, industrious, law-abiding citizen, whose chief desire is to be left to go about his business and make a living for himself and his family. If he has to fight he fights well, for he does not lack courage, and he has often been compelled to fight for causes in which he takes no interest, as the alternative to losing the employment which stands between him and starvation. But he does not want to fight, because he is convinced that all Spain’s wars, whatever their ostensible object, are arranged by his “betters” to put money into their own pockets, regardless of the true interests of the nation. You may talk as you will about the wealth, health, and happiness that might be obtained, say, in Melilla, should it become a well-administered colony of Spain. The Spanish working man has an invariable reply to all such suggestions. He says: “That might be so under other Governments, but not under ours. Look at Cuba!”

Emigration goes on to an extent which causes the gravest apprehension to those who have

FACTORY GIRLS.

[To face page 14.

their country’s good at heart, and the reason is that owing to the continual increase in taxation, the Spanish labourer cannot make a living at home. Of all the taxes which crush him, the most oppressive is the consumo, or octroi. Little is heard of this outside Spain, because those who profit by it have every reason to keep silence, while those who suffer have not hitherto dared to raise their voice against the powerful interests which profit by the system. Any statesman who could abolish this iniquitous tax would gain thereby an amount of popular support to which ministers of the Crown in Spain have long been strangers. But he would have to contend with an organised opposition in the monied classes which would be hard to overcome, and hitherto, although the reform is constantly talked of, little or nothing has been done to bring it about.

Next to bread the chief desire of the Spaniard is education for his children. He is thoroughly conscious of the disadvantages of his own ignorance, which he bitterly resents, and the blame for which he lays at the door of the Church. The Inquisition is not forgotten, and if there is no priest or “pious” person within sight, an interested listener may hear strange tales told in explanation of the popular detestation of the religious Orders. Some of these tales are no doubt traditional, handed down from the time when the Holy Office was an ever-present terror. It is not easy for more advanced nations to realise the influence of tradition among a people necessarily dependent on oral teaching for everything they know, or the extent to which it colours their thoughts and affects their actions in every direction. Although the working classes in Spain are of course aware that the Inquisition no longer exists, the effects of the nightmare of three hundred years continue, and the fear and hatred with which that tribunal was regarded are now transferred to the priests, and especially the Religious Orders. The Church has ruled in Spain, with one short interval, ever since Isabella and Torquemada revived the Holy Office, and, like all autocracies, it has come to look upon the nation over which it rules as a tool to be used for its own ends, an insentient thing, a mere machine to be driven hither and thither as the interests of the Church dictate.

And now the inevitable is happening. The machine has become sentient, and instead of submitting to be driven it is beginning to take its own course and carry its quondam drivers into regions unknown.

The crucial question to-day in Spain is the religious question. Not the belief or disbelief of the people in their religion, but the relations of the Church—i.e., that of the priests and, far more, of the Religious Orders—to the nation.

From tradition and from the circumstances of their lives, the mass of the people have come to look upon the Religious Orders as their evil genius, and at every turn one meets with evidences of their distrust of and hostility to those who should be their spiritual guides. Until July, 1909, this feeling, although for long past there have been clear indications of it, was not openly expressed by the people in public places. They not only hated the “good fathers,” as they satirically call them, but dreaded their vengeance upon those who offended them. Since the rising against the Religious Orders in Cataluña, however, the attitude of the two parties towards each other has been reversed. It is now the priests and the Religious Orders who are afraid. So little do they understand the people whom they are supposed to teach, that they go in fear of their lives lest the working classes should rise en masse against them; whereas the working classes en masse desire nothing better than a peaceable solution which shall ensure their daily bread to them and their children.

On every side the people see the baneful hand of the Church, interfering or trying to interfere in their domestic life, ordering the conditions of employment, draining them of their hard-won livelihood by trusts and monopolies established and maintained in the interests of the Religious Orders, placing obstacles in the way of their children’s education, hindering them in the exercise of their constitutional rights, and deliberately ruining those of them who are bold enough to run counter to priestly dictation. Riots suddenly break out in Barcelona: they are instigated by the Jesuits. The country goes to war in Morocco: it is dragged into it solely in defence of the mines owned, actually if not ostensibly, by the Jesuits. The consumos cannot be abolished, because the Jesuits are financially interested in their continuance, and so forth. Rightly or wrongly, the people attribute all the ills under which they suffer to the influence of the Church, and sooner or later, unless measures are taken to restrain the interference of the Church in public and private life, an explosion will come which will sweep the whole institution away. Moreover, the steady and continuous efforts made by the Church to upset the existing regime and bring back a reign of absolutism with the proscribed branch of the House of Bourbon, though not continually present in the minds of the people, are not unknown to or ignored by them.

But with all this intensely anti-clerical feeling, the mass of the people are untouched by modern scepticism, and are deeply and sincerely religious. Their religion is simple in the extreme: many would call it gross superstition, but such as it is, it suits their stage of intellectual development and undoubtedly has a considerable effect on their conduct. To represent the Spanish working man—as the Church newspapers always do—as an atheist and an anarchist, only to be restrained by force from overthrowing the social order, merely proves how completely ignorant the Clericalists are of his real character.

RACIAL AND CLASS DIVISIONS

CHAPTER I

RACIAL AND CLASS DIVISIONS

The relations between rich and poor, between rulers and ruled, between employers and employed, in Spain are peculiar and not easy to understand.

The immediate dependents of a well-to-do family are allowed a freedom of manner and intercourse which is incomprehensible to English exclusiveness, and a sense of responsibility for their dependents, and especially for those who have rendered long domestic service, is almost universal among employers. Thus there is hardly a family of means that does not, as a matter of course, support for the rest of their lives one or more of the wet-nurses who brought up the children; and during the famine in Andalusia a few years ago, most, if not all, of the landowners continued to pay, to the limit of their means, the wages of their permanent labourers, although owing to the drought no field work could be done for months. But with all this very real generosity towards those with whom they are brought in contact, the rich have no corporate or class sense of responsibility for the working classes, and make no effort to understand or provide for their needs as a whole. Spaniards are liberal in alms-giving, and every good Catholic gives doles on one day of the week to his or her regular pensioners; but there is no public provision for the destitute, and it is not in the least realised that an organised system of poor relief would be less costly, and certainly far less demoralising, than the haphazard distribution of pence to all and sundry. It is true that in some towns benevolent societies are carrying on good work according to their means, but these, consisting only of voluntary gifts, are not sufficient to do more than touch the fringe of the poverty produced by the conditions of the country.

The original causes of this combination of an almost patriarchal relation between the master and his immediate dependents, and complete ignorance of and indifference to the lot of those outside of the home or estate, lie deep, and must be sought in the relations between Christians and Moslems when the Castilians re-conquered Spain. It must be remembered that the Arabs had brought agriculture and many industries to a high state of perfection, and after the conquest they continued to cultivate the land and work at their manufactures for the benefit of their conquerors. Thus for some hundreds of years the dominant was living with the subject race, and the conquerors would feel for the conquered the contempt of the fighting man for the labourer, of the Western for the Oriental, of the victor for the vanquished, and of the Christian for the infidel. It is easy to see that when the mass of the industrial population was of alien race, any idea of responsibility on the part of the employers for the employed as a class would be unlikely to arise, while on the other hand the personal relation between master and servant would become intimate, as it did in the Southern States of America in the slave-holding days, and as it is in the East to-day. This accounts for the relation between rich and poor already remarked on: liberal protection of immediate dependents, coupled with indifference to the general welfare of the working classes. The tradition, handed down from the time when the bulk of the proletariat were aliens, has persisted for two hundred years after the last of the Moslem inhabitants was expelled.[1]

A right understanding both of the past history of Spain and of its social and political condition to-day is made still more difficult by the claim made by Castile, with Madrid as the capital, to speak for Spain as a whole. Most histories of Spain are written from the Castilian point of view, and foreign writers naturally go to the capital in search of their material. But this procedure leaves out of sight the very important distinctions between the different parts of Spain, and especially those between the Castilian and the Aragonese of the centre and north, and the Andalusian, Valencian, and Murcian of the south. Setting aside Cataluña and the Basque Provinces, with a population in round numbers of 2,500,000, the rest of Spain north of the Sierra Morena has a population of 9,000,000, while the three ancient southern kingdoms, Valencia, Murcia, and Andalusia, have between them a population of 6,000,000. The distinctive characteristics of these provinces, which contain about a third of the total inhabitants of the country, are left unnoticed by Castilian writers and those who follow them, or, if the southerners are mentioned at all, it is usually with some expression of contempt. This applies especially to the Andalusian, who is always spoken of as lazy and incompetent, without ambition, content to sit in the sun and smoke a cigarette, a windbag who talks everlastingly and does nothing, and generally a negligible quantity in Spanish politics, and a person unworthy of serious consideration in Madrid.

The ingrained orientalism of the south is at the root of the hostility with which it is regarded by Castile and the north. Andalusia and Valencia were under Moslem rule for some 500 years—Granada for nearly 750—and this long occupation and colonisation has left an indelible impress on the race, language, customs, and modes of thought of the south. On the other hand, the Arab invasion of the north was soon driven back beyond the Sierra de Guadarrama, and even in New Castile and Estremadura, north of the Guadiana, their occupation was more in the nature of a military tenure than a colonisation, and, such as it was, came to an end 160 years before the Christians were able to win any footing in the southern provinces. There is, therefore, comparatively little Eastern blood in the veins of the Castilian, while in those of the southerner the Arabic strain is at least as strong as the European.

How little sympathy exists between Castile and Andalusia may be judged from the following facts: In 1904 the south-west of Spain was afflicted by ten months of drought, causing the worst famine known for many years. Men literally died of starvation by the roadside, and the suffering among women and children was something terrible. No national or combined effort was attempted for the relief of the distress, which, indeed, the Clericalist organs of Madrid minimised and almost mocked at, saying that “every one knew that the Andalusians were all farmers, and farmers would grumble whatever the weather was.” On the other hand, when comparatively small districts in Castile, Leon, and Galicia suffered from floods in 1910, over 100,000 pesetas were collected by voluntary subscription within a week.

It must be remembered that, while the reconquest of the whole of Spain except the Kingdom of Granada was completed by the middle of the thirteenth century, there was no large exodus of the Moslem inhabitants until their expulsion in 1609,[2] and that, until Isabella’s religious fervour made things unpleasant for them, they lived side by side with their Spanish conquerors, and were, on the whole, not badly treated until the persecution and expulsion ordered by Philip III. Indeed, all the evidence goes to show that a steady amalgamation of the races went on, with so much intermarriage, that in some parts of the country there is hardly a family without Eastern blood in its veins. But necessarily and naturally the conquered race gradually fell more and more into the position of servants and slaves.

Although the great preponderance of the Arabs and Moriscos was in the south, numbers of them were scattered over other parts of Spain, even so late as the beginning of the sixteenth century, which accounts for the position of the working classes elsewhere being much on a par, so far as their employers’ view of them is concerned, with that of their fellows in the south.

Thus Spain is now divided into two unconsciously hostile camps, with an ingrained tradition of racial and religious hostility at the root of their antagonism, which is a fatal obstacle to mutual understanding. The Spanish labourer has replaced his predecessor of alien race, but the tradition of contempt and indifference remains, and the employer—and especially the employer who is “addicted to the priests”—still regards him, as his predecessor regarded his Moslem servant, as a hewer of wood and drawer of water, whose duty is to pay his taxes, and to use the suffrage nominally bestowed on him by the Constitution in the interests of his master. The working classes, if we are to believe the assertions of their “superiors,” are a godless lot with anarchical leanings, whose vandalistic tendencies have to be suppressed with a strong hand lest they break out to the total subversion of society. But ask a peasant about his politics, and he will say that all he wants is a sufficient wage to provide for his family and a decent education for his children, and he will add that he has no hope that any political party will help him to realise this modest ambition, or do anything whatever for him, because “all Governments, whatever they call themselves, are of one kidney, and care for nothing but pocketing the public funds, and pleasing the Religious Orders; the Conservatives because they love them, and the Liberals because they fear them, and both because the Jesuits are the richest people in Spain.”

The patient submission of the labourer to conditions which he believes to be unalterable is partly the result of three hundred years of corrupt government, during which he has been steadily squeezed to provide money for the wars, luxuries, and amusements of the governing classes; partly of the terror of the Inquisition and the tradition of silence that it has left behind it; partly of Oriental fatalism; but is certainly not due to the animal indifference and stupidity to which his “betters” attribute it. The peasant refrains from open complaint, not because he is contented and has nothing to complain of, but because long experience has taught him the uselessness and the danger of protest. He may offend his employer and lose his place, or, still worse, he may offend the Church and the Jesuits, in which case he will be a marked man, and can never hope to get permanent employment again.

Here is a paragraph which appeared in a leading Clericalist organ on December 1, 1909:

“Canovas and Sagasta attracted to the Monarchy the most aristocratic elements of the Carlist and Republican masses, through the mediation of Pidal and Castelar. Señor Moret (leader of the Liberal-Monarchist party) does not act in this way. Instead of considering the honourable people he considers the masses, the elements which bring about disturbances of the social order.”

This summarises in a few words the attitude which has always been maintained by the Church, and the aristocracy attached to the Church, towards the democracy. The people must be restrained from making their voice heard in the counsels of the nation, although they have nominally possessed the suffrage for some forty years, because, if the masses are given the free use of the vote, they will disturb a social order maintained exclusively in the interests of the classes. Such sentiments were common in France before 1789, but one hardly expects to find them so badly expressed in the twentieth century.

The upper classes in Spain are in the majority thoroughly materialised. Their object in life is simple—wealth and power, with all that they bring in their train, often without too nice a regard for the means whereby those ambitions are realised. Their religion consists in a diligent observance of the ordinances of the Church, and submission to the dictates of the priesthood.[3] Of any higher ideals—of any amelioration in the general lot of the poor, of any improvement in the deplorably backward state of education, of any attempt to raise the low moral tone which prevails in their own class, little or nothing is ever heard. There is, however, an increasing number of educated young men who are doing what lies in their power to promote a better state of things. They have to contend, not only against the active hostility of the clericals, but against the dead weight of middle-class apathy and ignorance, and in consequence their labour is as that of Sisyphus. Yet they patiently struggle on against all discouragements, and their circle of influence is widening every year.

But while the upper-class Spaniard is intent on the pursuit of wealth and indifferent to higher things, the peasant has an ideal which he has set before him, and for which he makes every effort in his power, against obstacles which anywhere but in Spain would be inconceivable. And that ideal, as has been said, is some sort of education for his children, whom he does not wish to be handicapped, as he has been, by inability to read and write. If he can only pay for the schooling of one child, that child has to share his knowledge with the rest of the family, reading to them all he can get to read, and sometimes even passing on the little instruction he has received, and teaching his parents and brothers and sisters their letters at night, after the day’s work is done.[4] And his chosen reading is not the republican, or socialist, or anarchical stuff against which the Church inveighs with theological fervour as the mental pabulum beloved of the masses, but certain papers with moderate Liberal views, which preach education and loyalty to existing institutions as the best hope for the country. These papers point out that any upheaval of the social order, with its necessarily attendant paralysis of trade and agriculture, can only result in making the hard lot of the labourer harder still; and the peasant, whom his masters take to be indifferent and half brutal, has the sense to see the wisdom of this teaching and to be guided by it. That the Ultramontane party should maintain, as they do, that every disturbance that may occur in Spain is the fruit of the working man’s attachment to seditious and anti-religious literature, is only another proof of their determination to misrepresent or slander him. Had this been the case, no measures of repression would have saved Spain, in July 1909, from an outburst of rage against the Religious Orders all over the country. That the fires lighted in Barcelona did not spread was not due to the suspension of the Constitution or to any terrorism exercised by the priest-ridden Government of Señor Maura. The people were kept in bounds by the influence of their chosen organ, the Liberal, which costs less than a farthing and has the largest circulation of any paper in Spain. And this paper, like the others of its party and all the best of the Radical and Republican Press, throughout all the turmoil of the three months before the Maura Ministry fell, steadily urged the people to have patience, keep the peace, and show by their actions that they were worthy of liberty.

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE

PEASANT WOMEN.

[To face page 39.

CHAPTER II

THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE

If you ask upper-class Spaniards, priestly or lay, about the religion of the people of Spain, you will be told that half the nation are bigots and the other half free-thinkers and atheists, or at best indifferent Laodiceans: a sweeping assertion that has so often been made that it has become a commonplace with foreign journalists and magazine writers.

To accuse the nation at large of bigotry, atheism, or indifferentism, is nevertheless as unjust as to accuse the army of cowardice. Small though is the attendance of the working classes at Mass, and hostile though they are to the practice of confession, they are none the less deeply religious—firm believers in the efficacy of prayer, and loyal to the fundamental tenets of their faith, such as dependence on the will of God, gratitude for small mercies vouchsafed by a good Providence, and devotion to the Virgin and the saints.

In the middle class there is, no doubt, a good deal of rather shallow free-thinking, although it usually goes little beyond a scoff at superstition and contempt for miracles and images, and is confined to the men. The women usually follow in their mothers’ footsteps, attend Mass, run through the rosary, and thoroughly enjoy the processions which enliven so many Church festivals. Confession, however, is perfunctory even among middle-class women, and the poor avoid it altogether. For strict observance of the ordinances and for material support of the Church you must go to women of higher social position, ladies of title and the wives of rich men, whose political relations keep them hand in hand with the priests and the Religious Orders. They are the bulwark of the Church in Spain. Indeed, it is often said that if all the ladies of the aristocracy could be locked up for a few years, the Church of Spain would go to pieces, so little real hold has it on any other element in the national life.

These ladies attend Mass every day and confess with great regularity. They consider it the highest privilege to be “wardrobe keepers” for the santos (saints-images) in their favourite churches; they dress and undress the image of the Virgin with their own hands for festivals, and they keep in their own houses the jewels and other treasures belonging to her. In some cases they also look after the vestments of the priests and take charge of the altar linen. And they give or bequeath large fortunes to different monasteries and convents, and to religious houses built to receive orphans and old people, repentant Magdalens, and girls in training for domestic service. But no one is admitted to institutions supported by ladies of devout life save on condition of daily attendance at Mass and regular confession and communion. And therefore the people say that such charity is not dictated by love for their poorer brethren, but is merely given in order to prop up a decadent Church, and many will starve rather than ask for it.

The people have a word of contempt for the religious principles of women such as these. They call them beata, which according to the dictionary means “devout,” but which the poor translate as “canting.” There is a world of difference to them between the lady who is religiosa (religious) and the one who is beata. Religiosa is applied to a woman who devotes her life to God and works for the sake of doing good; beata means one who lives, moves, and has her being under the thumb of the priests and the Religious Orders.

The poor say that unless they are prepared to attend Mass and confess regularly, they can expect nothing from women, however rich, who are known to be beatas. For alms given unquestioningly and without insistence on previous compliance with the rules of the Church, the sick and needy turn by preference either to persons recognised as “religious” or to those who “have nothing to do with those follies.” That is how the practice of confession is characterised by the democracy in the privacy of their own homes. They dread and distrust the confessors, and no poor man or woman will speak freely in the presence of one of their own class who is in the habit of confessing.

Yet notwithstanding their antagonism to this primary dogma of their religion, the working classes, and especially the peasantry, are, as already stated, deeply and sincerely devout, and firmly uphold the Christian faith as they understand it.

One of the most remarkable features in the spiritual life of the nation is the clear comprehension of even the least educated among them that the sins of the priests and the Religious Orders stand apart from and leave unsmirched the national religion.

“What have I to do with those people?” said a young fisherman to the writer. “Confess to a priest? Never! I confess to God and my mother, and I want no priest to come between me and my God.”

“I? Confess to a priest? What for? Every night when I go to bed I confess my sins to the Virgin, and I can die as well after that as if I had received the holy oils,” said an old woman of deep and sincere faith.

“I do not allow my wife to go to confession,” said a master mason. “If she insisted I should refuse to provide for her. I will have no traffic with the gentry of the long skirts in my family.”

“No, I did not call in a priest when my husband was dying. He would have died all the sooner if I had, he hated them so. We poor people never call the priest if we can help it. We say ‘death gave us no time.’ The priests pretend to believe it; they are glad enough to be saved the trouble of coming to our houses because, if we send for them, they have to give the holy oils gratis. And we get buried all the same,” said a young widow who had lost husband and child within three months of each other.

“And you are not afraid the dead will stay longer in purgatory if they die without the holy oils?” I have frequently asked on hearing such statements.

“Why should they? My brother, may his soul rest in peace! was a good man. God will look after him without any priest putting in his oar. Yes, it is true that the priests talk of purgatory, but for my part I have never well understood what it is, and I do not care. I say a prayer for my dead on All Souls’ Day, and there is an end of it. There may be purgatory, God knows. But certainly I will not pay money to a priest on that account. I want it more than he does.”

The popular idea of purgatory is very confused, and many declare that they do not believe in it, while betraying in every word that they pray heartily for the souls that they assume to be there.

“Do you think I could believe that my brother or my mother are in purgatory, or that I shall go there, I, who would give the clothes off my back to the poor?”

You cannot pay a greater compliment to a sceptic of this kind than to say: “By your good deed of this or that kind you have certainly taken a soul (or two souls) out of purgatory to-day.” “Taking souls out of purgatory” is a favourite occupation. It is effected by prayer or by good works, not necessarily, so far as the popular belief can be understood, by both practices together.

“There are always seven souls clinging to the cloak of the Virgin—not the Virgin on any altar, but the real Virgin in heaven. They are all climbing up, one above the other, and by prayers or good works you can help the uppermost to get out and make room for the next.”

“And where do they go then?”

“I don’t know. To heaven, I suppose. Purgatory is not a very bad place to be in, it is pretty fair. The wicked people go to the Tinieblas [tenebræ]. I do not know what that is, but it is very bad. It is always well to say a prayer for those in Tinieblas.”

“But do you suppose that any of your friends are there?”

“No, indeed; but you never know who may be clinging to the robe of the Virgin, and some one belonging to you might just be climbing up. At least, nothing is lost by saying a prayer.”

“If the souls in the Tinieblas are allowed to cling to the Virgin, I suppose she also is there?”

“How do I know? Perhaps these are all lies—things of priests [mentiras, cosas de sacerdotes]. What does it matter? What is needful is to share your puchero[5] with any poor man who is hungrier than you, and God knows I do that.”

The custom of attending a Mass for the dead on All Souls’ Day is very general. There are thousands of men and women who never set foot in a church during the rest of the year, yet rise an hour earlier than usual to go to Mass before beginning their work on November 2nd. But the proportion of communicants even on this occasion is very small. I have counted the congregations present at churches attended by the working and the lower middle classes on All Souls’ Day. At one early Mass, out of forty present, four communicated; at another, two out of thirteen; and so on. Communion involves previous confession, and the poor will not confess. Nevertheless, their faces show that this Mass is not a mere empty form to them. They do not, of course, understand a syllable of the words the priest mutters at the altar, but they are absorbed in earnest intercession for the dead whom they are commemorating. Then they go their way to take up the round of work, and probably do not attend another Mass until All Souls’ Day comes round again, while the rich celebrate the “Day of the Dead” by paying for and attending frequent Masses, and by taking or sending wreaths of flowers to adorn the graves of relatives in the distant cemetery.

Curiously enough, infant baptism bulks far larger in the religion of the poor than any other office of the Church, and the parents, and especially the mother, will make heavy sacrifices to obtain the fee demanded for the performance of this rite. The ceremony itself has some singular features, for the mother must on no account be present, and even the father remains in the background. But the social function which follows the ceremony in the Church is almost as important an event in the family life as a wedding, and the festivities are kept up far into the night. It may seem fanciful to trace these baptismal customs back to the time of Islam, but it is a fact that the accounts of the birth-feasts (buenas fadas) among the Moslems of Spain offer certain resemblances to those of to-day, while the term used to describe an unbaptized child among the peasantry links us directly to the time when to be a follower of the Prophet was to be an object of contumely. The explanation of the efforts made by the family and friends of a child of poor parents to scrape together the 7.50 pesetas demanded by the priest for the performance of the baptismal office is: “I could not leave him a Moor” (No podia dejarle Moro).

Burial often takes place without the offices of the Church, for there are few among the working classes who can afford to pay for a funeral Mass, and very many are unaware that they can insist upon the attendance of a priest even without a fee. And since the charge for a marriage in church amounts in many parishes to as much as 25 pesetas—the average weekly wage of the agricultural labourer certainly not exceeding half that sum—it is only to be expected that the civil ceremony, which costs one peseta, or the stolen “blessing” snatched from an unwilling priest by the pair proclaiming themselves man and wife at the close of any Mass, should be more frequently resorted to than the orthodox function. Many couples, moreover, live all their lives as husband and wife, as faithfully as if married by the Church or the mayor, without any religious or legal tie at all.

“The women don’t like it,” said a working man to the writer, “but what is one to do? How can we pay twenty-five pesetas to get married? And the women are only now beginning to understand that the civil marriage is quite as good as the other, if there is any question of money to be left to the children. I could show you plenty among my neighbours who live as if married, and no one takes notice that they are not. The priests only say such couples are living in sin because they have not got the marriage fee out of them.”

“It is true that my daughter-in-law could leave my son if she liked,” said an old woman when discussing a quarrel between her hot-tempered son and his hotter-tempered “wife.” “There was no money for the marriage, so I consented to their marrying without going to church. They will never separate: it does not occur to them that it would be possible. It is not as if they were not faithful to each other. My son does not look at other women, and as for my daughter-in-law (mi nuera), he would kill her if she set her eyes on another man, and well she knows it. There is no sin in marriages like that, whatever the priests may say about it. Of course I would have preferred that they should be married in church, and so would my daughter-in-law, but what are you to do when there is no money?”

The use of the term nuera here is significant. No social stigma attaches to these “wives” who are no wives at all, unless they leave one man to go to another. Then they are branded as “women of bad repute” by their neighbours, and shunned accordingly.

Thus the religion of the people seems to be entirely dissociated from the forms imposed by the Church upon its members, save only that of baptism, which is respected mainly owing to an unconscious traditional antipathy to the unbaptized;—the “Moor” or Moslem, of bygone days—and an almost complete indifference to the rites of marriage and death has sprung up as a consequence of inability to pay the fees demanded for their performance. In the towns perhaps few really care if their dead are buried without a prayer, but in the villages there still remains enough feeling about it to arouse an occasional growl of indignation when a coffin is borne through the streets attended only by the mourners, without the priest, the acolytes, and the censer-bearers, who lend distinction to the last journey of those who possess a few pesetas. As for the children, who are born and die like flies, the poor have become so accustomed to see the little coffins carried by on the shoulders of small elder brothers or school friends, led by the father or uncle of the dead child, that the piteous sight no longer calls forth a comment. It is often only one out of half a dozen of the same family who have gone the same way, and notwithstanding the heartbroken lamentations of the mother when the breath leaves the little body, every one knows she will soon be consoled. The lot of the poor is too hard for indulgence in sorrow, and it is not uncommon to hear a woman who is approaching childbirth say with the utmost unconcern, “We shall see what happens. Perhaps it will please God to allow the infant to be born dead.” It is not heartlessness or want of love for her offspring, for Spanish parents of both sexes and of every class are very affectionate, and indulge their children to excess. It is simply that every extra mouth to feed means so much less to fill the stomachs of the rest, while the national custom of suckling the child for at least a year, and often for two renders the mother meanwhile weak and unfit for the washing, sewing, or charing which helps out the family resources. That a great effort should be made to baptize the new baby when it comes shows the strength of the feeling in regard to this religious duty, and would make the general indifference to the intervention of the Church in marriage and death doubly remarkable, were it not that the tradition connected with the first ceremony does not extend to the other two.

Among the upper classes more attention seems to be paid to the religious funeral ceremony than to the actual committal to the grave. When a death takes place in a family of social position, all the friends and relatives are invited to attend the funeral Mass, which takes place in the parish church of the defunct, and it is expected of the guests that they shall accompany the funeral procession on foot as far as the outskirts of the town or village, the cemetery generally being some little distance beyond. There, however, the party disperse; few attend the coffin to the grave itself, and very often it is shuffled into its last resting-place with what to English eyes seems indecent haste and carelessness.

Indeed, whatever be the reason, small respect is shown for the empty shell, once the spirit of life has fled. The rich buy a freehold grave for themselves and their family, but the poor can seldom afford to pay for more than a six years’ concession, if that; and if they do not renew payment the bones of their dead are disinterred and thrown on a heap in the osario or bone-house, a building with a locked door built for the purpose within the walls of the cemetery.

The mental attitude of the people towards images is intricate and difficult to disentangle. Even persons who have had what ought to be a liberal education in many cases believe in the miraculous virtues of the images, scapulars, and medals of their particular devotion.

“If you would only wear this medal,” a devout lady said to the writer, “I know you would be converted to the true faith, for it is very miraculous, and has converted many. But you would not wear it, so it is useless to give it to you.”

The speaker was a woman of culture, artistic, and fairly well read for a Spanish lady, yet she was obviously sincere in her belief in the virtues of the little cast-lead medal washed over with silver.

Nor is this singular simplicity confined to women. Every year men of the upper classes (never, I think, of the lower) may be seen during Holy Week walking barefoot before the images carried in procession through the streets; and since their faces are covered and there is nothing to reveal their identity to the world at large, it cannot be supposed that the act of penance is performed for political reasons, as, unfortunately, is too often the case with public demonstrations of adherence to the Church. Moreover, these processions are attended by men of Liberal as well as Conservative opinions. That the particular image plays an important part is shown by the fact that the act of penitence is never performed save in connection with its appearance in the streets. The penitent walks barefoot before or after the platform on which is carried the Virgin of his adoration, and although it may be one among fifty representations of the Virgin in his city, it is understood that no other would have the same efficacy in cleansing his particular sin. It must be a genuinely penitential experience for a man used to luxury to tramp barefoot over badly paved streets at a rate of progress which makes the two or three miles of distance occupy twice as many hours of time, and sometimes these aristocratic penitents reach the end of their journey in a state of complete exhaustion. But there does not seem to be any sentiment of shame or disgrace attached to the act, as though there were some great sin to purge, for it is not unusual to hear a young man of orthodox proclivities say to a girl whom he meets in society shortly before Holy Week: “You must look out for me at such a place in the route of the procession; I am going in penitence and I will lift my hood there for you to know it is I.” Yet, frivolous as such penitence may appear, the rich man shares with his poor and ignorant brother a personal feeling for the image of his devotion, which leads him to disregard even danger to life in connection with it, should the need arise. This is quite dramatically shown in the case of the fires which frequently occur in churches and chapels, where lights burn continually before images adorned with lace and other combustible fabrics. The santos are always the first thought of the crowd on these occasions, and even men who scoff aloud at “all those fooleries” in daily life will be seen risking personal injury to save “the Virgin of Hope” or “Our Lady of Miracles” from destruction.

One very puzzling question in connection with this worship of the images is how far even the better educated Spaniards recognise the fact that the different images, e.g., of the Virgin—the Virgin of Sorrows, of Miracles, of the Pillar, of the Kings, and hundreds more—are all representations of one and the same Virgin Mary, and how far they consider them to be distinct individuals. Probably the worshippers themselves are not at all clear on the point: that the prayers offered before these images are in most cases addressed, not to the Person represented, but to the image itself, there seems little doubt. In the case of the populace the images certainly seem to be distinct individuals; indeed, I have been pitied more than once by kindly peasants for having “only one Christ.” “We have many: there is the Christ of the Descent from the Cross, and the Christ of the Waters, besides the Christ of the Flagellation in the Parish Church, all very miraculous.”

An intelligent man of middle age, better educated than most of his class, said to me in reference to the affection of the Spanish peasants for their images of the Virgin.

“You would be shocked if you could hear what we say to the Virgin in our houses and when we see her in the streets. But it is not irreverence or disrespect, as you would consider it. It is that we feel towards her as one of the family and talk to her as we should to one of ourselves.”

The return of certain confraternities after carrying their images through the streets in Holy Week presents an extraordinary spectacle. This is especially the case with images belonging to the poorer quarters. In one town the procession of one of these images returns early on the morning of Easter Eve, after moving slowly through the streets, from its church to the distant cathedral and back, all through the night. The bearers of the platform, which is a great weight, the members of the confraternity, the soldiers—for the Army always has a place in these functions—and the band in attendance, are all worn out with fatigue, but when they reach the threshold of the church they revive, the band strikes up an animated march, and the whole crowd assembled to do honour to “Our Lady” seem to go crazy with joy at having brought her safely back to her “home” (á su casa). The richly dressed life-sized image is lifted down from the platform by many eager hands, and swayed to and fro in time to the music almost as if dancing, and the whole atmosphere of the scene is that of a rejoicing welcome to a beloved being who has returned to her family after a long absence fraught with danger. Nothing brings home to the observer the intense reality of the people’s feeling for their santos like such a scene as this. It is, however, seldom witnessed by foreigners or even by the well-to-do of their own nation. It is so much a matter of course in Spain that no one goes out of his way to see it, and I was present on such an occasion only by the merest chance.

A bright, clever woman of the working classes, with a strong sense of humour, told me that she could only pray to a certain Christ. “All the others are only sticks (palos) to me. I can never pass our Lord of Pity without kneeling down, and I know by the look in his eyes if he is going to grant my prayer, but I cannot pray to any of the others.”

“Then when you pray to that image of Our Lord, it really is the Christ to you?”

“No; the Christ is in heaven with His Mother, but I pray to our Lord of Pity, and he always answers me. No other is the same. When I pass Our Lord of the Miracles, for instance, in the Church of San José, I have to say: ‘Excuse me, Lord, but you are only a stick to me, and I cannot pray to you. I do not know why this should be so, Lord, but that is how I find it.’” All this was said quite gravely, and the prayer addressed to “Our Lord of Pity” was recited with sincere piety.

A good old widow of my acquaintance finds St. Anthony of Padua particularly sympathetic, and feels constrained to pray for the soul of her husband at 7 a.m. on All Souls’ Day before one particular St. Anthony in one particular chapel at a quite inconvenient distance from her home. On any other occasion the first St. Anthony of Padua she comes across serves her purpose, and I once saw her stop short and break into a fervent prayer under her breath at the sight of an abominable penny chromo of the saint which suddenly attracted her attention in a shop window.

MORALITY AND CEREMONIAL

NEWSPAPER SELLERS IN MADRID.

(At the offices of the Nuevo Mundo.)

[To face page 61.

CHAPTER III

MORALITY AND CEREMONIAL

That it is a duty to speak the truth is a proposition practically unrecognised in Spain. This is chiefly, if not entirely, due to the influence of the Church, for, as a great historian says in reference to this question, “when credulity is inculcated as a virtue, falsehood will not long be stigmatised as a vice.”[6] I have heard the peasant’s creed on this point put into a nutshell, thus:

“Very often it is necessary to lie, either for your own or for some one else’s benefit. There is nothing wrong in that. But to tell an unnecessary lie is a sin.”

This sophism, which I have translated word for word, seems altogether too subtle to be instinctive, and we trace in it some echo of the Church’s teaching, instilled into the mind of the uneducated, who have come to adopt it as an axiom of common morality.

The honesty of the Spaniard is, according to our views, relative. It is very rare for a working man or woman to take cash which does not belong to him. But the same people—e.g., servants—who would consider it a disgrace to steal a peseta in coin, will have no hesitation in falsifying their accounts and cheating their employer out of ten or twenty times that amount.

In certain matters there is extreme sensitiveness to any suspicion of dishonesty, but it is not clear that any conscious religious principle underlies this feeling. It seems rather an instinct of self-protection; for when we learn that it is a common practice for employers to examine their servants’ boxes when they leave a situation, even although their good conduct has not been called into question, we see that the friendliest relations between master and man do not necessarily imply confidence in the honour of the latter. The result of assuming evil where there is none is to encourage its genesis. I have heard working-class Spaniards say bitterly: “The rich people believe that we are all thieves, so what is the use of being honest? Yet most of us are honest, even though we go hungry for being so.” Stealing is considered by the poor as a sin, but I am inclined to think that the degree of sinfulness depends in the criminal’s eyes upon the nature of the theft. Thus, while no respectable peasant will steal money or clothes, servants have no hesitation in appropriating sweets and wine, to which, indeed, they think they have a right, very possibly dating from the time when domesticated aliens were fed on the leavings of their masters’ table. It would be difficult to convince them that to drink their employer’s wine without permission is just as immoral as to steal his cash.

The instruction given by the Church on these points is hardly ambiguous, if one may judge by a parish leaflet in my possession. It contains the following questions of conscience resolved under the head of “Consultations.”

“May a servant give to the poor the food which remains over, without asking permission of her master?”

“She may do so when her master does not make use of or dispose of it.”

“And may she give it to her poor relations?”

“Without any doubt; but it is better to consult her master” (italics mine).

Such moral teaching as this would quite account for the conduct of a pious cook once in my employ, who fed her entire family for some time at my expense. She, it is perhaps needless to say, did not “consult her master” on the point. She may have consulted her priest, for all I know, and if she did was probably told that it was a meritorious act to rob a heretic.

To turn to another branch of the subject, it will probably be news to many people that a “Bull of the Crusade” is still largely sold in Spain. This indulgence was first instituted in the days of the Moorish wars, to permit those who were fighting the infidel to keep up their strength by eating meat whenever they could get it. Few or none of the poor purchase this or any other indulgence nowadays, but it is still freely sold to people of means, and the day of its issue is kept as a minor feast day. It now costs the modest sum of pesetas 1.75, having been gradually reduced from pesetas 7.50, and is a source of income to the Government, producing, according to the Budget for 1909, 2,670,000 pesetas, or, say, £106,800. Any one can obtain it, as no questions are asked as to the religion of the purchaser.

An interesting survival is the penitential purple dress, with yellow cord and tassels round the neck and waist, which is worn on occasion by women of all classes in the rural districts, and by the poor in many cities. It is not, generally speaking, a penance imposed by the priest, but a free-will offering to the Virgin, made on behalf of some one dear to the wearer. A woman will promise to wear the hábito or penitential robe for a specified number of months, or a year, or sometimes even for life, if the Virgin will intercede for her invalid husband; or a girl will undertake to wear nothing else until the dress is torn or worn past repair, when the sacrifice is completed. A girl of seventeen explained that she had volunteered to assume the hábito she was wearing because her only sister was very ill.

“But my sister got better and persuaded me to put it out of my head. Then she suddenly became very ill again; all one night she seemed to be dying, so I knew I must keep my promise to the Virgin, and after that I would not let any of them put it out of my head.”

The Spaniards have two distinct ways of crossing themselves. One, described by the verb santiguar, consists in making the sign of the cross with the first and middle finger from the forehead to the breast and from the left to the right shoulder, invoking the Trinity. The other, called signar, consists in making, with the thumb and first finger crossed, or with the thumb alone, the sign of the cross on the forehead, mouth, and breast, praying God by the sign of our Redemption to deliver us from our enemies. In some parts a third method is often employed, which peasants will tell you “is from the times of the Moors.” In this the nose is touched as well as the forehead and mouth, with the thumb-nail, which is kissed at the end. The two forms are usually combined (persignarse), and the invocation is divided as follows:

By the sign of the Holy Cross from our
(forehead) (nose) (L. cheek) (R. cheek) (nose) (chin)
enemies deliver us Lord.
(L. cheek) (R. cheek) (L. shoulder) (R. shoulder)
In the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.
(breast) (L. shoulder) (R. shoulder)
Amen.
(thumb kissed).

A good Catholic, say the peasants, must persignarse thirty-three times in the course of the Mass, “and that would be very well if we understood the language and knew why we were doing it.”

In the south people always take up a handful of water and cross themselves before bathing in the sea or in a river, some even before taking an ordinary bath at home. It will be remembered that the Moslem, when preparing for prayer, washes his nose, mouth, and ears, as well as his hands and feet, and possibly this elaborate mode of making the sign of the cross may be a survival of the Moslem ceremonial of purification, especially when combined with the water. One distinctly Islamic tradition is seen in the custom of touching anything unclean, if it has to be touched, with the left hand, the right being put behind the back. A woman of Andalusia when washing the dead for burial always begins operations with the left hand, just as the Moslem does, and will not use the right until it becomes necessary. Thus it is not impossible that the curious sign of the cross described, like the traditional reason for insistence on infant baptism, even when the other offices of the Church are viewed with indifference, may be connected more or less closely, as the peasants say, with Mohammedan practices.

In the south and west the peasants never put on clean underlinen without the persignar, and previous to the crossing they recite the following prayer:

“Blessed and washed be the most holy Sacrament of the Altar, pure and clean, of the always Virgin Mary, Our Lady, conceived without spot of original sin from the first instant of her most pure human nature. Amen.”

No matter how great their aversion from the Confessional and indifference to the offices of the Church, the most careless never omit this invocation when they change their underclothes.

Another prayer, which is universal, reminds one of the—

“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on”

of our own peasantry in bygone days. It runs thus:

“Con Dios me acuesto,
Con Dios me levanto,
Con la Virgen Maria,
Y el Espíritu Santo.”

(“With God I lie down, with God I arise, with the Virgin
Mary, and the Holy Ghost.”)

As will be observed, the Virgin here takes the place of Christ in the Trinity. I have inquired of a number of people how the verse goes, and find it does not vary. They say that evil would befall them if they failed to recite the lines every morning and night.

The Radicals, Republicans, and Socialists, who are all branded alike as atheists by the Ultramontanes, understand the people’s faith better than their priests do. The cry of the Church is that the nation is indifferent to all things holy. But men like Melquiades Alvarez, the novelist Galdos, Sol y Ortega, and many other leaders of the Lefts, continually explain that the national quarrel is only with the priests and the Religious Orders, not with the Church as an institution, for they recognise and proclaim that religion is an essential part of Spanish national life.

There is, indeed, no room for doubt that the mass of the people love God, Christ, the Virgin, and the saints with a warmth and sincerity rare in these materialistic days. His God is a living God to the peasant of Spain, his Virgin a mother always prepared to protect him, her image and those of the saints the most beautiful things in the world to his unsophisticated eyes. This may seem to the enfranchised intellect a degrading superstition. But the fact remains that the religion of the working classes of Spain in the mass does what many a more advanced creed cannot do, for it carries conviction and comfort to its possessors.

THE CONFESSIONAL AND CHURCH ABUSES

CHAPTER IV

THE CONFESSIONAL AND CHURCH ABUSES

Something must now be said about the way in which the people refer to the confessional, and this I will endeavour to do in their own words, premising that I offer no opinion as to the truth or falsehood of their stories, most of which have been told me by women. The abuse of the confessional is such a heinous sin that Catholics of other nations will not believe what is currently said as to its prevalence in Spain; they hold that such things are impossible, and it is to be hoped, for the sake of the Church, that prejudice distorts the popular view, and that what the working classes in town and country assert to be of frequent occurrence does not in fact take place. But whatever be the actual truth, it is impossible to doubt that the people are convinced that the confessional is habitually abused, and this conviction—which nothing can shake—constitutes a peril which must ultimately endanger the very existence of the Church in this country.

When first I was told, several years ago, that the secrets of the confessional were betrayed, as a matter of course, in the interests of the rich as against the poor, I flatly said that I did not believe it. The thing was unthinkable to one brought up in the belief that such secrets were inviolate. I was given actual instances of domestic servants sent to confession “so that the mistress might learn from the priest what the maid had been doing wrong.” As my informant was a young foreigner, born and bred a Catholic, in the employment of a family of title, and with a somewhat limited knowledge of Spanish, I found it easier to assume that he had misunderstood what was said in his presence than to believe that he had accurately repeated his employer’s words, although he declared that the above remark had been made in his hearing on several occasions. It should be said that he was in a house noted for its clerical leanings.

A similar assertion was made to a member of my family by the daughter of a professional man, better educated than most of her class, and touched with the superficial scepticism prevalent among clever young Spaniards, whose hatred of the priests and the Religious Orders tends to alienate them altogether from the religion in which they were brought up. In this instance I attributed the accusation to prejudice, and attached no more importance to it than to the young man’s story. And as it is not a matter that can be discussed with practising Catholics, the two mentioned, and one other, who confirmed their statements, are the only educated persons whose opinions I can quote.

But among the poor this offence is spoken of freely, and they accuse the priests, not only of betraying their trust by repeating what is told them under the seal of the confessional, but also of using the opportunities it offers to ruin young and foolish women who obey the Church’s order to confess with frequency. Indeed, many working men have gravely assured me that such is their distrust of the priests that nothing would induce them to allow their women-folk to go to confession on any pretence whatever.

The following are some among many stories of this kind, which I give as they were told me, only omitting the expressions of anger with which some of them were punctuated:

“I was laundress in a priest’s house for several years. His sister lived with him, and she really was his sister, for a wonder; not the sort they generally call their ‘sisters.’ They also kept a young girl to help in the house, for the priest was well off. One day my fellow-servant committed a sin, for the devil tempted her to steal a ring belonging to the Señora. But she could not rest happy with it, and at last she went to a priest and confessed that she had stolen it, and asked what she should do. He told her to put it back, and gave her a penance. So she put it back. And the priest went and told her mistress, and she sent the girl to prison.”

“There are several maidservants in the house of Doña Dolores, and one of them goes to confession frequently. The others all have to be very careful what they say before her, for the priest repeats it all to Doña Dolores, and then it is ‘into the street’ with those who have done anything silly or wrong in the kitchen or elsewhere.”

A friend of mine—a foreigner—was begged by her servants not to engage an attractive-looking housemaid from one of the convent training schools who applied for a situation. “She will repeat everything that is done in the house to her priest, and he will make unpleasantness for you and us too. That is done every day here. We who have not had the misfortune to be brought up in a convent never, if we can help it, take a situation where a convent-trained girl lives.”

“Juan Cabrito was hung through the priest telling the authorities that he had confessed that he was a murderer. The priest went straight to the Governor and told him everything Cabrito had said. He well deserved hanging, and no one thought anything of the priest betraying his confession. We are quite used to that in Spain.”

“I often used to be called in to help to wait in the evening in the house of a priest who had a tertulia for priests every week. His niece kept house for him. I have often heard the priests laughing and joking about the confessions of the nuns. They would imitate their voices, speaking high up and whining: ‘Father, I lost my temper and spoke harshly to the dog or the cat to-day.’ ‘How tedious they are with their dogs and their cats and their tempers!’ the priest who confessed the nuns would say, and then they all laughed together, very much amused. But it was wrong, for the priest is forbidden to repeat a confession. I am not very fond of the nuns myself, but I did not like to hear those coarse men [nombres brutos] making jokes about their penitence.”

“It is many years since I have confessed. When I went to confess before my wedding the priest asked me a question which no man should put to a decent woman, so I never went again.”

“In my last situation my mistress made me go to Mass with her every Sunday. I had to get up at five in the morning, so as to be back in time to do my work in the house. Every Sunday she asked me if I had confessed so that I might take the Communion, but I always told her I had not had time and would confess next time. I will not go to confession. I would rather lose my place.”

“It is true that I am over seventy, and it is very hard to earn my bread and pay a penny a day for rent by picking up rags and rubbish for sale. I am ill too: I have never been well since my daughter ran away from me to live with a priest. But I do not wish to go into the Asylum of the —— Sisters. They not only make the poor people there confess and communicate every day, but they make them work quite as hard as I am working now. And in my own place, though I may be hungry, at least I am not obliged to get up at six in the morning to go to Mass, and then carry firewood for the convent, as my poor old brother was.”

In another town in the diocese where the rag-picker lived, an old acquaintance of mine thankfully accepted an opportunity I was able to obtain for her, through friends, of entering an asylum for aged paupers, managed by nuns under the supervision of the municipality. That town has long been markedly Liberal in its politics, and possibly this may have something to do with the more humane administration of the asylum. With this instance in my mind I was surprised at the rag-picker’s rejection of a similar refuge for her old age, but further inquiries convinced me that the rule of the one convent was in truth very different from that of the other.

“Every one knows that Higuero was the son of the Bishop, and that was why they didn’t hang him. There was no doubt at all that he murdered his paramour: he was caught almost in the act. How upset the Bishop was! His son and his daughter married a brother and sister, and both turned out badly, very badly. The son—Higuero was his nickname—and the daughter’s husband—Pepita her name was—fell in love with the same woman, and that was the cause of the murder. If the Bishop had not used all his influence with the Government Higuero would not have escaped hanging. He was taken away to —— Prison, and no one ever heard of him again. Of course he was not really taken to prison, he was allowed to escape. How did we know he was the son of the Bishop? Very simply. His mother had been ama de gobierno [housekeeper] in the Bishop’s house before he was made bishop. No, she was never married. She was well provided for, and the children had some education, but they were bad from the beginning. I lived for some years in the same tenement house with them. Many of the priests’ children turn out ill. What can be expected of the children of such bad men?”

These are a few out of hundreds of such stories told. And the people believe they are true.

Certain scandals, relating to the disappearance of valuable paintings from one Spanish cathedral or another, are familiar to all who travel in Spain. One such incident has always been a mystery to the outside world, owing to the seeming impossibility of a thief getting access to the picture in question, which was in a chapel in the cathedral, protected by a heavy grille extending from floor to ceiling, the door of which was always kept locked.

The following explanation was given by the widow of a former cathedral servant:

“I know quite well how it was done. The assistant-keeper of the keys was on duty that night, his superior having leave of absence because his daughter was ill. The priest in charge of the chapel made some excuse to take the keys from him that afternoon. Next day he and several others were sent to prison, accused of having been concerned in the theft. They were released in a week, for there was no evidence against them, and the proof is that not one of them lost his place. The priest soon after left the city. It was said that he had been promoted, but no one ever heard of him again.” The husband of the speaker was one of those accused.

A scandal which gave rise to a question in the Cortes was the disappearance of two valuable pictures from the Cathedral of Toledo. It appears that these pictures were in a chapel which had been built and endowed in the seventeenth century by a certain family. Two or three years ago their descendants claimed these pictures as their private property, and entered into treaty to sell them to a “foreigner.” The State intervened, declaring the whole contents of the cathedral to be inviolate. Soon afterwards “it was found necessary to repair” the chapel in question, and the pictures were taken down “for safe custody” meanwhile. What happened after that has never been cleared up, but a “foreigner” and a motor figure in the story, and the chapel is now without the pictures. No steps were ever taken, so far as the public could learn, to bring the matter home to any one.

That quantities of valuable old laces and embroideries have disappeared from the cathedrals and parish churches of Spain there is no doubt. I know of one case myself in which an antique chasuble was exchanged for one of cheap jute imitating brocade. The explanation given was that the old one was worn out, but as it now figures in a private museum it is difficult not to believe, as the people say, that some money changed hands with the chasuble.

In the cathedrals each canon had, until quite lately, entire control of the chapel he served, and was responsible to no one for its contents. The temptation to sell old lace and vestments and altar fittings, and to replace them by new, was no doubt great, especially if there is any truth in the popular belief that the priests in many cases maintain a home and bring up families like men to whom marriage is not forbidden. And no one could bring him to book for any change made in the appointments of his chapel or (in the case of a parish priest) his church, because, as a rule, no one in authority over him knew what it contained when he took possession. Even after his death it would generally be impossible to prove peculation, did the superior officers of the Church desire to do so, for it is a rare thing for any cathedral or church to keep an inventory of the valuables it is supposed to possess.

It is said that the priests in many cathedrals and parish churches allow their linen vestments and altar fittings to be taken away from the precincts for laundry purposes. The facility with which valuable old laces can be exchanged for modern machine-made stuff in these cases need not be dwelt on.

Another opportunity for those who wished to profit by the sale of church treasures was said to be afforded by the fact that fabrics, sometimes several centuries old, stand in occasional need of repair. I have heard the “store-room” or “workshop” laughed at by employees of the church.

“Once anything worth money goes into the store-room for repairs we never expect to see it again.”

“And where is this store-room?”

“Don’t you know? The dealers in antiques can tell you.”

The hostility of the people towards the priests doubtless colours their views in these as in all other matters relating to them. But it is a fact that a distinguished Spanish archæologist a few years ago was refused further access to the archives of a certain cathedral after he had asked the Chapter to permit him to publish an inventory of the treasures under their charge. Now, I am glad to say there are at any rate some dioceses in which all this has been changed. The archbishops have had the contents of the churches examined and catalogued, to the annoyance of certain persons, but to the satisfaction of the parishioners, who obtained no benefit from the sale of the Church treasures under the old system.

The following incident was reported to the Press at the end of the year 1909. I have not seen any contradiction published, and I give the story for what it is worth.

In one of the great cities a certain church was condemned as unsafe, and the congregation were told that ere long they would have to attend other churches in the neighbourhood. One of the Religious Orders entered into treaty for the purchase of the condemned building, in order to build on the site. But nothing was settled, and as the danger of collapse was not immediate the services continued to be conducted as usual. When the time came to collect money for Masses to be said on All Souls’ Day, the parish priest found his usual request for alms refused, on the ground that the —— Brothers had already been round to say that the church was given up and its congregation attached to the Brothers’ Church in such a street, and this being so they had come to collect the payment for the All Souls’ Masses, which was usually given to the parish priest. He indignantly reported the affair to his superiors, and so it got into the papers.

It was added that the priest declined to say the Masses for the dead, as he had not been paid for them, and the —— Brothers, although they got the money, provided no special service for the congregation who had paid for it. So that the souls for whom these poor folk had given their alms will—in their belief—remain so much longer in purgatory. That the alms were given by the poor, not by the rich of the parish, is evident from the donors not knowing that their parish church still existed. The whole affair throws an instructive light on the relations of the poor with their Church or their parish priest. Had he been in the habit of visiting them, or did they make a practice of attending Mass even occasionally, the mistake could never have arisen. But, as the story shows, the priest had no intercourse with his people save when he went to beg from them. The incident, even allowing a wide margin for journalistic exaggeration, goes a long way to support the assertion of the woman who gave as her reason for not going to confession, that “the priest would only ask her for money, which she wanted more than he did.”

One more case, and I have done with this unattractive subject.

Some twenty years ago a large dole to the poor, which had been given annually for about four centuries in a certain chapel, was suddenly cut off, and has never been renewed. It came out that the priest in charge had sold the bonds in which the capital was invested, with the connivance of a Government official in the Finance Department, and the two between them spent the money. The priest was convicted and imprisoned for a twelvemonth. Then he was released and appointed to another church in the same diocese. My informant said he had been a witness at the trial. “And to-day,” said he, “that bad man holds the sacred Elements in his hands, and gives the people his blessing. Such things ought not to be allowed.”

THE POOR AND THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS

CHAPTER V

THE POOR AND THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS

My readers may be inclined to think that the Religious Orders are a kind of King Charles’ head, which I, a twentieth century Mr. Dick, am unable to keep out of this book. The truth is that in an attempt such as this to make intelligible the views and aspirations of the working classes of Spain, the Religious Orders are the central and dominating fact which overshadows everything else. Whether we discuss the material condition of the poor, their education, their political disabilities, or whatever it may be, and make any attempt to analyse the matter and discover the reasons of their deplorably backward condition, we always get back to the Religious Orders as the cause—if not in actual fact, at any rate in the firm and unshakeable conviction of the people—of all their misfortunes.

It must be remembered, in connection with the Religious Orders, that the position of nearly all of them in Spain is illegal. According to the Concordat, made before the expulsion of Isabel II., the only Orders allowed in Spain are those of St. Vincent of Paul, St. Philip Neri, and one other, to be nominated by the Pope by agreement with the Government, while all closed Orders of nuns are prohibited. The Pope has never yet named the third Order, and apparently no steps are ever taken to oblige him to carry out his part of the bargain.

I will now give—generally in the words of the narrators—typical instances of the way in which the Religious Orders are said to interfere with the livelihood of the working classes, and of the manner in which once wealthy families have been brought to ruin through their machinations.

The porter of a Jesuit college—for the servants of these institutions love their employers no better than do their friends and relatives outside—told his brother, who told me, that every night during the first two or three weeks in August, 1909, after the Barcelona riots, refugees were admitted to the college. At least eighty, he said, came in all. They slipped in secretly, after the lights were out, disguised in lay dress, often of the poorest description, having travelled half dead with fear [muertos de miedo] from Cataluña. That the porter’s story was true was proved by the large purchases of provisions made by the college during that month. A baker told me that the frailes were more insistent than ever that all the waste bread should be given to them “for the poor.” And, he added, the “good Fathers” were already buying twice their usual supply of him. “The frailes always demand all the bread we put by for the poor,” said my friend. “We would prefer to give it direct to the poor ourselves, for we do not feel sure how much of it they get from the frailes, whose house-keepers are great hands at making pasteles and dulces[7] for sale to good Catholic families. These good Catholic families prefer to buy their pasteles cheap from the friars, who say that they are sold for the good of the Church. We do not care to give our stale bread to be used in injuring the trade of our companions the confectioners; for the friars, having no taxes to pay, can naturally undersell ordinary tradesmen, and all the more when they get the bread for their confectionery free. But if we said that we wished to give our bread to our own acquaintances among the poor, the Jesuits would ruin us. They would tell all their clients that we were bad men and enemies of the Church, and we should lose all our trade. We know this by experience. So we give our stale bread to the frailes and they let us live. But the poor are getting no bread from the frailes since the Barcelona business.”

During the disturbances in Cataluña it was said that “shiploads” of monks and nuns were being landed in the middle of the night at sundry ports along the coast, and that they so effectually betrayed themselves by their nervousness of manner that the country people had not the slightest doubt as to who and what they were. But as the people had no desire to injure them personally—notwithstanding a certain amount of talk about cutting throats and hanging—they were permitted to pass unmolested, though it is true that there were occasional scowls at ill-clad individuals who wore their trousers “with a difference,” as though they missed the flowing skirts of their cloth.

And it must be remembered that at the very time that these frightened men and women were travelling the country in disguise, numbers of families were sorrowfully bidding farewell to sons, brothers, and husbands, on their departure to the war which, as the people will always believe, was begun in the interest of Jesuit capitalists, sheltering their ownership of the Morocco mines and the great steamer companies behind the names of lay millionaires.

The popular suspicion of Jesuit interference in these, as in almost all the other big commercial concerns in the Peninsula, may or may not be justified, but its effect on the attitude of the people towards the Religious Orders cannot be over-rated. Not the least extraordinary feature in the situation is that the Religious Orders profess to disregard the feeling that exists against them, although it is apparent on every hand to any one who goes about with eyes and ears open.

For years past I have noticed that no member of the working classes salutes a priest or friar in the streets. Day after day one summer I saw the same priests taking their afternoon walk along the same by-way, where the same artisans, to the number of twenty or thirty, watched the “long skirts” from the doors of their workshops. I never saw an artisan greet a priest or friar, or vice versa. The flowing robes of the ecclesiastics swept against the patched garments of the workmen, but no glance was exchanged. The priests kept their eyes bent on the ground, one hand grasping the skirts and the other pressed on the breast, a typical attitude, which is jeered at by the poor as “canting.” The workmen kept their eyes fixed on the work on which they were engaged. It is impossible to imagine anything more hostile than the silent defiance of the men, as they turned to watch the “long skirts” out of sight. I have seen single instances of the same thing elsewhere in many places, but here I had special facilities for observing the daily exhibition of armed neutrality, owing to the accident of my room at the back of the little country hotel looking out on the by-path. “I hate to see them,” one of the men said to me; “they are the ruin of us and our country.” What made it the more significant was that these same workmen had a pleasant word of greeting for every lay person, man or woman, acquaintance or stranger, who passed by them.

The economic question bulks largely among the causes of the popular hostility to the Religious Orders, and if only half the complaints generally made are based on fact, the people have reason on their side.

Formerly, say the women, it was easy to obtain a day’s wage by washing in well-to-do houses, and a laundress could make a decent living. Now in every town of any importance there are one or more convents called “Domestic Colleges,” where orphans or servants out of place are received, and these girls repay the nuns for their board and lodging by doing laundry-work for rich Catholic families. If the girls were allowed to keep even a portion of what they earn, the women say that they would not feel the system to be so unjust. But they declare that this is not the case. Whatever is paid goes to the nuns, and as they, having no taxes or wages to pay, can undersell the laundresses, who are called upon to provide both charges, the lay laundry trade is steadily declining, although the quality of the work is on a par with that done in the convents.

The nuns teach their protégées every class of needlework, lace-making, and a kind of embroidery or net-work which is largely used for priests’ vestments, altar-cloths, &c. This competition, which was one of the reasons given for the presence of women (if, indeed, they were present) in the attack on the convents in Barcelona, is felt in every part of Spain, but perhaps especially in the south and south-west, where skilled needlework, which is almost the only employment of women above the domestic servant class, is exceedingly common and badly paid at best. Nowadays, say such women, it is increasingly difficult to obtain employment of this kind at any price, owing to the quantity done in the convents and the reduced prices at which the nuns undertake it.

And finally, although this does not so directly affect women, the nuns do a large trade in the sweetmeats and patisserie already referred to.

The grievances against the nuns, then, are chiefly related to their interference with the industrial market, and this, although a very real source of hardship, has not yet, except in a few isolated instances, given birth to anything like the active hostility that is expressed against the male Religious Orders. The closed Orders of nuns are regarded with aversion and contempt, as living at the expense of the nation and leading lives which, to the working classes, seem purely idle and self-indulgent—“doing nothing all day but pray for their own souls, or worse,” as they describe the life of contemplation. I have never heard working women express any desire to injure the nuns, much though they dislike them as a class. But when we come to the Jesuits, Maristas, Carmelites, Franciscans, Dominicans, and all the long list of Orders lumped together in one condemnation by both men and women under the derisive name of “long skirts” (sayones), we find a much worse state of affairs.

The people declare that in many places the leading industries have been completely ruined by the competition of persons in the employ of the Jesuits—for they call all the friars indiscriminately Jesuits, although they are perfectly aware of the distinctions between the various Orders. And they will point out to you one family after another who have been reduced to penury by the “good Fathers,” and will relate innumerable instances of the methods they believe to have been employed to this end. Perhaps the best way to explain these will be to give a literal translation of one or two of the stories I have heard from the people, which, told as they are with an absolute conviction of their truth, show what ground the working classes have for distrusting and detesting those who ought to set an example of virtue and self-abnegation.

“A man I know saved 5,000 duros [about £1,000], and he lent it all to the Jesuits for a building they were putting up, a building attached to the monastery, so that he looked upon it as a work for God. Some years went by, and my friend was growing old and wished to retire from his little business and live on his capital. So he asked the Jesuits to repay his loan. ‘Oh, no!’ they said, ‘do you not know, my son, that he who lends to God must expect no return? A loan to God is a gift for the salvation of thy soul.’ As I say, he was an old man, and he found himself ruined, without hope of earning more money. He left the good Fathers and went and cut his throat.”

“Why is the old Marquesa de Fulano starving? I will tell you. When her father, the last Marquis, was dying, the Jesuits never left him for a moment, and at last they persuaded him that his soul was of more consequence than his daughter’s livelihood, and he made a will by which he left all his money to found a college for boys in ——. When he was dead his daughter discovered that all she had was the family land, and not a farthing of the capital her father had invested. Soon afterwards a famine came, and there was no rain for nine months. The Marquesa gave food to all the labourers on the estate, although there was no work for them, for she is a very charitable lady. She spent all the money she had, and then sold all her jewels and other valuables to buy them food. You see, she is a widow without family to advise and help her. Of course she was too proud to betray her poverty, but even if she had told her friends they could have done nothing, for many landowners were ruined that year. Now the estate is mortgaged to the last acre, and she has sold everything she has and is almost without food for herself. If you wish to hear about the Jesuits, ask the Marquesa de Fulano! And you will understand that all the people employed on the estate lost their livelihood too, for it is now long since she has been able to afford to have it cultivated.”

“Yes, it is a pity to see that fine old oil-mill falling to ruin. It used to belong to a very rich man, but when he died the Jesuits got hold of his widow and induced her to build a large new chapel in the monastery of ——. Millions of pesetas they squeezed out of her for the work, and when it was finished, there was nothing left of the business. One of the sons meanwhile became a Jesuit, and as they have a big business in oil over there he naturally took the olive-groves for his share of the property. This happened twenty years ago: the younger brothers are married and have children to bring up. They have to earn their bread as they can. One of them rents ten acres and cultivates them himself, so he does not starve, but the other poor fellow has taken to drink, and he and his family mostly go hungry. It is all the work of the Jesuits.”

There are many such stories of gifts made to the Church in articulo mortis. The priests are said to urge the dying penitent to save his soul by benefiting the Religious Orders instead of providing for his family, on the ground that if he acts as his duty and instincts dictate he will lengthen his stay in purgatory. There seems no room for doubt that many once wealthy families have been reduced to poverty in consequence of such legacies to the Church. Indeed, it almost seems as if a new class of society is gradually arising among the very people who formerly were the strongest supporters of the Church—people of good birth and gentle breeding, with a family tradition of injury at the hands of the Jesuits, which has alienated them for ever from a Church to which they owe their worldly misfortunes, and is converting them into earnest recruits to the cause of Free Thought. From these men of gentle breeding will eventually come the leaders of the people in their final struggle against the Ultramontanes.

The ways which the Jesuits are reputed to employ in order to ruin those who defy them are many. The following story shows how easily it can be done, if it is true that the Company of Jesus condescends to such contemptible action against the industrial and working classes.

“Francisco Mengano used to have a very good business. He employed nine men to work for him. But he hated the friars, and he used to talk against them to a man who pretended to think as he did and came to sit with him every day, and encouraged him to say he would never let his daughters go to confession because he was afraid the priest would make love to them, and many other things. That vile man always talked in the same sort of way himself, and poor Francisco looked upon him as a friend. But when his eldest girl was old enough for her first Communion and Francisco refused to let her go to confession, he discovered that the man he trusted was himself a Jesuit, and had told the Jesuits everything Francisco had said. They waited to be sure his daughter was not going to confession, and then set to work to ruin him. It was quite simple. He was a cart-builder and wheelwright, and depended on the landowners in the neighbourhood for most of his work. The Jesuits merely sent word round that he was charging too much and doing bad work, and his trade was ruined and he became what you see—a poor old jobbing carpenter, who cannot even afford to employ a boy to do his heavy work.”

When I heard this story I recollected that about a year earlier, when passing Francisco’s workshop in company with a gentleman reputed to be friendly with the Jesuits, he had remarked, apropos des bottes, “Don’t employ Francisco if you should want any carpentering done; his work is bad and he overcharges abominably.” It naturally did not occur to me that this observation could have any other object than to save me, as a foreigner, from being cheated, and, all unconscious of what I afterwards discovered to be its injustice, I gave my work elsewhere.

Not only do the people accuse the Religious Orders of depriving them of employment by underselling them and destroying their trade by slanders, but they also bring grave charges of indifference, if not actual brutality, to the poor who ask them for help of any kind.

It seems to be a fact that no assistance was volunteered by any Religious House during the epidemic of typhus in Madrid in 1909. In another town, where a seminary for priests was temporarily converted into a hospital for the sick and wounded from Melilla, the cisterns ran dry one night owing to the unusual quantity of water used for the invalids. Not a man or a boy among the seminarists would take the trouble to pump more water, though a quarter of an hour’s work would have done all that was needed for the time, so workmen had to be fetched in the middle of the night to supply what was immediately required for the sufferers. This I heard from one of the men who did the work.

The working classes have as yet no plan of campaign against the Religious Orders. They are waiting in the hope that at no distant day they will have the suffrage in fact, not, as at present, in name only. But the bitterness of their hostility may be judged from the following incident, related to me by an eye-witness.

Three country people, dealers in charcoal, were sitting in a tramcar. My informant was sitting immediately behind them, and at his side was a priest. One of the charcoal-merchants, pretending to be unaware of the priest’s presence, related how he had been overtaken by night on the mountains, where he was buying wood in pursuit of his trade, and how he had gone to a large Jesuit college standing alone on the hillside, to ask permission to sleep under the portico, the season being mid-winter and the weather bitterly cold. The “good Father” who opened the door at his knock refused to admit him, telling him that “the college was not a house of call for tramps, and he could go and sleep under a tree by the roadside.” The narrator had no option but to do this, for the door was shut in his face, and “he thought he would have died of cold before morning.” “I wish,” he concluded, “that all the frailes in Spain would come to my house some cold night and ask for shelter. Before morning I would leave every one of them under my trees with his throat cut.”

I have no doubt that the charcoal merchant uttered his theatrical threat on purpose to frighten the priest, and if that was his object he certainly succeeded, for the poor man turned white and trembled with alarm; but it is certain that no one of his class would have dared to express such sentiments before a priest or a monk previous to the Barcelona affair.

I have heard a gentle-looking old woman say deliberately: “I wish all the frailes were going out to be shot this morning! How I should enjoy seeing them killed!”

And I have heard an artisan remark as a couple of “long skirts” went by:

“How I hate those vermin! It makes me sick to see them near me.”

The people who say these things are not Socialists nor Anarchists, nor even Republicans. They are decent, quiet, industrious working people, who know and care little about current politics, and simply judge of the priests and the Religious Orders by what they see. Once the confidence of such people is won, you will hear similar remarks by the score wherever two or three of the working class are gathered together, whether in town or country. Nor are their wives and daughters one whit behind the men in their expressions of hostility.

Here is an outburst which I took down word for word from a clever but quite illiterate working woman. The reference to the “ovens,” as will be seen, tallies with what I have quoted about the bakers, although the speakers were in different provinces, far apart.

“While we have that lot here we cannot live. The alms which ought to be given to the poor are given to them. I don’t believe they give to the poor the bread which they beg from the ovens. I believe they use it all to make alforjillas and piñonates for sale.[8] They cannot make them without bread. The Jesuits do not make them themselves. All the monasteries keep amas de gobierno[9] to cook and wash and mend and do everything required. They are quite independent, answerable to nobody. They eat us up as if they were ants. They let no one live, meddling with everything that doesn’t concern them. They tack themselves to a lady, an acquaintance, and she has linen to launder, and they order her to send it at once to be washed in one of the [religious] houses where poor unfortunates are taken in. Many of them are the children of the friars themselves and of the priests. There is a family in —— Street whom they call ‘Curitas,’ five brothers and sisters, all children of one parish priest [cura]. Their ‘Uncle Cura,’ as they called him, brought them up and educated them and left them all he possessed. They were all the children of one mother; it was the same as if the priest had been married to her. He lived with her and maintained her all his life. But that is a great sin for the priest! They say that in your country the priests are allowed to marry. If it were the same here the Church would be purged of many sins, for all the priests live with women. If they are faithful to one woman I do not see what sin there is in it. It is natural. But it is more usual for them to have many women. I know that one old priest had at least ten or twelve children in —— [a low quarter of the town], all by different women. He brought them all up, and gave them every year enough for their food. He was very rich. They called him ‘the Prior.’ The mothers said to the children: ‘Run along; the Prior will give thee money to buy food.’ I know this because my father used to work for him. The priest often said to him: ‘Look, what pretty children mine are!’ He was not in the least ashamed of owning that they were his.”

And here is another statement made by the father of growing lads whom he was educating as best he could to try for appointments in the Civil Service.

“You should be careful not to say anything about the Jesuits in those letters you are always writing,” he said. “In Madrid or Barcelona it may be all very well, but in a little country town like this you can never be sure how much the ‘good Fathers’ will find out. It is well known that Paco, who attends to the registered letters here, is the son of a Jesuit. Many of the clerks in the post-offices are the sons of priests or frailes, and that is why honest lads like my sons have no chance of getting a place there. The Jesuits have a plan by which their sons slip in without the examination imposed on others. Do you think that fool Paco would be where he is if he had had to pass a competitive examination? But be warned! He has been clever enough to learn how to open letters and seal them up again. The ‘good Fathers’ have taken care of that. And if they suspect that you write stories about them, they will take care to read your letters before they leave the post-office.”

In this connection I may mention a curious incident. A book sent to me from England went astray, and some six months later, after inquiry made by the English post-office, reached me minus its wrapper, with a note of apology from the local post-office, explaining that it had been recovered from a Jesuit college at least fifty miles from the place to which it had been addressed and registered by the publisher. Why it was delivered at the college instead of to me was not explained. I thought at the time it was merely a piece of characteristic Spanish carelessness, but I was reminded of the occurrence by my friend’s remarks about “Paco” and the post-office.

THE MONARCHY AND THE PEOPLE

THE QUEEN AND THE QUEEN-MOTHER OF SPAIN.

[To face page 111.

CHAPTER VI

THE MONARCHY AND THE PEOPLE

If Spain at large had attributed the misfortunes of 1909—the war in Melilla, the outbreak in Cataluña, the suspension of the Constitution, the attacks on the country made by the foreign Press—to the influence of Don Alfonso, the throne would have been in greater danger than at any time since the expulsion of Isabel II., for the whole nation was roused to indignation by the general conduct of the Clericalist Ministry then in power.

But happily for Spain, and indeed for Europe, since civil war in the Peninsula would be an European disaster, not even the most violent of the Republicans or Socialists taxed the King, the Queen, or any member of the Royal Family with indifference to the feelings of the people or a disregard of the sufferings of the poor.

A fact not recognised in England is the extent to which conscription tends to consolidate the Monarchy in a country where the King, the head of the Army, enjoys personal popularity among his working-class subjects.

Under an unpopular ruler conscription would probably lend itself to the speedy establishment of a Republic. But every year that King Alfonso lives he binds the Army, which is the very flesh and blood of the nation, more firmly to himself by ties of personal affection. And personal affection is a stronger force than political conviction alone ever has been or ever can be.

In the seventies the Army stood for liberty and the Republic against Carlism and Ultramontanism, until Alfonso XII. was brought from his English college and offered to the nation which had seen his mother dethroned, as the mass of the nation always will believe, at the instigation of the Church. It was his mother’s personal popularity with the masses which made her son’s path comparatively smooth, notwithstanding the chaos of conflicting interests among which his lot was cast. His own honesty of purpose, his devotion to his people’s welfare, the Spartan simplicity of his private life, and the personal charm which he, in common with all his race, possessed, gave him a higher place in the affections of the nation than is at all realised outside of Spain, and the greatest hope expressed for King Alfonso XIII. by the poor is that he may take after his father. “He was a man,” they say. It was for the father’s sake that all parties agreed to call a truce during the anxious months that followed on his premature death, until his son was born, and it would be difficult to say how many times, while Queen Maria Cristina held the reins of Regency, the memory of her dead husband may have turned the tide in favour of their child, when the Ultramontanes would have used the national unrest to the profit of the proscribed branch.

From the day that Alfonso XII. breathed his last, the Ultramontanes have consistently tried to represent the Queen Mother as closely attached to their party. The accusation is manifestly absurd. No mother would support a policy directed in the interests of a Pretender before that which maintains the rights of her own son. It is, indeed, a matter of history that in order to give the Opposition no excuse for agitation, Canovas, with true patriotism, recommended the grief-stricken Regent in the early days of her widowhood to entrust the Government to his opponents, the Liberals under Sagasta, in order to avoid a contest, so that to the latter fell the duty of proclaiming to the waiting nation the birth of Alfonso XIII., on May 17, 1886.[10] Canovas would not have acted thus had there been any real doubts of the loyalty of the Liberal party.

The Imparcial, in an article dealing with Señor Maura’s assertion, immediately after his fall in 1909, that the Conservatives are the only bulwark against revolution and the only support of the Throne, recalled this fact, and added that “without the Liberals the Throne would not exist now, because the Liberals rescued it from revolution after it had been shaken by the bloody attacks of Carlism. Without Sagasta, without Castelar, the Spanish monarchy would not be.”

Yet so persistently has the story of the Queen Mother’s clericalist leanings been repeated by those interested in its acceptance during the twenty-three years that King Alfonso XIII. has been on the throne, that the mass of the people still believe that she defers to the Jesuits even in matters in which their interference cannot fail to injure the King in the eyes of his people—a preposterous misconception, which cannot be corrected too soon. Quite lately I heard a working woman say:

“She cannot be a Jesuit, as they say. A Jesuit mother could not have borne such children as hers. Look at the King! He has none too much love for the curas (priests). Yet we have always been told that Queen Cristina is a Jesuit! Why should that be said? These are cosas de los frailes (doings of the friars) ‘said to make us dislike her.’”

In one town where I had some acquaintances among the clergy, I was struck by the malicious things that were said by them about the young Queen, and especially about her relations with the Queen Mother. Not long before I went there I happened to have heard a very pleasant account of the private life of the Royal Family from a foreigner, entirely outside of politics, who was for a short time employed in one of the palaces while the Royal Family were in residence. His description left no doubt at all as to the happiness of their home life.

With this in my mind I did not feel greatly concerned at being informed by various Ultramontanes that “Queen Victoria was on the worst terms with the Queen Mother, who had never forgiven her for having been brought up a Protestant,” and that “Maura had refused to let her go to England after the Barcelona affair, because she was so miserable in Madrid that she had declared she would never return to Spain if once she got back to her own country.”

No one who has seen the young King and Queen together believes this kind of thing, although it has been repeated in clericalist circles ever since the marriage. But, unfortunately, comparatively few of their subjects have the opportunity of seeing them, and during the last half-year of the Maura administration photographs and picture postcards of the Royal Family, which formerly were on sale everywhere, became noticeably absent. Throughout the three months that the press was censured it was almost impossible to find an illustrated paper containing any picture of the King, the Queen, the Queen Mother, the Infanta Maria Teresa, or the Royal children. During that time everything that could tend to recall the King and Queen to the minds of the people and increase their popularity was suppressed. My attention was first called to this state of affairs by finding that in one large town not a single picture postcard of King Alfonso could be bought. The shops had sold out their last year’s stock, and no new photographs of any kind had been issued since the war broke out.

It would have been natural that portraits of the Queen should appear in connection with the War Fund initiated by her Majesty and taken up with enthusiasm all over the country. But no. A portrait and several pictures of the Marquesa de Squilache, who acted as honorary secretary, were published, showing that lady at work in her office, distributing money to applicants, &c. But I have not been able to discover that any such pictures appeared with the young Queen as the central figure. The Marquesa de Squilache is a philanthropist whose fame deservedly extends all over Spain, and the admirable organisation of the fund was certainly due in a great measure to her clear-headed and business-like methods. But she would be the first to acknowledge that the Queen, and not herself, should have been represented in the picture-papers as the head and front of this effort to alleviate the misery caused by the war. It is difficult to believe that the marked omission of her Majesty’s portrait in the illustrated papers during the clericalist Press-censorship was accidental, while at the same time a series of thirty-six postcards of Don Jaime of Bourbon in the Castle of Frohsdorf was being freely advertised in Madrid.

The War Fund, initiated and presided over by the young Queen, was perhaps the first charitable appeal ever issued direct from the Court to the nation, without the intervention of the Church. At first it was stated that applicants for relief from this Fund must bring certificates of birth, baptism, marriage, &c., from their parish priests. [11] But the Heraldo, one of the leading Liberal-Monarchist papers, pointed out that such a condition would deprive all those who had been married by the civil authority of participation in the Fund, and put in a further plea for the children of soldiers not born in wedlock. The Queen and her committee of ladies decided on the widest interpretation of the family limitation, and at an early stage in the war relief was given to a child whose father was at the front, although the mother did not bear his name. This broadly charitable decision commended the Fund warmly to the mass of the people, for, as already shown, the prohibitive cost of the marriage licence in many, if not all, the Spanish dioceses compels numbers of decent couples to use the civil rite or none. Thus the decided action taken by, the Queen and her committee, notwithstanding the recommendations of the Church, endeared Queen Victoria Eugénie to thousands of mothers who, if the first conditions proposed had been made obligatory, would have been without the pale.

The interminable lists of subscribers, appearing day after day and week after week, and the innumerable small subscriptions, often not exceeding ten centimes, and sometimes falling as low as five, proved how whole-heartedly the poor gave of their penury, and various incidents which occurred showed a real spirit of self-sacrifice in the wage-earners. Such was the action of the cigarette-makers of Seville, the two thousand women of all ages whose fame has been so often sung in the opera of “Carmen.” They were ordered to make up several thousand boxes of cigarettes with the legend “For the Army at Melilla.” They immediately asked to be allowed to do the whole work gratis as a tribute to the Army; and on being informed that this could not be permitted, because the consignment was a gift to the troops from the Company which rents the tobacco rights from the Crown, the cigarreras volunteered to forfeit a whole day’s pay, to be given to the Queen’s Fund for the Wounded. Numbers of these women are mothers of families, and many of them have only three or four days’ work weekly, at a wage ranging from 75 centimes to pesetas 1.50, so that a whole day’s pay was a serious consideration to them. Nor were they by any means alone in their generosity, for many industrial guilds, companies, trade unions, and civil servants, such as, e.g., the minor post-office officials and telegraph operators, also gave a day’s wage.

Judging from the results of previous appeals to the public for charitable purposes, it is safe to say that the enthusiastic response to the Queen’s Fund was due in a great measure to the national confidence that the money would be well and wisely administered under her Majesty’s auspices, for it is a melancholy fact that similar confidence is not felt by the poor in the case of subscriptions raised under the patronage of the Church.

I have quoted at random a few observations from among many betraying animus against her Majesty on the part of the priests. Here is another, which shows why they dislike the young Queen so much. I met one day in a mountain village a Franciscan friar who had come from a neighbouring city to deliver a course of sermons. He mistook me for a Frenchman, and therefore had the less hesitation in enlarging upon the evils that the King’s marriage would bring upon the country. One remark particularly impressed me, as expressing in a few words the attitude of the Church towards education.

“She will do untold harm by trying to introduce her English ideas about the education of women. The women of Spain have quite as much education as is good for them. More would only do them harm.”

In this connection it seems worth while to mention that what most appealed to the working women (who certainly are not over-burdened with education) in relation to the birth of the Prince of Asturias was the announcement that the Queen intended to nurse her baby herself, instead of following the old-fashioned custom, universal among the upper classes, of employing a wet-nurse. This is not the place to discuss the unhappy, results of the system on the general health and morale of the nation. But the announcement was seized upon by the poor as bringing the royal mother into close contact with themselves.

“Have you heard that she is suckling her child, just as we do?”

And when soon after it was stated that “owing to the Queen’s state of health, and having regard to the duties of her position” the infant Prince had been handed over to a wet-nurse like any other rich man’s child, a sigh of disappointment went up.

“You see, the doctors would not let her do as she wished. Health? Rubbish! Any one can see that she is the picture of health. But what would become of the commissions the doctors get from the wet-nurses for recommending them if the Queen put wet-nursing out of fashion?”

The Queen was not blamed for relinquishing her maternal duties. Every poor mother believed that she would have nursed her baby, had the decision rested with her. This is characteristic of the attitude of the mass of the people towards both the King and the Queen. Whatever they do that is worthy of respect and admiration is taken as fresh evidence of their intrinsic virtues. But whatever happens in regard to them that does not please the country people is attributed to the malign influence of those who stand between them and their subjects.

I was struck by the popular comments on the announcement that Don Alfonso was not going to Melilla, among which this was one:

“Do we not know that he is dying to go? He is young and brave, and he loves our soldiers. It is Maura who forbids him to go to the war.”

A suggestive remark was made by a journeyman plumber with whom I had a long conversation while the war was at its height.

“No doubt he would have liked to lead the Army. He is brave enough. But kings are too expensive to be risked in that way. If we have a king he may as well be taken care of.”

“You do not seem a very enthusiastic Monarchist,” I said.

“I? Monarchist! I am republican to the bones.”

“Ah! Then I suppose you would like to turn Don Alfonso out of the country?”

“I? Why? What harm has that boy done me? Everybody likes him.”

And he seemed quite puzzled by the smile I found it impossible to repress at this exposition of “republicanism to the bones.”

For fully a year before the fall of the Maura Ministry anecdotes of the charity and generosity shown by the King, the Queen, and the Royal Family were growing rarer in the papers which had formerly supplied these little pieces of information to the many people who like thus to be brought into contact with the home life of their rulers. The omission was introduced so gradually that at first no one noticed it. But when soldiers returning from the war talked of gifts sent out by the Queen, and other evidences of active sympathy shown by the Royal Family, it was realised that no steps had been taken to make these things known to the public at home. The King’s gift of thirty thousand solar topees out of his private purse was one instance. The Queen’s present of thousands of warm vests to wear under the uniform was another. Queen Maria-Cristina, and the Infanta Maria Teresa (who by her gentleness and unassuming manner has won for herself an affectionate nickname among the poor of Madrid), as well as the Infantas Doña Isabel, Doña Paz (Princess Louis of Bavaria) and Doña Eulalia, the King’s aunts, all devoted themselves during the war to working with their own hands for the soldiers, besides giving generously to the Queen’s fund, but not a word of this appeared in any of the papers. I heard something of their work from private sources: the public heard nothing.

It may be suggested that the ladies of the Royal Family, who are instinct with patriotism and love of their fellow-countrymen, may have preferred that their charities should pass unpraised by the nation. But even were that so, one would expect that the expenditure of some £11,000 out of the King’s private purse would have been reported far and wide, especially since it had been impossible to conceal that the troops were suffering severely from want of proper headgear in the tropical summer of North Africa. But beyond the bare announcement that the King had ordered this immense number of sun-helmets to be procured for the troops in urgent haste, from abroad, because they could not be purchased at home, no comment was made on an act of truly royal generosity. A Liberal paper said that information on the subject was held back by ministerial instructions “until a suitable time for publication arrived,” but beyond the bare fact of the number given and the price said to have been paid, no further details were ever published. The Conservative organs confined themselves to commenting unfavourably on the size, shape, and colour of the new headgear, and one of their correspondents turned the whole affair into ridicule, describing the soldiers in the new helmets as “having the appearance of walking mushrooms, which destroyed all that had hitherto been picturesque in the campaign.” But when the illustrated papers brought out one picture after another in which the men were seen wearing these solar topees, and the soldiers began to write home to their families that “the King’s helmets” not only protected them from the sun by day, but kept their heads dry and warm while sleeping on the damp ground by night, the people scored another black mark against Señor Maura, crediting him with a deliberate intention to conceal evidences of the King’s care for the soldiers from the people at home.

The vests sent out by the Queen were never mentioned at all by the Press. Yet my informant, a returned soldier, told me they must have numbered thousands, for, said he, “there seemed to be enough for all of us; at any rate, all I knew had them.”

It was thanks to these, he said, that there were not many more fever patients when the torrential rains of October fell on an Army destitute of winter clothing and even of sufficient sleeping accommodation, so that for nights at a stretch “men lay on soaked mattresses or blankets only, sunk in a bed of mud.” “The Queen’s vests kept us warm in the middle, and that helped us to bear the wet and cold,” he said.

Why was the Queen’s gift, equally with the King’s, treated with such discourteous silence under the Press censorship of the Clericalist Ministry? It was not for want of space in the papers, nor for want of goodwill on the part of the editors, for full particulars were given of innumerable generous offerings by commercial houses and private individuals, and column after column was daily filled with names of subscribers to the War Fund, which was designated “The Patriotic Fund presided over by H.M. the Queen,” or “The Patriotic Fund under the Committee of Ladies,” according to the political bias of the paper publishing the lists.

If anything had been wanting to arouse national enthusiasm for the Queen, her prompt action in initiating this fund would have provided it. To English people it seems natural that the Queen should undertake the work, for the Queen of England has been for many a long day regarded as the head and front of charity organised on behalf of the nation. But Spanish women, accustomed for centuries to bow to the dictates of the Church, had come to believe that what the Church looked on coldly could not be carried out at all, and least of all by a woman. The Church, with certain exceptions, stood aloof from the Queen’s Fund on the pretext that men of peace might not aid in any matter connected with war. The nation translated this into a protest on the part of the Ultramontanes against a national work of charity headed by a Queen who is not popular with the priesthood. And the response to the Queen’s appeal for the sick and wounded is not only a testimony of the love of the nation for the Army, but also evidence of its confidence in the Monarchy as opposed to the Ultramontanes.

A pretty incident in regard to another royal gift made on the first visit of the young King and Queen to a certain large provincial town may be worth relating. The usual largesse of so many thousand pesetas to the municipality, for the poor, was announced in the newspapers when they left. But by chance I heard how much farther their unannounced charity had extended. They had given a considerable sum to a convent in each district of the city to buy bread for the poor, and of this no notice was taken by the papers. I heard of it from a journeyman painter, whose sick wife had received two loaves.

“Her aunt is portress at the Convent of ——, so she was able to get her share. Everybody in our parish was very pleased. The only thing we should have liked better would be to receive the bread from the King’s and Queen’s own hands, so that we might have thanked them as they deserve. But such a crowd of people would have gone to the palace that the Queen would have got very tired, which was no doubt the reason why they did not give us the bread themselves.”

Strangely enough, the Queen’s Protestant upbringing, which prejudices the Ultramontanes so strongly against her, has just the opposite effect upon the people. They look upon her as being, like themselves, a victim of clericalist injustice, and so deep-rooted is the conviction that whatever the Jesuits object to must be good for the people, that the knowledge of their oppositions to the marriage would have been sufficient in itself to secure her a welcome from the proletariat.

But her hold upon the masses goes deeper than this. The peasants appreciate, far more than many of the upper classes seem to do, the vital importance to the nation of a settled Dynasty and Constitution. They know that for many years the Monarchy hung on a thread, while the frail life of a little child was all that preserved Spain from the chaos that another conflict between Republicans, Carlists, and Monarchists would have produced. Therefore when King Alfonso grew up, married, and became the father of an heir to the throne, the rejoicing of the nation was heartfelt and sincere. The discussions which arose in 1905 on the death of the poor young Infanta Mercedes, the King’s eldest sister, as to whether her son was or was not entitled to be Prince of Asturias in the absence of a direct heir, had aroused all serious-minded Spaniards to the ever-present dangers that would take shape in action should King Alfonso die unmarried or childless. So that when the birth of the little Prince of Asturias—the first son born to a reigning King of Spain for over a century—was speedily followed by that of a second, the poor, always the worst sufferers from civil discord and changes of Government, learnt to look upon the young Queen who has given these hostages for peace to the nation, with a feeling compounded of admiration and affection. And each fresh child that comes to fill the royal nurseries seem a fresh bulwark to the State in the eyes of the working classes, who remember how their own flesh and blood were thrown to the dogs of war time after time by opposing forces during the century when Spain had either no King or no Crown Prince.

THE REVIVAL OF CARLISM

CHAPTER VII

THE REVIVAL OF CARLISM

For a long time past it has been assumed abroad that Carlism is dead in Spain, and probably few even among diplomatists in other countries could say off-book what the proscribed branch of the Spanish Bourbons now consists of, where the different members of the family live, and what relations they maintain with each other and with the country from which they have been exiled since 1876. Even so careful an observer as Major Martin Hume wrote in 1899 that Carlism as a political system was dead in Spain, and the absolutism upon which that party pin their faith, past revival.[12]

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the Carlists have been left out of account by those who observe Spanish political troubles from outside. Indeed, the very existence of the old Pretender seemed to have been forgotten by the generation which has grown up in England in the thirty-four years which have elapsed since the close of the last civil war. But the Spanish working classes have not forgotten Don Carlos, nor have they for a moment lost sight of the continued existence of this party in their own country.

The root of their long memory lies in their antipathy to the Religious Orders. To the people the Carlists are indissolubly associated with the Ultramontanes, and who says Jesuit says Carlist in their vocabulary of distrust. And that the people have reason on their side has been proved by the words and actions of the Ultramontanes themselves since the events that took place in the summer of 1909.

The Catalonian question has been discussed at such length and with so much confidence by writers living in other countries that I may be forgiven if I add to their pronouncements on the causes and effects of the “Red Week” certain information which is not common knowledge beyond the Pyrenees, unless possibly at the Castle of Frohsdorf or in the palaces of the proscribed branch in Venice or Trieste. The censorship exercised over the press, and over telegrams and even letters addressed to newspaper offices, was so severe while the country was under martial law, and, indeed, right up to the fall of the Maura Cabinet in October, 1909, that representatives of foreign journals who tried to put the facts before their leaders found it impossible to do so. Any man who had once tried—and failed—to get off even the most cryptic telegram relating to the part played by the Ultramontanes in the riots, was thenceforth marked by the Intelligence Department of the Society of Jesus, and if he continued his efforts to communicate what he knew, he not only found his telegrams suppressed after they had been accepted and paid for, but stood a good chance of having his personal liberty interfered with. There was plenty of excitement about the work of a foreign correspondent in Spain in the summer of 1909, wherever he happened to be stationed. But it was not precisely the form of danger suggested by the reports of revolution and anarchy which were supplied to the foreign Press. Notices of that class could be procured and sent through without the slightest difficulty. The newspaper correspondent who was in danger was the man who crossed the frontier to telegraph the facts as he saw them, and who was not unlikely to meet with an “accident” as he made his way back to the scene of his labours.

The result of this regime of espionage was that all Europe was hoodwinked as to the real crisis in Spain, for naturally as soon as affairs in Cataluña ceased to be sensational, the foreign Press relapsed into its usual indifference to what was going on in the Peninsula.

Foreign residents, living as quietly and comfortably as usual, were considerably astonished when their home newspapers reached them, packed with sensational tales of revolution, incendiarism, military sedition, and wholesale executions, and asked what on earth the Spanish Government was about that it allowed these slanders to be propagated all over the world? Who was responsible for these perversions of the truth? What advantage was hoped for by those who fostered so colossal a misrepresentation of the conduct of the inarticulate proletariat of Spain?[13]

The Censor handled the national Press even more sternly than the foreign, for the suspension of the Constitution gave the Government a perfectly free hand, and although the Constitutional rights were nominally restored everywhere except in Cataluña a few weeks after the rising, the Press was in reality gagged as long as Señor Maura remained in office. The Opposition indeed was placed on the horns of an impossible dilemma. So long as the party kept silence as to what they knew, Spain would continue to be held up to foreign contumely for a condition of affairs which did not exist. Yet if any Liberal dared to criticise the Government, he was clapped into prison until such time as it might suit the Government to release him.

The position was recognised by Señor Moret, the veteran Liberal-Monarchist leader. He possesses the invaluable quality of knowing when to speak and when to keep silence. And throughout the time when the fair fame of his nation was being dragged in the dust, he urged patience and submission upon his followers, pointing out that when the time came to call the Ultramontanes to account for their conduct of the Government, the strong men of his party must not be found in prison, for it would be their business to speak: and the Liberal-Monarchist statesmen, without exception, supported their leader in his patriotic policy.

Only a very strong man could have controlled the rising tide of wrath against the Religious Orders, whom the people hold responsible for everything that goes wrong with the nation. Señor Maura, the leader of the Ultramontane party, is supposed, by those who do not know the facts, to be the only really strong man in Spain, and it appears to be honestly believed abroad that he holds the Conservative party together by sheer force of statesmanship. The truth is that Maura is a weak man who owes his position as the leader of the party he is supposed to control only to the unflagging energy and intrigue of the Ultramontanes—the richest men and the subtlest intellects in the Peninsula; while Moret’s power, on the other hand, is based upon unswerving political rectitude, maintained against the onslaughts of corrupt politicians, and upon his capacity for silence among men who spend half their lives in talking. This is why he has obtained such a hold upon the people that the whole forces of political immorality have laboured to bring about his overthrow each time that he has taken office, lest he end by leading the nation into paths where corruption will have no standing ground. Maura’s policy of repression gave a great impetus to the revolutionary spirit against which it professed to be directed. And yet Moret’s influence was strong enough to keep the nation quiet, because the nation trusts him.

For once the low level of popular education, which Moret and his followers are working hard to raise, was on the side of the Liberal leader. Only some twenty-five per cent. or so of the nation can read, and of that number few indeed know any language but their own. Had the working classes realised that the Army, of which all Spain is so proud, was being traduced by the foreigner, neither Moret nor Maura could have controlled the storm of wrath that would have overwhelmed those held responsible for the lie.

Happily for Spain, the syndicate of newspapers known as the Sociedad Editorial de España, which is edited under the direction of the Liberal-Monarchist party in Madrid, and read by thousands, as against hundreds of readers of the journals which support a different policy, never wavered for a day in upholding Moret’s recommendation of patience and submission to the law, and refrained from increasing their sales by pandering to popular excitement with allusions to what was going on outside of Spain, notwithstanding the grossest insults from the Ultramontane press. Those who control the organs of the party knew well enough that if they had raised the cry of “Down with the Jesuits!” they would have called up a tempest not easily or speedily to be allayed. But they knew that their adversaries wished for nothing better, and they kept on their own course and saved Spain from a violent revolution against the Church. The syndicate of Liberal-Monarchist papers is continually accused by the Ultramontane press of being responsible for the attack on the religious houses in Cataluña, and is held up to reprobation for “encouraging the destruction of the country by maintaining the right of the people to have lay schools.” But the truth is, and the Ultramontanes know it, that to the Liberal-Monarchist press is due the present security of innumerable buildings belonging to the Church, which, but for the influence of the Liberal party, would be in smoke-blackened ruins to-day.

Many members of the educated middle classes of Barcelona assert that the disturbances in Cataluña in July, 1909, were deliberately instigated by the Jesuits. The object was, they say, by hook or by crook, to close the lay schools, and that it had long been an open secret that the Ultramontane party were determined to take the first excuse they could find to destroy an educational movement which they find inimical to their interests. And the link connecting the Jesuits of Barcelona with Don Jaime, the son of the recently deceased Pretender, Don Carlos, was provided by an indignant disclaimer of Carlist participation in the affair, published by a Carlist organ edited in Paris, long before any suggestion had been made that such participation was suspected. This was so clearly a case of qui s’excuse s’accuse that no thoughtful observer, unbiassed by political passion, could fail to put two and two together.

The peasants had no doubt whatever as to the origin of the disturbances. One of them gave me his view of the situation, as follows:

“The Carlists and the Jesuits plotted to turn out Isabel II., and now they are trying to overthrow King Alfonso. They ruined Queen Isabel because she loved the people and hated the priests, and now they are trying to do the same with los Reyes because they are popular in the country. But let them try! There are still many of us who remember what we suffered in the last Carlist war, and we do not intend to have another. Let them try to touch los Reyes! We will kill every priest in the country before they shall put a hand to that work!”

“Well,” I objected, “this is very fine talk now that Don Carlos is dead and buried, but if you did not want him for your king, why did so many of you fight for him?”

“If you were ordered to fight and knew that you and your children would be put in the street if you refused, would you not fight rather than let your family starve? The men who paid our wages said: ‘You will go with us to fight for Don Carlos or you will never have another day’s work from us.’ What help had we against our masters? Do you think we wished to take arms against Queen Isabel? If the Jesuits had not been in the affair, no one would have taken notice of her little faults. The Jesuits intended her to commit faults when they married her to a man who was no man. If she had not been good to us they would have let her stay.”

The popular songs expressing loyalty to Queen Isabella have not been forgotten in the forty odd years that have elapsed since she was dethroned, for in 1909 they were revived, with such slight alterations as were needed to bring them up to date. Here is a specimen:

“Si la Reina de España moriera
Y Don Carlos quisiera reinar,
Los arroyos de sangre correrian
Por el campo de la libertad.”

(“If the Queen of Spain were to die and Don Carlos wanted
to reign, the streams would run with blood on the field of
liberty.”)

The intricacies of succession being little understood by the people, this song was modernised by substituting “Victoria” for “de España” and “Don Jaime” for “Don Carlos.” During the suspension of the Constitution the song was not sung aloud: the people said that “Maura had forbidden it.” Directly the Liberals came in it was heard again everywhere.

Here is another:

“No reinará Don Jaime,
No reinará, no, no!
Mientras España tenga
Bayoneta y cañon.”

(“Don Jaime shall not reign while Spain has a bayonet and
a cannon.”)

And another, perhaps in some ways the most interesting of the three:

“Dicen de Barcelona
De un mitin clerical,
Que Don Jaime asistió
Provisto de un disfraz.
Al ver la bronca de palos y morral
Creyó que le tiraban bomba encima de nocedal!”

The literal translation is as follows: “They say from Barcelona, of a clerical meeting, that Don Jaime attended it provided with a disguise. When he saw the row with sticks and a nosebag, he thought they were throwing a bomb on the top of a walnut-copse.” Taken in its literal meaning it is of course nonsense, and the popularity of the song was evidently due to the puns on “morral” and “nocedal.” By writing these words with capitals we get the names of the man who threw the bomb at the King’s wedding (Morral), and of a well-known Carlist leader (Nocedal). This song was sung in Barcelona when the colonies were lost, with another name in place of Morral’s, and was revived in 1909, brought up to date as above, until with the suspension of the Constitution it was severely repressed. It expresses the popular opinion as to the authorship of the bomb of 1906 and the troubles in Cataluña.

It was curious to observe how constantly the Carlist and Cuban wars seemed to be in the minds of the people during the regime of repression. Frequent comparisons were drawn between the reign of Queen Isabella and the rule of Señor Maura, all highly unfavourable to the latter. It was always Maura and the Jesuits: never was the King blamed in Spain for the sins of his ministers. The Carlist war seemed as fresh in the minds of the unlettered masses as Mellila itself. Tales were raked up of shocking cruelty to the rank and file, and of a callous disregard of their sufferings in Cuba and the Philippines, and it seemed to be believed by many of the speakers that similar abuses were being repeated in Morocco.

A nation which has been prevented from developing its intellectual life is inevitably thrown back upon its recollections, and traditions of class injury cannot fail to be more permanent among a people who have no other occupation for their thoughts.

For nearly forty years the uneducated Spanish peasantry, and the artisan classes, have nursed their wrath against the body whom their parents believed to have dethroned, for their own ends and at the cost of a bloody civil war, a Queen desirous of ameliorating the lot of her people; and for ten years of that time their resentment has been increased by the conviction that the same body plotted to sell the last of the once world-wide Spanish colonies, and strewed the road to that sale with the corpses of Spanish peasants, set to fight, without arms or equipment, against the overwhelming forces of the enemy, while the Jesuits appropriated to their own purposes the money wrung from the nation for the expenses of the war.

How much of the indictment against the Jesuits is justified I do not pretend to decide; but all the world knows that the Spanish Army again and again went into action in Cuba and the Philippines so destitute of munitions as to be practically unarmed, while the tragic loss of the Spanish Navy at Santiago will never be forgotten by those whose friends and relatives were sent to an inevitable death “by order of the Government in Madrid.”

Had the people been allowed to educate themselves during the years that have passed since those fatal adventures, the wound, though it will long remain unhealed, would have been skinned over by consoling comparisons drawn between these and the great disasters of other nations. But the Religious Orders have always opposed the spread of popular education. The people have been driven back upon tradition, old and new, for their mental nourishment, while other nations have been forging ahead. Thus the Religious Orders have sharpened a sword for their own undoing. The longer the Spanish peasant is left to nurse the memory of his grievances, the more bitter grows his resentment against those whom he holds responsible for them.

To the Jesuits the people attribute the downfall of Isabel II. and the years of internecine strife which followed; to the Jesuits they attribute the fiasco of the Spanish-American War, with all the suffering it entailed upon the poor; to the Jesuits they attribute the war in Morocco, with its heavy account of bloodshed, sickness, and money-cost; and to the Jesuits they impute the chronic unrest in Cataluña, which they believe to be fostered in the interests of Don Jaime of Bourbon. They are convinced that all these things were and are engineered by the Carlist party, being well aware that, as the Pretender himself stated, in a published document, the “Monarch” of the Ultramontanes has no hope of entering Spain again, save on the waves of a national revolution, which would bring misery and desolation to thousands of homes.

Let us now see what evidence may be found in incidents that have occurred and statements that have been published since the regime of repression was abolished, to support the popular theory of Jesuit-Carlist intervention in the events of 1909.

The belief, industriously promulgated in Spain and abroad, that Ferrer engineered and conducted the July outbreak, fell flat, generally speaking, among the Spanish working people; always excepting, of course, the more educated elements in the larger industrial cities.

“They are saying that this Ferrer, whoever he may be, paid Morral to throw the bomb at the King and Queen. If that is true he deserved to be shot. But others say that the Jesuits themselves paid Morral, and others again say that Don Carlos employed him.[14] What do I know about it? The only thing certain is that the Jesuits had a hand in this Barcelona business, for they have a hand in everything that is bad for the country. Where the Jesuits are, there are the Carlists also. As for this Ferrer, who is he? We never heard of him till Maura shot him.”

This commentary on “the execution of an anarchist” or “the martyrdom of an enthusiast” is, of course, that of the peasantry alone, not that of the Republicans and Socialists, to whom he was well known long before the Barcelona riots took place. But let it be remembered that the unlettered peasant forms the great majority of the working classes in Spain.

The calm with which the mass of the nation regarded the affair was, however, shaken when a report got about that Ferrer was denounced by or at the instigation of a Dominican monk—even a name being given—who, having quarrelled with him some years before, had determined to contrive his destruction. I do not say that there was any foundation for this vague story. But its ready acceptance as exculpating

SEÑOR MAURA.

Leader of the Ultramontanes.

[To face page 149.

Ferrer, by those who had previously been indifferent or hostile to him, shows how the people twist everything to the prejudice of the Religious Orders, and believe all evil possible to them. Had the Liberal papers lent themselves to agitation then, the result might have been serious. No better incitement to riot could have been found than the story of the Dominican. The death of Ferrer in itself left the mass of the people unmoved, but the ease with which churches and monasteries were destroyed in Barcelona had already set many aggrieved people thinking how easy it would be to follow Barcelona’s example in other towns where the Jesuits are numerous, and only a leader and a party-cry were needed to raise the working classes against the Religious Orders.

The whole of the Opposition Press, however, in spite of great provocation, as usual stuck to its guns and steadily, continued to condemn violence and to point out that the duty of the nation, unjustly deprived of its constitutional rights, was to prove by its self-restraint and moderation how entirely it was worthy to be trusted.

“If we could only kill Maura without hurting the King,” a working man said to me, “he would have been dead long ago, for he is the cause of all our troubles. But the Jesuits would make out that any act of violence on our part was directed, not against Maura himself, but against the party which is supposed to support the King; they would never admit that it was only their friend Maura whom we were attacking, and it would be made to appear that we were trying to overthrow the Monarchy. That is why Maura is still alive.” The conviction, and the rancour expressed in these words, cannot be rendered in print.

The speaker could not read or write. He and some ten or twelve of his friends were in the habit of meeting quietly together after nightfall, when no priest or Jesuit was likely to see them. One of the better instructed, generally a reservist who had “got education while serving the King,” would read aloud to the rest, and all would discuss the pronouncements of their chosen newspaper and form a collective opinion on them. I have sat with many such groups, in small towns and country villages, and have taken care to notice what newspaper they read. It was invariably the Libéral. It often struck me, during the three months of “repression,” that Señor Maura literally owed his life to the organs of the so-called “Trust,” which he and his party accuse of working hand in hand with the anarchists; for the sentiment recorded above was expressed in my presence many times by members of the working classes in connection with Barcelona, the war, the want of education, and all their other grievances. Maura, the Jesuits, and the Carlists, are regarded as one by the mass of the nation, and the three-fold hostility is concentrated on each member of the trinity in turn.

When you have some twelve or thirteen million people brooding over their grievances, and cherishing the conviction that a certain party in the State refuses to recognise or redress those grievances because by preserving the status quo they put money in their own pockets, the situation becomes serious for the party to which such action, or inaction, is attributed. And it must be remembered that though the Spanish peasant can read but little of the literature disseminated by revolutionaries—anarchists and such-like—across the Pyrenees, an echo of their campaign can hardly fail to reach him sooner or later.

Several little incidents occurred about this time which, though trivial in themselves, lend support to the popular view that the Carlists were at the bottom of the trouble.

Thus we have the disclaimer of participation in the outbreak, by the Correo Catalan, the official organ of the party, synchronising with the publication of extracts from a “forthcoming” manifesto of Don Jaime, suggesting the possible expulsion of the King by a revolution, to which I have already alluded; while early in August the Ultramontane journals said that a quantity of weapons, which they allege to have been taken from the hands of the mob, were stored in the Carlist club in Barcelona. Don Jaime’s full manifesto was not published till November, when the equivocal passage did not appear. But it is worth observing that some time before the expected death of the old Pretender his supporters in the Press had been hinting that those who believed Carlism to be dead in Spain “would presently see things that would surprise them.”

Then we have the inexplicable favours accorded by the Government to Señor Llorens, a Carlist Deputy to Cortes and one of the most prominent of the “Court” of Don Jaime. This gentleman paid more than one visit to the Army at Melilla, and was allowed privileges at the front which were granted to no other civilian. The favours shown to him and his own proceedings were so marked as to call forth outspoken comment from the Ejército Español, a military paper professedly without political bias, which, after recalling the fact that he is a well-known supporter of the anti-dynastic party, and had

DON JAIME OF BOURBON IN MOROCCO.

[To face page 153.

taken part in the last Carlist war, plainly warned him that any attempt to tamper with the loyalty of the Army would be in vain, and asked what was the meaning of the exceptional privileges he enjoyed.

On July 24th a great meeting of the Carlists was held at Trieste on the occasion of the funeral of Don Carlos, the most noteworthy feature of which was that on the evening of the same day Don Jaime left his followers to be entertained by his mother and sisters, and went himself, it was said, to Frohsdorf. Why did he, on the very day of his father’s funeral, abandon the delegates of his party when they travelled long distances to see him and discuss the situation? The rioting at Barcelona was just then at its height, having begun, it was said, some days sooner than was intended.

About this time all sorts of reports were spread, calculated to alarm the country and prejudice it against the Monarchy. The story of the mutiny and execution of soldiers on their arrival at the front I have already mentioned. The details of this varied with each telling: sometimes two men were shot, sometimes nine, often a whole battalion, once several of them. The immediate preparation of accommodation was called for for the thousands of sick and wounded, who could not be received in the already overflowing hospitals. Real sacrifices were made by the poor to help in these preparations, for every one wished to do his share for the sufferers; and when at length it became clear that no wounded were coming, at any rate at that time, and that the demands made on the public sympathy—for the moment at least—were a sham, much indignation was naturally aroused. These alarmist reports circulated with great rapidity, even in remote villages where no one received newspapers. The people had no hesitation in attributing them to the parish priests, “who have their own ways of spreading what Jesuits wish them to make known,” and tales of all sorts of horrors for which they had been held responsible in the past began to be raked up and repeated as happenings of the moment. One such tale was of a walled-up nun found in a convent in Barcelona during the July riots. I took some trouble to track this story, and finally convinced myself that it was merely an echo from the past—a tale of the Inquisition or of some monastic crime. But it formed another instance of the hold that tradition has on the Spanish peasant, and of the way in which it is combined with the events of the day to pile up the indictment against the Religious Orders.

I asked some of my middle-class acquaintances on one occasion where was to be found the “army” of Don Jaime, which I had seen mentioned in the report of a Carlist meeting. One of them laughed and said it existed only in the region of comic opera, but another proceeded to explain with conviction that the Pretender had a strong following in Cataluña and the Basque Provinces and a good many adherents in Andalusia, and expatiated at length on the benefits the nation would derive from the autocracy and the abolition of popular rights, which he seemed to think would bring about a social millennium.

And while he was speaking I mentally recalled the commentary of one of the people, to whom I had read aloud Don Jaime’s manifesto, asking whether he would welcome the advent of the “Legitimist Monarch” in Spain.

“Don Jaime? I? I would like to burn him and then blow his ashes to the winds, and so would all my friends, both men and women. What dealings do we desire with the seed of Don Carlos? There is no poor man in Spain who liked Don Carlos or wishes ever to see his son.”

A Basque friend of mine, a highly educated man, whose position as a large employer of labour enables him to judge fairly of the political leanings of the people, made the following remark to me one day:

“The Carlists,” he said, “may think they have the Basque Provinces with them, but they are completely mistaken. The working classes of my country have no more desire for civil war than those of any other part of Spain.”

This gentleman is not a man who would use illicit means to influence the votes of his dependants, and his opinion may be taken as representing the true state of public opinion in his district. On the other hand, he said that among his wealthy clients there was no attempt to disguise the desire for a dynastic change: the portrait of Don Jaime hangs in a place of honour in many of the great houses which he visits in the course of his business, and the general devotion of this class to Carlism is open and avowed.

“But,” he said, “what can be done by a party which is all head and no body? The army of Don Jaime may be well supplied with would-be officers and with all the munitions of war, but they have no troops behind them, in the Basque Provinces or anywhere else.”

His description of the Carlist “army” reminded me of the famous raid of the Fhairshon:

“For he did resolve to extirpate the vipers
With four and twenty men and five and thirty pipers.”

THE CHURCH MILITANT

CHAPTER VIII

THE CHURCH MILITANT

The Church of Spain asserts that its mission is peace, and as has been said, supported the assertion, when Queen Victoria initiated the patriotic fund for the sick and wounded at Melilla, by declining as a body to contribute, on the ground that men of peace would be stultifying their office if they supported a war fund. When it was pointed out that the healing of the sick and the binding up of wounds, however incurred, was as much the Church’s mission as the preaching of peace, the reply was given that the priests as a class were poor men who could not afford to give away money. It may be remarked that what they call their poverty is so well recognised by the working classes that they never dream of applying to their parish priests when they are in distress; they say it would be useless to do so, because “the priests do nothing without securing their fee in advance.”

But for a body whose first duty, on their own showing, is the preaching of peace, it cannot be denied that the Religious Orders, if not the secular clergy, are distinctly militant.

While Maura was in office nothing about priests and firearms would have been allowed to appear in the papers, but about a fortnight after his fall the Pais asserted that previous to the Barcelona outbreak the Carlists and Jesuits had accumulated a great quantity of arms in some of the small towns in Cataluña, which were subsequently conveyed at night from one religious house to another in Barcelona. And, said the Pais, while the local authorities were imprisoning luckless working men who neither possessed weapons nor made any sort of revolutionary movement, the contraband purchase of arms was still going on, “the priests and the Religious Orders shamelessly lending their aid to it, and the people keeping silence because they believe that every Government, whatever it may be called, is either friendly to Carlism or is afraid of it and cannot or will not interfere with it.”

On reading this article (which the Ultramontane organs did not contradict) I was reminded of a story which had been told me three months before by one of my working class friends. A pious old woman, the wife of a small shopkeeper in a town where there are many religious houses, went one night to a service at a church attached to a monastery.[15] The weather was hot and the old woman tired. She fell sound asleep in a dark corner and woke at midnight to find the church empty and the doors locked.

Recognising at once that she had no choice but to stay where she was until morning, she was looking about for the most comfortable bench on which to pass the night, when she saw a light in the sacristy communicating with the monastery and heard steps approaching. Fearing lest the fathers should accuse her of being there with intent to rob the church, she crawled under a bench and lay trembling. From this position she saw a number of monks and priests file into the nave, form up in ranks, and go through various military exercises under the command of one of the number, who looked and spoke like an officer. The drill continued for some time, and after it was over the unwilling witness had to stay where she was until the doors were opened for early Mass, when she made her escape, ran home as fast as her poor old legs would carry her, and related what she had seen to her husband and neighbours. This was told me by a lad who sold fruit to the husband, who declared that he had heard it from the old woman herself.

At the time I paid no attention to the story, knowing how the dramatic instinct of the Spaniard lends itself to exaggeration in repeating anything that appeals to the imagination, and thinking that the whole thing might have been a dream. But later on I found reason to think there might be some basis of fact in what was related by my young fruit-seller. When the Pais article appeared I was told, in the course of a conversation about it, that a priest in a neighbouring town had said in the hearing of my interlocutor—of course unaware that he was listening—that his party were all armed and prepared to shoot “on sight” every one whom they knew to be inimical to them, directly the opportunity offered. And thenceforward for some weeks constant reports of the arming of friars and their lay allies—the “Young Catholics,” “Luises,” and other such associations—were published by the one party and denied by the other with equal frequency.

In this connection the following passages from an article in the Correo Español are rather significant.

“In Barcelona ten Carlists sufficed to prevent the burning of a church, and put the mob to flight, so that they left in the hands of our friends the weapons they were carrying in pursuit of their vandalic designs” [an incident already referred to]. “And there are 100,000 brave men such as these in Spain.... We are prepared for all! all!! all!!!” (in crescendo capitals). “The fight, which inevitably had to come sooner or later, has now begun between Catholics and sectarians, between civilisation and barbarism, and we must not stop till we have destroyed them.”

It all reads like transpontine melodrama, and as such I at first regarded it. But when day after day announcements appeared that new Carlist clubs were being opened in one small town after another, when Señor Llorens returned from his second sojourn with the troops, loaded with plans, sketches, reports, and what not, relating to the campaign and the general condition of the Army there, and openly announced that he had obtained them for Don Jaime, and when, although the people were shouting songs of defiance to the Carlists and their “King,” the militant “Catholic Association of Social Defence” announced that it had increased its working class membership from 31,000 to 200,000, one began to wonder whether the Carlist “army” might be something more than comic opera.[16]

The stories related of secret arming and drilling in the churches at night are obviously not capable of verification by a layman and a foreigner,[17] but that the Jesuits in Barcelona were armed before the revolt began, and used their arms with skill, seems certain. A near relative of one of these warlike men of religion told me that they had twice driven back the mob by firing from their balconies, so it seems fair to assume that when the newspapers talked of the shooting down of the crowd by the Jesuits they had some ground for their statement. Civilians in Barcelona found in the possession of arms were arrested, even though they had not used them, but it does not appear that the Jesuits incurred any penalty for using their weapons on the mob.

One mysterious feature in the events of that week has never been cleared up, and possibly never will be.

On the first two days of the rioting there was fighting about the barricades which had been raised in many of the central streets, but the scarcity of firearms among the rioters was noticeable, a large number of them being without arms of any kind. Mainly, no doubt, in consequence of this, the struggle was practically over by the third day, after which there was no more street fighting, the troops occupied the city, and the attack on the Religious Orders, which might so easily have spread all over Spain, was at an end.

Yet, notwithstanding that the fighting was over, shooting from the roofs of the houses went on for two days more. No one ever saw those who fired: the shots came from invisible persons concealed behind the parapets and other sheltered positions. And, what was the more remarkable, whether the shooting was in working class districts, or, as was frequently the case, from houses in those quarters of the city where rich men live, the noise of the report and the bullets which were found were always the same. The “man on the roof” invariably used a Browning pistol, a weapon not easily procured by a poor artisan. Thirty, forty, fifty such shots would be fired in succession, the troops would hurry up to the roof from which the bullets came, find no one there, and see nothing suspicious, yet hear the rattle of the shots again as they returned to their duty in the street below. A civilian who ran up the stairs from the ground floor in one of the “haunted” houses told me that although several shots were fired as he ran, no one was to be seen above, except a young priest professedly on the same errand as his own.

It was said that among the many people arrested there was at least one priest. But nothing more was heard of him, and whether he was released as innocent, or allowed to disappear, was not revealed to the public.

No one has yet explained who organised the expensively-armed sharpshooters who displayed such remarkable skill in firing from an elevation without being caught in the act. The people believe that they were members of the clerical party whose object was to exasperate the troops against the rioters who were supposed to be firing at them, and thus to bring about a fight in which the whole town should be involved. Meanwhile Don Jaime was to convert the mêlée into an organised revolution against the established order of things, which should spread from Barcelona all over Cataluña, and from Cataluña throughout Spain. This, for what it is worth, is the popular explanation of one of the most mysterious features in the “anarchist” rising of July, 1909.

But the people go farther still. They attribute not only the incidents of July, but the whole of the political unrest in Cataluña to the underground activities of the Carlists and their allies the Ultramontanes. It is firmly believed by the unlettered peasantry, who read or listened to the accounts of the beginnings and endings of the “Red Week,” that the emissaries of the Pretender planned and carried out every incident that led up to the general strike with which the rioting began.

The protest against the calling out of the reservists—the greatest error of the many committed by the Government at that time—was said to have been engineered by the Carlists. It was not spontaneous and found no real echo in the feeling of the nation.

The next step was to proclaim a general strike, but even then there was so little idea among the working classes that anything like violence was intended, that women and children strolled out to the meeting-place as for an outing, with the men who were unconsciously being led into action which was to brand them as revolutionaries and assassins.

To this day no one has been able to say how or why the rioting began. The only thing clear is that the great majority of the strikers expected and intended to proceed peaceably to formulate their demands, although no one knows exactly what these were to be, for no formal report of the strikers’ complaints, or even of the factories they worked in, has ever been published.

The Civil Governor, Señor Osorio, objected to the calling out of the troops, and fell into permanent disgrace with Maura and his Cabinet for saying that but for the undue harshness employed by the military authorities, the rising would never have attained serious proportions. He was dismissed from his post—perhaps inevitably, since he had not foreseen events. It is worth noting that the week before the riots the Government had expressed themselves as perfectly satisfied with the tranquil condition of Barcelona under Señor Osorio, and had withdrawn most of the troops in garrison in the province.

Meanwhile the Ultramontane Press never wearied of repeating blood-curdling tales of the awful scenes of carnage, rapine, and sacrilege, brought about by the teaching given in the lay schools, a hundred of which, they said, Maura had been compelled to close in order to put an end to a system of education which produced such horrors: and since the Opposition newspapers were not allowed to publish a line without the sanction of Señor La Cierva, the Minister of the Interior, the nation, had it read the Ultramontane papers, would have supped its fill of uncontradicted libels upon the working people of Cataluña. But the nation does not read the Ultramontane papers. The Press of that party, indeed, admits the exiguousness of its circulation by pathetic appeals to the faithful to furnish money for the propaganda which in Ultramontane opinion constitutes the only hope of arresting the crimes born of the instruction given in the lay schools, and fostered by the seditious labours of the Liberal. But although the people closed their ears to the fulminations of the Church papers, the hand of the Church lay heavy on all Spain in 1909, for the continual reports of bombs and arrests, and the whispered tales of the secret drilling and arming of “good Catholics,” kept everybody on the rack, fearing they knew not what. The slow progress of the campaign in Melilla, the constant arrival of shiploads of sick and wounded, and the impossibility of obtaining trustworthy news of what was really going on, filled the cup of anxiety, and every one was in low spirits, for every family had friends or relatives in the war.

Meanwhile Don Jaime, in his castle of Frohsdorf, was occupied in editing a verbose document which he published later on, addressed “to those loyal to me.” The gist of this was that as long as Spain was engaged in war he would make no move, but that when the flag waved victorious he would remember that he had to fulfil unavoidable duties imposed by his birth. “And,” said he, “social order, shaken by the revolution, is tottering to its foundations. And this not so much from the attack of anarchical crowds as from the cowardice of the powers who make compact with them, delivering themselves as hostages in order to save their life and property. In the violent struggle which is approaching between civilisation and barbarism I yield to no one the first place in the vanguard in the fight for society and the country.”

Curiously enough, an incident in which the nation at large took very little interest nearly proved the last straw. This was the execution of Ferrer.

Everything had been done beforehand to excite the public over the affair. Columns upon columns of matter prejudging the case had filled the Ultramontane Press for weeks, while the Sociedad Editorial and the republican Pais were accused of complicity with the prisoner because they pointed out that the publication of incriminating documents alleged to have been found in his house, before the Court had pronounced them genuine, was contrary to all the principles of justice. In Republican and Socialist circles this action on the part of the Government—for copies of the documents in question were sent to the Press by persons in Government employ—produced the indignation that might be expected—indignation that probably was counted upon to bring about an outbreak of violence. But the mass of the people, thanks to their lack of education, knew and cared very little about Ferrer and his alleged offences against society.

While all Europe was excited about the fate of the founder of the lay schools, the Spanish people, believed abroad to be seething with anarchy and sedition, were peaceably if dispiritedly pursuing their usual avocations, only interested in Ferrer, if they took any interest in him at all, as another victim of the tyranny of the Church, whose “tool,” as they call Maura, had brought Spain so low.

This was because the Sociedad Editorial, and especially the Liberal, laboured as indefatigably to keep the temper of the people within bounds as their opponents on the Ultramontane press laboured to produce irritation. At one period in the protracted controversy I wondered whether the editors or staff of the Sociedad Editorial could actually be unaware of the lies spread broadcast concerning the political party for which they stand, so temperate in quality and so limited in quantity were their comments on the foreign campaign against the honour of the Spanish nation. But I soon came to understand that it was not ignorance of what was going on, although the Censorship used all its wits to keep foreign newspapers out of the Liberal-Monarchist newspaper offices. It was the deliberate policy of the wise and far-sighted Liberal-Monarchist party to keep their working-class readers in the dark about the Ferrer incident, because they knew that if the mass of the people became aware of the attack upon their honour, a civil war between the Ultramontanes and the people would have broken out within a week.

It seems impossible to doubt that the desire of those who pull the strings that work the Ultramontane party leaders was to provoke such a war. The declaration of the Correo Catalan that a hundred thousand good Catholics were ready to follow the example of the Jesuits who fired on the crowd in Barcelona and to “go all lengths” against the forces of “anarchy” bears no other interpretation. The Liberal-Monarchists, who know that in any such war the people would stand as one man for the King and the Constitution against the Ultramontanes with the hated Pretender at their head, might have been excused had they dallied with the idea of sweeping out the Religious Orders by force, and thus settling once for all the eternal quarrel between the State and the Church of Rome. But no such course of action would have been admitted as possible by Moret, who is, and will remain while he lives, the spiritual if not the ostensible leader of his party. Well aware that he was offending the more advanced and impetuous among his followers, and that he was being accused of lukewarmness in defending the Liberal party from attacks both at home and abroad, Moret firmly pursued his lifelong policy of conciliation instead of provocation, and it was thanks to his firmness alone, during the last three months of Maura’s rule, that Spain was not once more thrust into the horrors of internecine strife.

The week before Maura’s Government fell the Radical and Republican party in Madrid demanded permission to hold a meeting on the following Sunday, to protest against what they considered the illegality of a trial in which witnesses for the defence were not summoned. The organising committee frankly stated that whether Maura gave leave or not, the demonstration would equally take place.

What might have happened had the Ultramontane Government still been in office on the day of the demonstration, no one can pretend to say. But in the meantime the climax came and the Maura Government fell, amid general rejoicings. The demonstrations took place, not only in Madrid but in all the large towns, and were in every case conducted with the most perfect order. Their original object seemed to be lost sight of in the satisfaction at the change of Government. The speakers said very little about Ferrer, because Ferrer was of so little interest to the people; in the majority of cases the demonstrators limited themselves to a protest against Maura’s policy and a demand that he should never hold office again.

The Religious Orders were, or professed to be, in a state of panic terror when the demonstrations were announced. They declared that they expected violence, incendiarism, and robbery; treasures of gold and silver work, images, paintings, &c., were removed to private houses for

A DEMONSTRATION OF REJOICING AT THE FALL OF THE ULTRAMONTANE MINISTRY, NOVEMBER, 1909.

[To face page 174.

safe keeping; and the general exhibition of alarm on the part of friars, nuns, and parish priests made them a laughing-stock to the working classes for the month during which the demonstrations continued. The Civil Guard were sent, at the request of the ecclesiastical authorities, to assist the friars in their projected self-defence and to instil courage into the trembling nuns, and the garrisons were everywhere kept in barracks in readiness for attacks which nobody dreamed of making. A Civil Guard told me, with a twinkle in his eye, that he and his companion had sat up all night in the portal of a convent, knowing all the time that they might just as well have been in their beds for all the danger the convent was in. No doubt many nuns seriously believed their houses to be in peril, although the Jesuits must have been perfectly aware of the truth, and it is not easy to find words in which to characterise the folly, to say no worse, of a policy which tries to forward its ends by permitting women cut off and completely ignorant of the world to spend hours of misery anticipating dangers which their leaders must know to be imaginary.

It cannot, however, be denied that the deep-seated and chronic hostility of the people to the Religious Orders became manifest all over Spain, as reports of panic-stricken friars spread from mouth to mouth, converting their traditional dread of the Church into a feeling of contempt. The working-class Spaniards fear the underground action of the Church because they know it may mean starvation for their wives and children. But it was something new for them to see the “long skirts” fleeing from Cataluña in fear of their lives, and the spectacle led to open exhibitions of scorn, which are a new feature in the history of the Church in Spain.

There were not wanting either journalists or private persons to hint that the alarm shown by the Religious Orders at the demonstrations against Señor Maura was fictitious, and a renewal of the Catalonian riots would have suited their plans. It was said that the slightest hostile action on the part of the working classes would have been made the signal for a Carlist rising, and that numbers of priests and monks, as well as civilians of that party, were armed in readiness for such a contingency.

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.

Throughout the three years that Señor Maura was at the head of affairs, Barcelona had been in a state of continual unrest and anxiety. Bomb outrages were reported every two or three weeks with monotonous regularity, but strange to say, the explosions seldom or never took place in public buildings or in places where people congregate. Now and then some inoffensive passerby was killed or wounded, and once in a way an insignificant house would be damaged more or less seriously. But the total injuries inflicted by this long series of bombs were so few that the object of their authors must have been to terrorise rather than to kill. When the King and Queen went to Barcelona in the autumn of 1908, the inevitable bomb was let off—or was reported to have been let off—on the sea shore, where no one could possibly have been hurt by it.

Here, by way of parenthesis, I should like to call attention to the courage and devotion to duty shown by both the King and the Queen on this occasion. It was considered advisable by the Ultramontane Government that the young wife and mother should accompany her husband to the city which has been made to bear such an evil reputation as the home of anarchy and sedition. The nation watched the proceedings with admiration. “What courage the Queen had, to face the chance of another bomb being exploded in her presence so soon after that tragedy in Madrid!” said those who appreciated the human fear which they knew must be concealed under the smiles demanded by the exigencies of her position. Not a word of this was permitted to appear in the Press, of course. It was only the common talk of the common people. But one little paragraph slipped, through some mismanagement, into a popular paper, which revealed the Queen’s realisation of the danger she might be running. It was to the effect that “the alteration of their Majesties’ itinerary, by which they would spend two days in Madrid instead of travelling direct to Cataluña from Vienna, was dictated by the Queen’s wish to embrace her children before going to Barcelona.” The next day the paragraph was corrected by a careful explanation that the Queen had wished to see the royal children because they were suffering from childish ailments. But the people were not deceived by the second notice. They said that Doña Victoria’s conduct was worthy of a Queen of Spain.

I do not believe that the people of Barcelona would hurt a hair of Queen Victoria’s head, nor that they would have raised a hand against King Alfonso had he appeared there during the riots of 1909: what advantage his secret enemies might have taken of his presence during the disturbances is another matter. And my personal belief is that the people of Barcelona were not responsible for any of the bomb outrages which have made their city a byword in Europe.

Two things go to show that the industrial classes in Barcelona had nothing to do with the bombs. The first is that they are too clever to commit stupid crimes by which their class could not possibly benefit. The second is that during the “Red Week,” when Barcelona was given over to mob law, the mob, said to be responsible for the bomb outrages, did not explode a single bomb. It is not likely that if letting off bombs were the favourite occupation of the criminal classes of Barcelona, they would have lost the opportunities afforded them during the first three days of the riots. Yet when the rising was quelled and the whole province was under martial law, the bombs began again, and twenty-three were reported to have been exploded between August 15th and October 20th.

The stringent censorship exercised then and for three months afterwards prevented Europe from hearing of either this remarkable feature of the riots or their real object. But every one in Spain knew perfectly well that the riots were directed solely against the Religious Orders, whereas the bomb outrages never affected a building belonging to the Church or a person attached to the Clericalist party so long as Maura held office.

Is there any previous instance in history of a mob, said to be composed of the lowest and most degraded of the community, firing monasteries, convents, and churches, while they left public buildings, banks, and rich men’s dwellings untouched? Is there any other revolt on record in which troops of people containing the dregs of the criminal classes protected and brought food to orphanages supported by the objects of their attack? And can we find a parallel, in the circumstances, to the organisation which had the markets opened for two hours every morning and kept its forces under such complete discipline that during those two hours persons of either sex could walk all over the town secure from molestation?

These things I have heard from people of unimpeachable veracity who were in Barcelona at the time; not only Catalans and Spaniards, but also foreigners unconnected with any political party. I do not attempt to deny that some half-hundred or so of buildings belonging to the Church and the Religious Orders were damaged or destroyed, nor that many evil deeds were done by the criminal hangers-on of the movement; nor do I at all desire to minimise the crime of destroying property to gratify feelings of personal revenge. But I do say that the mob, as a mob, behaved with extraordinary self-restraint, and proved by their conduct that they had no complicity with the miscreants who for so long terrorised the unoffending inhabitants of Barcelona by exploding bombs, without apparent intent to injure.

No one disputes that every suspect in the province was imprisoned or fled from the country when the iron hand of military law closed on the insurgents. Nevertheless the bomb outrages began again after the “Red Week” came to an end, and only ceased with the fall of Maura and his Cabinet of repression.

I have related in the previous chapter the continued shooting from the roofs of the town, after the riots were quelled, by persons who were never seen, and the stories that were told of the secret arming of the Religious Orders. When we remember that the hope of the Ultramontanes lies in a Carlist restoration, which is only possible through a revolution, and that a revolution cannot be brought about except by fomenting unrest and discontent in the country, and when further we recall that the bomb explosions ceased with the fall of Maura’s Ministry, when the officials of a Government not in sympathy with the aspirations of the Religious Orders might have instituted inconvenient inquiries had the bombs continued, it may at any rate be conjectured, in the absence of any evidence as to who instigated this long series of comparatively harmless outrages, that their authors were the only party who expected to benefit by a subversion of the social order such as might have ensued had the patience of the people given way under this long series of provocations. This theory of the bombs, I may add, is that held by the working classes.

From the moment that Moret took office in October, 1909, Barcelona began to resume her normal aspect, although the constitutional rights were not restored until the new Civil Governor and the new Captain-General had taken possession of their respective offices and reported that the whole province was quiet.

From that date a strict watch was kept upon newspaper reports of explosions, and the Heraldo got into trouble for publishing a paragraph saying that what proved to have been merely a slight explosion of gas was a bomb. The authorities at once explained to the Press that the explosion was purely accidental, and that no one in Barcelona had for a moment believed it to be otherwise, yet the report that it was a bomb had reached the Heraldo office in a form circumstantial enough to deceive an experienced editor.

It is not surprising, therefore, that doubts are now expressed whether a good many of the alleged bombs may not have been as fictitious as this last. The persons who let them off, or were supposed to have let them off, in order to maintain unrest in Barcelona, could certainly have provided means to deceive the Press, as in the attempt upon the Heraldo, frustrated by the prompt action of the Civil Governor.

Two or three bombs, if they can be given so imposing a name, were exploded in Zaragoza in December, 1909, under the conditions which had become so familiar to Barcelona under the Maura regime. They were made of bits of old iron, mixed with some mild form of explosive and placed in a meat tin, the whole being wrapped in a black cotton material, said to be of the same make as that found on remains of bombs at Barcelona. The tin cans on these occasions were placed in or near the porch of a convent church, and no harm was done beyond some slight damage to the plaster on the walls. The progressive Press, freed from censorship, expressed the conviction that this affair was the work of the monks, desirous of raising disturbances in Zaragoza because they were now powerless to do so in Barcelona, with the result that the public remained entirely indifferent to the incident. One cannot but hope, therefore, that that may have been the expiring effort of the bomb-throwers, whatever their real purpose was and whoever their employers may have been.

I should like, before closing this branch of my subject, to point out once more the wide differences that exist between the methods, objects, and results of the Barcelona and Zaragoza bomb outrages and those of similar attempts elsewhere on the Continent. The murderous anarchist makes a direct attack on the personage whose death he believes to be necessary to the furtherance of his political creed, and when he lets off a bomb he takes care that it shall do as much damage as possible, regardless of risk to himself. Abhorrent though the creed of the militant anarchist is, he has at least the courage of his convictions, since he so frequently pays the penalty of his act with his life. The wretch who tried to murder the King and Queen of Spain on their wedding-day was the tool of some one working on the usual anarchist lines, and his crime bore no resemblance in detail to the work of the mysterious party interested in terrorising, without injuring, the inhabitants of Barcelona.

A volume of school statistics published in November, 1909, to which further reference is made in another chapter, shows that there are in Spain 91 protestant and 107 lay schools, 43 of which are in Barcelona. On the other hand, there are 5,000 private Catholic schools, in addition to some 25,000 Government schools, in which the rudiments of the Catholic religion are supposed to be taught. These few Protestant and lay schools are the subject of furious and unceasing abuse from the Clericalist party and Press, who make every effort to traduce and vilify them. It would not be edifying, nor is it necessary, to cull specimens of their flowers of invective: the language in which the odium theologicum is habitually expressed is tolerably well known. The schools in Barcelona, many of which were established by Ferrer, who devoted his fortune to the work of education, are the special subject of clerical hostility, and there is no doubt that they cost him his life. As far as can be learnt about these schools the teaching given in them contains absolutely nothing of the socialistic or anarchistic or other doctrines subversive of society of which their enemies so freely accuse them. They are more or less hostile to the form of religion taught by the Church in Spain, which is the chief reason for the venom with which they are attacked; but setting this on one side, there is, I am credibly informed, nothing either in the text-books used or the teaching given to which objection need be taken.

Nevertheless the Clericalist campaign against these schools is carried on without intermission, and at the end of February, 1910, about the time that Moret fell, unusual efforts were made against them. Thus in Valencia several thousands of priests and friars, ladies of the aristocracy, and members of the militant religious associations filled the great open-air theatre of Jai-Alai: a telegram giving the Papal benediction to the objects of the meeting was read, and cheers for the Pretender were raised at intervals during the afternoon. The reactionary papers asserted that twenty thousand people were present on this occasion, and although this was doubtless an exaggeration, no one attempted to deny that a very large number attended.

The number of public bodies and associations said to have sent letters and telegrams of adherence to the objects of the meeting would be alarming to any one unacquainted with the arithmetical methods employed on these occasions in Spain. The grand total was given at 280,000, “composed of 100 newspapers, 83 town councils, 135 mayors, 429 clubs, 1,714 congregations, and 272 parishes.” But no names of these parishes and congregations were given, and verification of the figures is impossible. It was also said that “9,000” ladies who had been present at the meeting subsequently left their cards on the Civil Governor.

Admission to the meeting was by ticket, and there were not wanting working men who declared that whole villages had been coerced into attending by the action of their priests and their caciques, but I give this for what it is worth. It is, however, safe to say that the great majority of those present were priests and friars, and members of the upper classes. Only one speech by a working man was mentioned in the long report published in the Correo Español, although the Clericalist papers always give prominence to the smallest indication of sympathy with their cause on the part of the people.

The really serious feature in the affair was the Papal benediction of the speakers and the audience. There is nothing in the Constitution to forbid the existence of the lay schools, to protest against which the meeting was held. Thus the Pope, by his benediction, set the seal of his approval upon an effort to subvert, in this respect, the Constitution of the country. But, further, the introduction by the speakers of the name of the Pretender and the reception given to references to him turned the whole affair into a frankly seditious gathering. The Pope’s support of the meeting was the more significant because his official reception of Don Jaime at the Vatican had been reported by the Spanish and foreign Press a few days before.

The Valencia meeting was followed by others in many of the large towns, and about this time Count Romanones, in his capacity of Minister of Education, closed a lay school[18] on the pretext that it was insanitary, but this only irritated the Liberals without conciliating the Church party, and Romanones hastily declared that the school would be re-opened as soon as certain structural alterations had been made.

On February 27th a Clericalist meeting was held at Bilbao, at which, notwithstanding the efforts of the police and Civil Guards, serious disturbances occurred. The circulars inviting people to the meeting were so inflammatory in tone that the Civil Governor found it necessary to suppress some of them. The following extracts from one of these will give an idea of the kind of language employed.

“In the name of religion outraged, and society menaced with total ruin ... and in the name of our own personal independence, closely bound up with the faith in our souls, let us go to the Catholic meeting to protest against the ignorance of those who desire to separate us from all other civilised nations, tearing faith and Christian morality from the souls of the young, together with all decency, all virtue, and every quality necessary to human dignity.... We unite our voices with those of all Catholics, speaking through the mouths of the most eminent men of science, to condemn this monstrous birth engendered by error and lies.”

The Liberal element in Bilbao is strong, and naturally great indignation was created among the working classes by these insults to their politics and religion. Down to that date there had been no lay school in the city, but now it was announced that one would be opened immediately.

The noteworthy feature of this meeting was a denunciation of the Conservatives by a Carlist speaker, who included them with the Liberals in his fulmination against the “cowardly incendiaries of Barcelona,” urging the Catholics “to have done with patient endurance and enter upon the period of action.” The result of this was that the Conservatives of Bilbao refrained from sending any representative of their party to the banquet given after the meeting to the orators who had spoken at it, thus definitely dissociating themselves from the policy of the Clericalists in their city.

I have made special mention of two of these demonstrations against the lay schools, one because of its magnitude and importance, the other because of its results. To chronicle more of them would be tedious and unnecessary. The campaign against these schools is unceasing: the defence is by no means equal in vigour to the attack, and is limited to articles now and then in the Pais and an occasional meeting in their support. Whether this apparent indifference is due to weakness on the part of those who uphold the lay schools, or to a feeling of strength which can afford to despise the fulminations of opponents, I am unable to say. It is a quarrel, as the satirist says,

“Ubi tu pulsas, ego vapulo tantum.”

THE ARMY, PAST AND PRESENT

A CONSCRIPT.

[To face page 199.

CHAPTER X

THE ARMY, PAST AND PRESENT

It is allowed that great abuses were committed by those in power during the long war in Cuba, which ended with the struggle in the United States and the final expulsion of Spain from the last of her American colonies, and it is common knowledge that the munitions, provisions, and all the supplies of the Army fell lamentably short of what was required. It may be imagined, therefore, that the survivors of these long years of warfare brought back stories of experiences little calculated to inspire their friends with confidence in the governing classes, who were responsible for such shortcomings. Fully to appreciate the difference between the sentiment of the Army to-day and what it was so late as 1901, when the defeated troops from the lost colonies came home with their tale of suffering, it is necessary to show what convictions have had to be changed and what prejudices overcome by Don Alfonso before he could win the place which he now holds in the affections of his soldiers.

I will only deal with the rank and file, whose loyalty is even of more importance to the nation than that of the officers. My own impression is that, after making all due allowance for differences in politics and traditions, the great majority of the Spanish officers to-day are staunch supporters of the Monarchy and the Constitution they have sworn to uphold. But beyond putting on record my private opinion, formed on the utterances of officers of all arms, I do not propose to deal with this side of the question.

It was natural that reminiscences of the Cuban and American Wars should be continually brought forward during the operations in Morocco, and that the popular expectation of the treatment the troops would there receive should be based on what took place in Cuba; and it was inevitable that the unlettered mass of the community, agitated as they were in the early days of the war by rumours of wholesale massacre and tales of thousands of dead and wounded, should have imagined that their friends and relatives were once more being sacrificed without mercy on the altar of political corruption. Not long ago I heard the following conversation among a party of working people who were entertaining a soldier at a tavern on the eve of his departure for Melilla.

“Poor fellow!” said a stout elderly matron, with a tear in her eye. “So young and so good-looking, to be killed by the Moors!”

“Don’t distress yourself, Señora,” said the lad, a slim, active young fellow. “I’m going to make mincemeat of at least eight before they kill me, and I shall be in no greater danger there than up at the mines of ——, where I was knocked to pieces by a landslide. Three months I’ve been in hospital, and it’s just like my luck to be called out to Melilla the moment I get out. I’m not afraid. If they kill me it can’t hurt more than that landslide did.”

“He’ll sing a different song when he gets out there,” remarked an elderly man gloomily. “I know how the soldiers are treated—not enough to eat, and that bad, no clothes, no beds, and no cartridges to put into their rifles when they go into action. I saw it with my own eyes in Cuba.”

I ventured to suggest that Melilla was nearer to the resources of Spain than Cuba, and that the general condition of military affairs had considerably improved of late years.

“Don’t you believe it!” said the old soldier. “The Government sold Cuba to put money into their own pockets, and they will do the same in Morocco. Do you know what happened to us one day in the Cuban War? We found ourselves attacked by the enemy, and we had nothing, nothing to fight with. There were no officers; the chiefs were in a safe place, spending the money they had robbed us of (for we got no pay), and the inferiors were hiding from the Cubanos wherever they could, behind us, to be out of the fighting. I assure you this is true. When the Cubanos came upon us we tried to load the guns, but many of the balls did not fit, and we had no wadding.[19] We tore up our white drawers and our shirts to make wadding, but what was the good? It was hopeless for us to fight. And seeing the enemy upon us and we helpless to defend ourselves, we went mad with rage and despair and turned on each other, not knowing what we were doing. It was all the fault of the Jesuits at home, who stole the money which the nation gave for the Army. And it will be the same thing now with this Maura and his Jesuits, you will see!”

“It is all quite true,” said another old man. “My son has often told me the same. He said they tied their officers to the gun-carriages in

A FORT ON MOUNT GURUGÚ.

The War in Melilla.

his company more than once to prevent them from running away. They said: ‘If we, the common soldiers, are to be killed like flies, at least you, the officers, shall take your share.’”

With such traditions firmly embedded in the popular belief, it would not have been surprising had a real spirit of mutiny been shown on the calling out the reservists in July, 1909. But this was not the case.

In an interview given to a representative of Le Journal of Paris, in November, 1909, by General Primo de Rivera, who was Minister of War previous to the disasters of July, that officer threw some light on Señor Maura’s conduct of military affairs, and explained why he had no alternative but to retire from office, to be abused by the Clericalists in power as “unpatriotic” for so doing. Here is a brief résumé of his statement:

“From the moment I took office, foreseeing what was brewing at Melilla, I began to fortify our positions in the Riff. Expecting that General Marina would need reinforcements, I brought the regiments of the Cazadores del Campo de Gibraltar up to their full strength, and put the Orozco Division, in all three arms of the service, on a war footing. In order to secure rapidity of transport, I contracted with the Transatlantica Company to make the voyage in twenty-four hours, on only four hours’ notice. When General Linares replaced me in the Ministry, he thought fit to improvise all that was required, and this caused complete disorganisation in the Army. He refused to call out the divisions which I had held in readiness, and by drawing the troops from Cataluña not only gave rise to the melancholy events of the “Red Week,” but rendered it necessary to incorporate many reservists who had married and set up homes in the belief that they were free from service, thus bringing misery on thousands of previously contented families. And after all this mismanagement it was necessary in the end to send the Orozco Division which I had prepared so long before.”

At the time one heard on all sides the question: “Why does the Government call out the reservists while the Orozco Division stands idle at home?” to which there has never been any reply but that of the people, who said: “The Government wants the war to go on because it suits the Jesuits, who are making a fortune out of it.”

But notwithstanding the acute distress throughout the country, the reports of an organised and widespread protest against the calling out of the reserves, which flooded the foreign Press at the time, were entirely unjustified and incorrect. Parents in Madrid wrote, full of anxiety, to their children in provincial towns, saying: “What is all this we hear about disturbances in your city? What is happening? What have the reservists been doing?” While the children were writing with equal urgency to ask what was amiss in the capital, that “such bad things” were being said of the soldiers in Madrid. I know these reports were spread, for I was asked to read aloud more than one such letter by working people who could not read for themselves.

It was not long before the people discovered that they had been deceived and vilified by some persons unknown, who were making it their business to represent Spain as in the throes of a revolution, and it was then that they became convinced that the rising in Cataluña, represented by the Government as springing from a protest against the calling out of the reserves, was in fact a Carlist plot, gone wrong so far as the Carlists were concerned.

As one travelled about the country in 1909 it seemed as if every village had sent one or more of its sons to Melilla. Yet, although their families made sure that they were going straight to destruction, few endeavours were made to evade the call to arms.

I heard one man, an artisan, say with a shrug of his shoulders that he was going because he might as well be shot in action as shot for a deserter at home, and I saw another fling himself flat on the platform when the train came in, howling that “he was afraid of being killed and didn’t want to go to the war.” The first was a professed republican; the second, as the bystanders promptly informed me, was “drunk, as usual.”

Very likely there were other cases of the same kind, but they were certainly exceptional. I made it my business to travel as much as I could at that time, on purpose to observe the people, for, knowing the Spanish peasant, I did not believe the tales current in the foreign Press of his cowardly and mutinous conduct, and I wished to see for myself how he behaved. I saw no such disgraceful exhibitions as were described by English and French journalists.

The conversations that I overheard were very naïve: not at all the talk of a rebellious people, notwithstanding the tales of suffering in Cuba and in the Carlist wars which balked so large in the popular imagination.

“My son! my son!” wailed one woman. “They will kill thee! I shall never see thee again!”

“Hush, mother!” answered the young man. “Rest assured that if they do kill me I shall have killed plenty of them first.”

“Why will they not let us women go too!” cried another mother. “We could kill all the Moras [female Moors] and then they would bring no more little Moors into the world to be the ruin of Spain.”

It was curious to observe how the eternal race-hatred came out at the very name of Moor—the tradition of the long contest between Christian and Moslem. The Moors of Morocco cannot be held to have inflicted any serious injury on the nation for many centuries past, yet such is the force of ancient tradition among the peasantry that the very name of Moro calls forth the cry, “They are the ruin of Spain,” and if you ask for an explanation you will be told that “The Moors are always pressing upon us and trying to take our country from us.”

One pathetic yet humorous incident was related by the Infanta Doña Paz (aunt to Don Alfonso) in a letter which she wrote to the Press about this time, exhorting her fellow-countrywomen to have patience and be of good courage. Describing her experiences of the patriotism of the men and the devotion of the women, she told how a poor mother, learning that her son was ordered to report himself for service, followed him from village to village, as he pursued his avocation of pedlar, carrying his regimental trousers, which had been put away in the family clothes-chest. When she found him at last, there was barely time for him to catch the appointed train, and the two hurried together to the station with the trousers flapping like a flag as they ran.

The sons of mothers like these do not shirk their duty when called upon to fight for their country. I believe that if the whole truth were told, we should find that no one was more indignant at the protest supposed to have been initiated by the working classes of Barcelona than the reservists whose grievances were its ostensible object.

Fresh from an exceptionally rough crossing, weak with sea-sickness, rusty in their drill after three years of home life, the reservists who sailed from Barcelona found themselves led straight from the ship on to the field of battle. This I had from a naval officer on the man-of-war that took them out.

“If they had been veterans,” he said, “such a situation would have been trying to them, and they were only raw fellows who hardly remembered the words of command. And yet I tell you they behaved with such courage and

A RESERVIST At THE FRONT.

[To face page 208.

discipline that I felt proud to be among them. I was sorry and ashamed to see those sea-sick boys ordered into action, but now I am glad to remember what I saw my compatriots do that day.”

The naval officer spoke of an incident in the early days of the war, before the foreign correspondents had reached the scene of action. But for some time the censors, both at the front and in Madrid, had made it impossible for the truth about the campaign to be told; and England, at any rate, was for several weeks allowed to remain under the impression that the Spanish rank and file were a cowardly lot, driven into action at the point of their officers’ swords. That impression was corrected as time went on, and it is, I believe, now generally admitted that the Spanish troops do not lack courage.

In Spain the conscripts join at the age of eighteen, and serve three years with the colours, when they are drafted into the first reserve. But those who can afford it may buy exemption from service for 1,500 pesetas (say £60), and from this source the Government makes an income estimated in the Budget for 1909 at pesetas 12,800,000 (about £512,000). Naturally the well-to-do always buy themselves out, as do also a certain number of the more prosperous of the working classes in the industrial towns. Señor Maura’s Government, not long before they went out, suddenly made an order calling on all those who had already bought their exemption to pay another 500 pesetas or join the colours at once, a proceeding which, differing as it does in no respect from highway robbery, naturally caused a good deal of indignation. No one likes to be called on to pay a second time over for what he has already bought; and in the case of the workmen, who generally secure themselves against service by means of one of the numerous insurance companies formed ad hoc, the premiums they had already paid were of course thrown away, and few indeed of them could produce 500 pesetas at a moment’s notice.

A scheme is on foot for doing away with the present unjust system, and making service compulsory on all alike. It provides for six months’ instead of three years’ service with the colours, the term to be extended, in the case of the illiterate, until they can read and write.

This scheme obtained from the first the support of the whole Liberal, Radical, and Republican Press, but the opposition of the Clericalists must always be counted on in Spain, and the proposals most obviously beneficial to the nation are usually those which meet with the strongest opposition. Another popular clause in the scheme affects the officers, whose pay is small. At present the officers live where they can: they have no mess, and their quarters in barracks are so much the reverse of luxurious that a lieutenant in a smart regiment apologised for not asking me to visit him there, as he, knowing our English customs, would have liked to do, because, said he, “it is not fit for an Englishman to see.”

It is now proposed, in order to reduce the cost of living in the Army, that quarters and a mess shall be provided for the officers in barracks. Most Spanish officers have to live on their pay, and even a captain in the cavalry only gets about £140 a year. On the other hand, their social expenses are very small, subscription dances, dinners, sports, and the numerous calls on the purse of a British officer being unknown in Spain.

THE POLICE

CHAPTER XI

THE POLICE

The visitor to Spain is frequently struck with the number of persons whom he meets on all sides clad in various uniforms and armed, some with cutlasses alone, others with revolvers in addition. If he asks who they are, he is told that they are the police, and then he is perplexed to find such a large number of distinct bodies, all apparently performing much the same duties. A few words of explanation as to the various police-forces of the country and their different functions may not be out of place.

In the first place, every town has its body of municipal police, under the orders of the Alcalde. Their chief duty is to regulate the traffic, to maintain order in the streets, and to report to the Town Council any infraction of the municipal by-laws, and to another body of police anything or any person whom they may regard as suspicious or a possible danger to the public security. They do not themselves, as a rule, arrest malefactors, though no doubt they are empowered to do so on emergency.

These policemen are well-intentioned, but on the whole ineffective, not from any fault of their own so much as from the conditions of their appointment and tenure of place. In Spain anything can be done by influence, and it is practically impossible to enforce the by-laws against a person in high place who chooses to break them. Not long ago I was at an exhibition, which a very great number of people had gone to see on that particular day. The municipal police were doing their best to make the crowd “pass along,” but at one point there was a block, caused by one or two well-dressed men who refused to move. I asked the policeman why he did not make them, and he replied that one of them was So-and-so (a person of local importance) and that if he said anything to him he would find himself dismissed the next day![20] In a certain town not long ago a body of police inspectors was established, whose duty it was to supervise the municipal police and report derelictions of duty, and as far as I could learn they were doing useful work. After about three months they all disappeared. On inquiry I was told that the reason of their suppression was that one of them had reported the carriage of some duke or marquis for obstructing the traffic, and that the indignant nobleman had insisted on and obtained the abolition of the force.

The municipal police go off duty about 8 p.m., and are replaced by the serenos or night-watchmen, who patrol the streets all night carrying a pike and a lantern, and in some towns still cry the hours. Hence their name, from their not unmusical cry, “Las doce han dado y sereno” (“twelve o’clock”—or whatever the hour is—“and a fine night.”)

Alongside of the municipal police is what is known as the Vigilancia. It is they who have to deal with criminals of all sorts within their own districts, arrest pickpockets and other offenders, investigate thefts, murders, &c., and catch the guilty. To them the hotels report the arrival and departure of guests, and it is their business to find any persons who are wanted on extradition warrants. In short, they perform most of the ordinary police duties except those assigned to the municipal police.

There is also a body of rural police, whose duty it is to patrol the country districts; they are few in number and not particularly effective. It is not often that one runs across any of them, even in their own districts.

The most important and by far the finest body of men in Spain is the Civil Guard, popularly known as the Benemerita (well-deserving). This force is one which, both in physique and morale, would do credit to any country in the world. They are under very strict discipline, and are prevented as far as possible from associating with any one outside of their own body—for instance, with the ordinary police-forces. Even the officers are under stricter regulations than those of the regular Army. I was told of one case where a junior officer, after due warning, was broke for gambling. The force is officered from the regular Army, and so highly is the service esteemed that an officer who obtains a commission in the Civil Guard ipso facto loses a step. Very great care is exercised both in their selection and in recruiting the rank and file.

They are something in the nature of a military police, and may be generally compared to the Irish Constabulary; they do not perform ordinary police duties, but in case of anything serious, such as a riot, they would act, and they are expected to hunt down and catch malefactors who are escaping from justice—which, indeed, they usually succeed in doing. They practically have power of life and death, as if, in the execution of their duty, they think it necessary to shoot, no questions are asked. They always go about in couples, a young man accompanying an older one, sometimes on foot, generally on horseback. They are the terror of evildoers, and some years ago entirely stamped out the brigandage which was then rife in the South of Spain, by the simple expedient of shooting down the brigands wherever they caught them. But I have never heard it suggested that they abuse their powers, and every one, foreigners as well as Spaniards, speaks well of them. Moreover—and this is rare in Spain—they are said, I believe with truth, to be incorruptible, and everybody has the utmost confidence in them.

I have already referred to this force being called on to protect the nervous nuns and the ostensibly non-militant clergy during the anticlericalist demonstrations in November, 1909. It may be interesting to show how they regarded the political situation at that time, premising that as they are in daily contact with the people, no body in the kingdom has its finger more closely pressed on the public pulse.

“You seem to have had your work for nothing,” I remarked to a couple of my friends at their barracks on the evening after one of the demonstrations. “I never saw a more orderly crowd.”

“What did you expect?” they replied. “These are political matters in which we take no part beyond going where we are ordered. It seems to be the fashion to talk about the prevalence of anarchical ideas in our country, so presumably it suits some persons that the public should think our people are anarchists. But we see no symptoms of it. No doubt it is right for the authorities to take precautions if they believe there are fellows of that sort about. It is not our place to inquire why they believe in a condition of affairs which we know does not exist. The Civil Governor naturally does not ask for our opinion on matters connected with politics. If he did we could tell him that he need not be nervous, for anarchy is a disease which does not progress in our nation, at any rate in any part of the districts we have to travel over.”

Remarks of this tenour have been made to me by members of the force in many times and in many places. A couple of Civil Guards accompany every train, and detachments of them are stationed in every town and village, in addition to mounted men charged with the care of the rural districts. They are continually changed from place to place, to prevent any danger of becoming too friendly with those they are intended to control, and the result is that they have an exhaustive knowledge of the feeling of the people. A Government genuinely desirous of gauging the popular point of view at any crisis need only apply to the Benemerita for information. But so long as the Civil Governors who command the Civil Guard are appointed for party purposes and changed with every change in the Government, this means of contact between the Government and the governed will be neglected in the interests of party.

It must not be supposed that the Civil Guard talk in public about the duty with which they are entrusted. On the contrary, their non-committal attitude is always honourably maintained before their fellow-countrymen. But when I travel alone with them—for I frequently take a second-class ticket merely for the sake of their company—they are not unwilling to express an opinion on affairs in general, feeling secure that I, as an Englishman, can be trusted not to turn anything they may say to their disadvantage. Before Spaniards they are extremely reserved, but when the compartment is empty save for myself and them conversation runs easily.

I was struck by this one day when a hot-headed individual shouted his vehemently Radical views to a friend at the opposite end of the carriage. The second-class carriages in many parts of the country are only divided half-way up, so that it is not unusual to talk from one end to the other on country lines where simple manners prevail. The Radical knelt on his seat and his opponent stood up on his, and the passengers sitting between them chimed in at intervals. The Constitution was suspended at the time, and Señor Maura would certainly have had the whole company clapped into prison had he heard what was said. But the Civil Guards turned a deaf ear, affecting to be entirely absorbed in their cigarettes. Later on I took an opportunity of asking what they thought of the oratorical exhibition we had been favoured with.

“We think nothing at all, and that is just how much it is worth,” they said. “We know that gentleman very well, and he would no more commit an act of violence or an offence against the law than we would ourselves. But all Spaniards love talking, and if he could not relieve himself by that sort of gabble he might become a danger to the public peace. There are a fair number of his kidney scattered about the country, though they are chiefly to be found in the big northern cities. They revel in the nonsense spouted at Republican meetings and love to read out violent articles from the Pais and the Motin, but they are quite satisfied with talking. Very few indeed of them would fire a shot for what they call their principles. That is why we never take any notice of what they say before us in the trains or elsewhere. We know it means nothing and is an excellent safety-valve. If Maura had done as we always do—let them talk and take no notice—there would have been no riots in Barcelona. But Spaniards have hot tempers, and if you make them angry, trouble begins. What harm does their talk do to any one? You have only to reflect that they are pretty nearly all fathers of families, who know very well that any such revolution as they romance about would only make it ten times harder for them to earn a living for their children, and God knows it is hard enough already to live in our country. We have to eat beans and bread, and often don’t get enough even of that. Do you imagine that any working man wants civil war in the country to make his food dearer still? Ca! Let them talk! It amuses them and it makes no difference to the Government. Whichever party is in power the poor have the same difficulty in bringing up their families.”

The Civil Guards had to shut their ears to a good deal of conversation which the Ultramontane Government would have found it desirable to suppress, during the three months after the “Red Week” in Cataluña; for the attitude of the people towards the priests and Religious Orders, not only in the North of Spain, but all over the country, became daily more aggressive, and I have frequently admired the tact and good temper with which members of that force contrived to do their duty and yet avoid fanning the embers of discontent into a blaze of passion.

It has been sometimes remarked to me that it is the Civil Guard who really govern Spain, and that without them anarchy would shortly ensue. So far as the maintenance of public order is concerned, there is a good deal of truth in this remark. They go quietly about their business, never interfering with any one unless there is need, but if there is, their intervention is immediately and conclusively efficacious. They are at once feared and respected, and it is only in extreme cases that resistance to them is ever attempted.

POLITICS

DON SEGISMUNDO MORET.

Leader of the Liberal-Monarchists.

[To face page 227.

CHAPTER XII

POLITICS

The apparently purposeless and kaleidoscopic changes in Spanish politics are very apt to puzzle foreign observers, who cannot understand what has happened to bring about the resignation of a Minister or an entire Cabinet, for which the cause, if any, alleged in the papers seems wholly inadequate. Internal and external affairs appear to be pursuing a tranquil course: no disputed question is agitating the country or the Cortes, when suddenly comes a bolt from the blue in the shape of an announcement of a Ministerial crisis, and the Government is changed. Thus, early in the year 1910, Señor Moret, who after overthrowing the Government of Maura in the previous October, seemed to be pretty firmly seated in the saddle, suddenly resigned, in spite of the fact that at the municipal elections a month or so before his policy had been endorsed by overwhelming majorities all over the country. One of the English newspapers, in commenting on this seemingly inexplicable change of Ministry, frankly confessed that it was useless for foreigners to attempt to understand Spanish politics.

Generally speaking, Ministerial changes in Spain are the outcome of a tacit arrangement made some thirty years ago between Canovas and Sagasta, the then leaders of the two main parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives, and continued by their successors, that each side should have its fair share of the loaves and fishes. After one party had been in office three or four years it was agreed by common consent that the time had come for the other side to have a turn. Thus, as Major Martin Hume says:[21] “Dishonest Governments are faced in sham battle by dishonest Oppositions, and parliamentary institutions, instead of being a public check upon abuses, are simply a mask behind which a large number of politicians may carry on their nefarious trade with impunity.”

But sometimes, though more rarely, another cause operates to upset Governments, and that is the underground intrigues of disappointed place-hunters. If the Premier in his distribution of appointments happens to omit any important person or section of people who think themselves entitled to a share in the plums of office, they will not hesitate to join with political opponents and turn out their own nominal leader, if circumstances happen to make this possible.

It is often said by foreign critics that the people—the mass of the nation—are to blame for the sins of their Governments. They have the franchise: if they are not satisfied, why do they not elect better men?

This criticism proceeds from ignorance of an important factor in Spanish politics—one of the tentacles of the octopus of corruption which holds the whole country in its grip.

The simple fact is that the great mass of the people have no voice at all in the election of their representatives. Nominally voting is free: actually it is not.[22]

The whole administrative system is centralised in Madrid, and the various Government offices interfere in local affairs to an extent inconceivable to an Englishman, accustomed for generations to manage his own affairs his own way. One result of this is that the elections to the Cortes are, in fact if not in theory, conducted from Madrid. In every small town and rural district there is a person known as the Cacique, usually a large employer of labour or a moneylender, to whom most of the working population of the district look for employment, or in whose debt they are. So enormous is the usury that once a loan has been raised, many a borrower has been unable to free himself from debt for the rest of his life. I have known cases where as much as 75 per cent. per annum has been paid for a trifling loan. Thus the Cacique, whether as employer or moneylender, or both, has the majority of the constituency under his thumb. He receives his instructions from Madrid, and issues his orders accordingly. If by chance the voting goes wrong, the returns are falsified; but this does not often happen, for the voters are so convinced that the exercise of their legal right of choice, if in opposition to the wish of the authorities, will result in loss of employment, that either they abstain or they vote as they are ordered.

The existence of the Cacique is one of the great obstacles to any effective decentralisation. If the villages and rural districts were given the management of their own affairs, the Cacique would be more absolute than ever. One can hardly open a paper without finding a report of some case of his arbitrary interference with local matters. If he is, as he usually is, the friend or creature of the Civil Governor of the Province, who is the nominee of the Ministry, he does what he likes and there is no redress against his illegal and oppressive action.

The following stories illustrate the method of conducting elections in Spain.

One man complained that a Conservative had given him a dollar for his vote, and after he had voted he found that the dollar was bad. “Had I not already voted, how gladly would I have given you gentlemen the advantage!” he said to a group of Liberals. “But you see I am left without my vote in exchange for a bad dollar. Never again will I sell my vote to the Conservatives!”

Another rascal went to the office of a Liberal paper to complain that “a thief” had contracted with him to engage some twenty fellow-rogues to vote to order. He fulfilled his part of the contract and took his twenty to the poll, but when he went to claim his pay the contractor had disappeared.

“And here I am many pesetas out of pocket,” he lamented; “for not only have I lost the large profit the thief offered me, but I had to pay my friends two reals apiece before they would stir out of the wine-shop.”

In one district the Liberals boasted that for years they had never bought a vote. “Partly,” as my informant ingenuously said, “because we have always had a safe majority, but partly also because we prefer to be honest. But,” he continued, “we learnt this time that a party of Conservatives intended to interfere with us, so we prepared a party of the same kind to receive them. ‘Do not begin to fight,’ said my father, ‘but if they begin, hit hard.’ They did begin, and our leader obeyed orders. He hit the leader of the other side so hard that he knocked out four of his front teeth, and that was the end of the fighting in our district.”

All these incidents are said to have occurred in the municipal elections of 1909. One more is worth mentioning.

In a town of some twenty thousand inhabitants, where for many years past an Ultramontane Cacique has been supreme, that gentleman rose early on the polling-day and personally roused the dwellers in the gipsy quarters—mostly the biggest ruffians in the place—out of their beds.

“Get up, my sons,” he said, “and go and vote, and there will be a dollar apiece for you when you leave the polling-booth.”

“They said they would go and vote,” said my informant, “and they got their dollars. But the Republicans came out at the head of the poll, and the Liberals next, and the Cacique and his Conservatives were nowhere.”

I happen to be aware that the Cacique in this instance is a man of great wealth and high social position, whose clericalist leanings are well known. If, indeed, it be the fact that the working classes have gained courage to defy men like him, the rising in Cataluña, the Maura regime of repression, and the campaign led against Spain by Ultramontanes and Socialists abroad will have borne fruit.

There is, however, one political leader in Spain who stands for purity of election and is the lifelong foe of the “caciquism” and corruption which paralyse any and every effort at political regeneration. Don Segismundo Moret has thrice been Premier of Spain. Each time he could have retained office had he consented to purchase the favour of the place-hunters by giving posts in the Ministry, not to those best qualified for the work, but to those who could command the largest following among the “Liberal mercenaries” who, as long as the system of “caciquism” continues, can make or mar electoral majorities. This he has never consented to do. So it has happened that each time that he has been in office he has had to sacrifice place and power rather than pander to an evil system.

The story of his late short tenure of the Premiership, and of the intrigues by which he was ousted is worth telling at some little length, because it throws light on the workings of the political machine, and on some of the difficulties with which a reformer has to contend in Spain.

Moret took office in 1909 against his own better judgment, for he would have preferred that the Conservatives should bear the responsibility of their own misdeeds, and solve the many difficulties resulting from Maura’s “policy of repression.” But the country had been brought to such a pitch of irritation and unrest by the reactionaries that the situation was becoming dangerous. The Riff question was attracting the unfriendly attention of foreign diplomatists; Barcelona was impatient under a rigid application of martial law, and the Ferrer incident had called forth a storm of condemnation from all the countries where the assumption that a prisoner is innocent until he has been proved guilty is an axiom of criminal law, while the advanced parties in the State were getting out of hand and had begun to defy the Government, as, e.g., in the matter of the demonstrations already referred to.

From the moment that Moret accepted office he was assailed by a stream of the most virulent abuse, not only by the Carlist but also by the Conservative and Ultramontane newspapers. He was “the destruction of Spain,” “the ruin of the nation,” “the arch-priest of irreligion and immorality,” and not only was his policy attacked in terms of unmeasured vilification, but the editors of these papers, which are owned and supported by some of the best born and wealthiest men in the country, did not hesitate to descend to vulgar personal abuse. His “grey hair,” for instance, was a favourite subject of their ridicule, and his “vacillation,” “infirmity of purpose,” and “inability to keep his party together” were accounted for by jeers at his “senile decay,” his “failing intellect,” his “body bent double by the weight of years,” and so forth, while the party led by him are usually spoken of in the clericalist organs as canaille.

But on his acceptance of the Premiership the aspect of affairs underwent a complete and immediate change. The political horizon began to clear. Terms of peace were arrived at in Morocco. Foreign susceptibilities were soothed. Cataluña was immediately relieved from the burden of martial law, and the constitutional rights were restored in Barcelona. The troops began to return from the war and were received with the greatest enthusiasm; the trials of persons arrested in connection with the disorders in Cataluña, who had been kept in prison on suspicion for four or five months, were pushed forward, and numbers of them were released for want of any evidence against them. Most of the lay schools were reopened, on showing that nothing seditious had been taught in them. The depleted treasury was replenished, and means were found to provide three months’ pay for the Melilla forces, which the outgoing Ministry had left out of account. A great project of irrigation was vigorously promoted by Moret’s Minister of Public Works, Gasset, who has devoted practically the whole of his political life to this subject, and has produced a scheme which would convert vast tracts, now arid waste, into fertile land. And the municipal elections, which took place about six weeks after the change of Government, were conducted, so far as time had permitted any modification of existing conditions, according to law, with the result that the Liberal-Monarchists swept the board all over the country. The official figures were as follows: Liberal-Monarchists, 2,961; Conservatives, 1,213; Carlists, 185; Republicans, 193; Socialists, 4. Thus Moret’s party nearly doubled the Conservatives, Carlists, and Republicans put together. The smallness of the Socialist vote should be noticed.

In any other country it would have been certain that a leader who could so well and so quickly convert popular indignation into contentment and hope was in for a long term of office. Not so in Spain.

During his four months of office, from October, 1909, to February, 1910, Moret tried hard to obtain the decree of dissolution of the Conservative Cortes, in order that the nation might have an opportunity of expressing its opinion on recent events. At first it almost seemed as if he would obtain the King’s consent to dissolve. But the place-hunters were afraid, and the Ultramontanes were more afraid. They played so successfully into each other’s hands that the decree of dissolution was postponed day after day, while all his enemies proclaimed the incapacity of a Premier who was “afraid” to go to the country.

The first attempt to upset him was a so-called “military demonstration” in front of the offices of the Ejercito Español, a military paper which had been confiscated for publishing an article written by a Carlist, accusing the Premier of unjust favouritism in the distribution of rewards for good service in Melilla. The demonstration was described by the Conservative papers as of “overwhelming importance,” and the number of demonstrators was placed by some of them at two thousand. The truth is that it was confined to a few officers well known for their Carlist leanings, and the rank and file of their regiments stood resolutely aloof. Moret and his Minister of War, General Luque, retired the Captain-General of Madrid and the colonels of the regiments in question for failure to maintain discipline, and ordered the actual participants a couple of months’ arrest—a proceeding which called forth general applause from all except the reactionaries. The small significance of the affair was made manifest when it came out that these arrests did not exceed half a dozen, including the editor (also an officer) responsible for the publication of the seditious article.

The result of this fiasco was still more to strengthen Moret’s influence with the nation, and it became evident that he would sweep the country should he obtain the long-deferred decree of dissolution. All the ingenuity of the Church was therefore exercised to secure his fall before this could take place, and the cupidity of a cabal of disappointed candidates for place was skilfully used to bring about—the catastrophe, I was going to say, but the triumph of morality would be a truer expression.

At the municipal elections in December, 1909, an endeavour had been made by Moret to secure something in the direction of freedom of voting for the working classes, and the result, as I have shown, was a triumph for the Liberal-Monarchists. The Republicans—to their honour be it said, for they did not do as well in these elections as they had expected—worked harder than ever after this to secure to the electors the free exercise of their legal privileges, and Moret accepted their programme, so far as it was designed to help in cleansing the Augean stable of corruption by limiting the powers of the local Caciques. This gave an opportunity to those who live by political immorality, and the intrigue which followed is typical of Spanish politics.

In the December elections Madrid returned a Republican majority to the Town Council. The Alcalde, Señor Aguilera, an old and staunch ally of Señor Moret’s, although himself a Monarchist, ranged himself on the side of the Republicans by supporting their demand for the limitation of the Alcalde’s power to appoint and thus control the votes of the very numerous municipal employees. It was proposed that the Alcalde, instead of being, as now, nominated by the Government, should be elected by the Councillors, who in their turn have been elected by the popular vote, and that the posts under the Council should be filled by open competition.

Most of the Alcaldes, even in the small towns, enter office poor and leave rich. But it is admitted even by his opponents that Señor Aguilera, a man with but small private means, who has twice been Alcalde of Madrid under Moret, has each time gone out of office as poor as when he came in.

A crisis was deliberately provoked by the President of the so-called “Liberal” election committees of Madrid, Count Romanones, a man who held office under Moret in a former Cabinet, and has long been suspected of aspiring to the Premiership of the party to which he belongs. The election committees, represented by Count Romanones, although nominally Liberal, objected to the proposed limitation of the power of the Alcalde, and finding Moret firm on the point, went so far as to hand him an ultimatum. Briefly, their terms were, “Leave to the Alcaldes” (often the Caciques) “throughout Spain the appointment of the municipal employees, or we will refuse to act, and leave you without any electoral organisation at all when the Cortes are dissolved.” It is not denied that this resolution was handed to the Premier by Count Romanones a day or two before his resignation. Meanwhile other opponents took advantage of Aguilera’s temporary alliance with the Republicans, and represented that if a programme of electoral reform supported by that party were carried out, the Throne would be endangered by a Republican majority in the new Cortes. This danger was imaginary, for there is no doubt that both the numerical strength of the Republicans and their hostility to the reigning House have always been greatly exaggerated by all the various factions desirous of clogging the wheels of reform.

Señor Moret of course declined to compromise with Count Romanones on any terms, which in a man of his recognised probity was a certainty, doubtless counted upon by the “Liberal” cabal and by the Ultramontanes. He then once more asked the King for the decree of dissolution, that he might place his programme of reform before those whom it most concerned. Exactly what passed at this interview was not divulged, but at its conclusion he placed his resignation in Don Alfonso’s hands. It was accepted, and the veteran Liberal-Monarchist, after forty years’ service to the Throne and the country, found himself dismissed at a moment’s notice, through the machinations of the opponents of electoral reform.

No plausible reason was given for the dismissal of Moret. It was reported that “the representative men of the party,” when applied to by the King for advice, recommended the appointment of Canalejas, on the ground that Moret had lost their confidence. But it was not stated who these representative men were. The Daily Mail gave half a dozen names, which had been telegraphed by its correspondent in Madrid, but that list was obviously untrustworthy because Montero Rios figured in it, and it is well known that the leader of the Radical group sets the unity of the party above every other consideration, and has always urged loyalty to Moret upon Liberals of all shades.

The circumstances were calculated to embitter the most even temper; nevertheless Moret’s first thought was for the welfare of the nation, whose whole governmental machinery was thrown out of gear. Some of his followers wanted to make a complete split with Canalejas, and one or two articles were published in the heat of the moment, expressed in terms tending to a final division in the Liberal camp. But in his own utterances for the Press Moret showed himself true to his ideal—the good of the country before personal ambition.

“The most serious feature in this crisis,” he said, “is that both the event and its solution were foretold by the reactionary newspapers, proving the intervention of the reactionary party in the intrigue. They interfered because they wish to prevent my conducting the elections in accordance with my programme of electoral reform.”

Moret’s assertion that the intrigue which brought about his fall was engineered by the Ultramontanes received confirmation from the Correo Catalan, a Carlist paper, which committed itself to the following prophecy:

“Canalejas will govern without altering the Cabinet until the autumn. Before the re-opening of the Cortes there will be ministerial changes. And in order to make compensation to Señor Moret a couple of unconditional friends of his will enter the Government. In the autumn Maura will have become tired of acting as guardian to Canalejas, who will fall irremediably. The Maurist restoration will be inaugurated next year.”

Working-class opinion on the situation was quite definite. For a day or two satisfaction was expressed, because Canalejas was reputed to be devoted to the interests of the people. But no sooner was suspicion aroused that his elevation to the Premiership had been engineered by the Ultramontanes than the poor were up in arms: the mere suggestion that the Jesuits were at work being sufficient to revive all the irritation and anxiety that Moret had succeeded in allaying.

“Canalejas talks a great deal, and we have long looked upon him as our friend,” a journeyman mason remarked to me. “But here we are again with everything in a state of confusion, and work in every direction waiting while our employers are busy with their politics. We shall get nothing done now till things have quieted down, so I don’t see what advantage it is to us to have Canalejas in power.”

GENERAL MARINA. | SEÑOR CANALEJAS.
Commander-in-Chief at Melilla. | Leader of the Liberal Democrats.

[To face page 244.

“If it is true that Canalejas is in league with the Jesuits to bring Maura back, there will be trouble,” said another man. “We will not have Maura ruining the country again just when it was beginning to pick up. I would rather shoot him myself. The poor can’t live under Maura, so I should lose nothing by killing him, even if I paid for it with my life.”

A woman burst out crying when she heard her husband talking about Maura.

“Why does the good God let that man live?” she sobbed. “If it is true that he is coming into power again, all our sons will be sent to Melilla to be killed. And we have been so contented because we thought we had got rid of him!”

The hope of the Ultramontanes was that the downfall of Moret would bring about a final and irremediable split in the Liberal party, which would facilitate the overthrow of Canalejas when the time came. And at first it seemed probable that this hope would be realised, for practically the whole of Moret’s Cabinet resigned with him, and refused to take office under Canalejas, while Canalejas himself at first acted as though he desired a permanent breach, by claiming that his appointment as Premier necessarily carried with it the leadership of the party—a proposition to which the party was by no means disposed to agree. But in time better counsels prevailed, and an interview between the Premier and his predecessor has lately been reported in the Press, in the course of which Canalejas frankly admitted the obligations of the party to Moret and the need that exists for his co-operation and advice—which Moret for his part professed himself quite ready to give, as indeed he had done ever since his resignation. So that it looks as though the danger of a breach had been avoided, at any rate for the present.

It is worth noting that the Government of Spain can be carried on for an indefinite time without the sessions of the Cortes. The Cortes adjourned for the summer recess in June, 1909, before the troubles began in Barcelona, and never met again. Throughout his tenure of office Moret tried without success to obtain the Royal decree for a dissolution. Canalejas was in office two months before he could get the decree signed, but at length, in April, 1910, it was announced that the General Election would definitely be held in May. The outgoing Cortes has a Conservative majority: what the next will be no man can say, although, having regard to the fact that a Liberal Ministry is in power, the presumption is that a Liberal majority will be returned. There is, however, no shadow of doubt that if the elections were conducted fairly and freely and the people could vote in accordance with their convictions, a Cortes would be returned with an overwhelming majority in favour of the Constitutional Monarchy, reform of abuses, and the destruction of the political influence and privileges of the Church.

POLITICAL PARTIES

CHAPTER XIII

POLITICAL PARTIES

It must not be supposed that the whole of the Conservative party shares the Carlist and Ultramontane views of the majority. The old school of Conservatives, led by Canovas, supported the Constitutional Monarchy as strongly as do the Liberals, and even now a contingent of strong constitutional Conservatives exists, although it is not easy to detect their influence on the general policy of the party with which they act. Their existence, however, was proved in October, 1909, when some of the leading men of Señor Maura’s party withdrew their adhesion to his leadership upon his declaration of “implacable hostility” towards the whole of the Liberal party. They saw, as did every one else, that the reactionary policy of the Ultramontane Premier was imperilling the existence of the Constitutional Monarchy.

To appreciate the disinterestedness of men who thus cut themselves off from the acknowledged leader of their party, whether in office or in opposition, the unwritten law of an alternate share of the spoils must be borne in mind. Thus a politician who deliberately deserts his party, from whatever motive, loses all chances of a salaried appointment when that party again has power to confer these political plums.

I make no apology for putting the facts thus plainly. They are spoken of with cynical frankness by all Spaniards, and it is considered a matter of course that any statesman who refuses to sell his favours to the highest bidder will be removed from place at the earliest opportunity by the intrigues of the many who live by political corruption.

It will be seen that once the rule of alternating office by mutual arrangement be broken, the end of the whole system of gerrymandering the elections would be brought within sight, for any Government which enjoyed the confidence of the nation would remain in office year after year, once the people were permitted to make their voice heard in the elections.

Señor Maura, or those who inspired him, of course foresaw this after the fall of his Cabinet in October, 1909, and his address to his party on that occasion marks an epoch in the history of political reform in Spain, although perhaps not precisely on the lines he intended.

His party, he said, must fight without truce against the Liberals, “ex-Ministers and ex-Presidents of Council who reach office in collaboration with anarchists.” Nor must his own party stand alone, he said, for it would be necessary to seek the alliance of all, no matter how different their political ideals, who desired to check the advance of revolution. From that moment all relations between Liberals and Conservatives must cease. Any other course would be treachery, for only thus could the nation be saved from the reproach and the ruin with which it was threatened.

In the opinion of Señor Maura, the party against which he thus proclaimed war to the knife includes every shade of Liberalism in Spain, from the most loyal Monarchists down to the rioters in Cataluña, while his right-hand man, Señor La Cierva, Minister of the Interior in the Ultramontane Cabinet, went so far as to accuse Señor Moret of being at “one end of a chain which linked Liberals, Radicals, Democrats, Republicans, and Socialists with the persons who fired the Religious Houses in Barcelona and scattered anarchy broadcast by encouraging the abominable sedition taught in the lay schools.”

When Señor Maura declared that all relations between the two parties must cease, he no doubt expected that the party to obtain power and keep it would be his own. But the dissatisfaction caused in his own party by his violent speech showed that they did not all share his views, and for a time it looked as though there might be a split in the camp. The Clericalists foresaw days of leanness, for if Maura’s calculations went wrong and Moret was able to carry out his project of electoral reform, their occupation and their livelihood would be gone. How the dissentients were brought into line we need not inquire. But the occasion forced one of the most statesmanlike of the Conservatives to make a public confession of his faith, and it then became manifest that in Señor Sanchez Toca, ex-Minister and ex-Alcalde of Madrid, the spirit of Canovas and Silvela still survives, although he with one or two more seem to stand almost alone among their party against the tide of reaction.

After three years of loyal support, said Sanchez Toca, in an interview with the representative of the Conservative Correspondencia de España—the organ of all that is left of the old Conservative policy—Señor Maura should have consulted his Cabinet before taking a resolution which completely alters the normal course of national politics. “I stood aghast,” said he, “at the thought of the incalculable results that must spring from those furious voices convoking the whole Christian world to a holy war against Ministers holding office under the Crown, to whom even the name of Liberals was denied, and shouting with anathemas that he was no true Conservative who held other relations than those of implacable hostility with men appointed to office by the King.” And he concluded by pointing out that the true Conservative faith irresistibly impels those who hold it towards conciliation instead of provocation, and that if this reason for its existence failed, the Conservative party must disappear.

Whether Sanchez Toca could have formed a party under his own leadership on the old Conservative lines it is not possible to guess; for after making the protest of which the above is a brief abstract, he left Madrid, and it was announced that he intended to make a protracted sojourn abroad, so that no one was able to accuse him of self-seeking in his secession from the Ultramontane party. The dignity of his position, as compared with that taken up by the supporters of the “implacable hostility” which has become a byword among the scoffers, needs no emphasis.

I have dwelt at perhaps undue length upon his part in the affair, because it is assumed abroad that Señor Maura represents an united Conservative party, which, as the above declaration proves, is by no means the case.

How completely this was misunderstood by many of the English journalists who wrote about Spain in 1909 was shown by their comments upon the strength displayed by Maura in holding the whole “Conservative” forces together, and their complete misapprehension of the real causes of the dissensions which have always prevailed in the Liberal camp.

The modern Conservatives and the modern Liberals are so nearly alike in their policy as regards the Crown and the Constitution, that they might almost be classed as one party, under the general name of Monarchists. In the matter of electoral reform there seems hardly anything to choose between them, although on the question of the Religious Orders Moret’s views are perhaps rather more advanced than those of Sanchez Toca, Dato, or Gonzalez Besada, the three most prominent Conservative-Monarchists of to-day. Unfortunately, the popular distrust of the very name of Conservative is so great that it would be difficult for any one thus labelled to convince the people that he meant fairly by them. Even Moret’s policy of conciliation is taken by the masses to indicate fear of the Jesuits, rather than as a calculated avoidance of action which might lead to disturbances.

The constant commendation given by the Conservative and even by the Liberal Press of England to the strength and unity of the “Conservative” party under Señor Maura, and their adverse comments on the dissensions in the Liberal camp, have materially added to the difficulties, already serious enough, which block the path of Moret and those of his creed, and have strengthened the party of clerical reaction and absolutism.

The Heraldo, in an article on the benefits to the nation to be expected from Moret’s support of Canalejas’ Government, spoke as follows of the influence of England upon Spanish affairs:

“It now appears probable that the democratic Government will be consolidated by the disappearance of the danger to which we have referred [the split with Moret’s party]. If this proves the case, all Europe will recognise with satisfaction how the personal convictions of the monarch, strengthened perhaps by the healthy influence of his illustrious connections by marriage, are leading Spain along the paths of prosperity and gradually relieving us of the nightmare of reaction which has weighed so heavily upon our nation during the minority of Don Alfonso and the early years of his manhood.”

Centuries of government by the rich for the rich, and by the Church for the Church, have contributed to make reform exceedingly difficult, but at length the issues between political morality and the maintenance of the old abuses have been clearly set before the nation, in the struggle which ended with the dismissal of Señor Moret. He determined to have the country freed from the tyranny of the Cacique. His opponents desired to maintain the system. That was the whole point at issue.

At the moment it seemed as if those interested in the maintenance of a corrupt system had won a signal victory, and the men who are working for the moralising of political life would have been more than human had they spoken no word of the bitterness they felt at seeing, as it seemed, their work undone and their hopes frustrated. But there are apparent defeats which mark a stage on the road to final victory, and such a stage was marked, for the people of Spain, by the fall of Moret in February, 1910.

Turning to the other main body of political opinion, the Liberal party, with its offshoot, the Republicans, it is worth noting that many of these, including several of their most prominent and influential leaders, although professing republican opinions, are in reality staunch upholders of the constitutional Monarchy, their republicanism being more in the nature of a political counsel of perfection than a policy that they are actively forwarding. Thus Montero Rios, the leader of the Radical wing of the Liberals, who, if not avowedly a Republican, is closely allied to that party, recently said, à propos of the split in the Liberal camp which seemed imminent after the resignation of Moret, “I have always urged that our group should submit to the leadership of Moret, because he alone can hold the party together.” Melquiades Alvarez, one of the acknowledged leaders of the Republicans, made in October, 1909, an important speech in which he offered “a final truce” with the Monarchy, and Republican support to a programme of liberty of worship, restriction of the power of the Religious Orders, neutral schools, and social reform. “With the adoption of this programme permanent stability would be afforded to the Throne on the model of the English dynasty—a crowned Republic.” And Soriano, another prominent man in that party, said about the same time “The Republican revolution should be spiritual, not material. We do not desire to overthrow the Monarchy, but to implant education and progress” (italics mine). The term “Republican,” as used by the men of this school of thought, seems to connote a social and political Utopia rather than a particular form of government, and “republican” principles are quite compatible with an undeviating support of the Constitutional Monarchy.

These “idealist” Republicans would not thus group their party with the supporters of the Monarchy if they believed that the existence of the Throne were prejudicial to the nation. Nor would the Liberal-Monarchists accept without protest such an association with themselves, did they believe that these men were working to overthrow the Monarchy.

The truth is that all Spanish politicians who have the good of their country at heart recognise, even though they may disapprove, the traditional respect for the kingly office which is implanted in the mind of most peoples who have lived from childhood under the Monarchical system. In Spain, where the King who united Castile with Leon and expelled the Moslems from nearly the whole of the South is venerated as a saint, the tradition exists more strongly and has greater weight in determining the action of the masses at any given moment than in any other country except perhaps Russia.

EDUCATION

A STREET HAWKER DESCRIBING BATTLE SCENES TO AN ILLITERATE AUDIENCE.

[To face page 263.

CHAPTER XIV

EDUCATION

Of the many evils that afflict Spain, one of the gravest, for it lies at the root of most of the others, is the deplorably backward state of education. It is commonly said that 75 per cent. of the population cannot read or write. This figure may or may not be exaggerated, but it is certainly the exception to find a member of the working classes who can do either. And this ignorance is not confined to the working classes, but extends, in a relative degree, throughout all social ranks. People of good position, presumably educated, frequently cannot write and spell their own language correctly. I have even been told as a fact that there are, or were until quite recently, grandees of Spain who could not sign their names. And ignorance of the commonest facts of geography and history is astonishingly prevalent even in the middle classes. It would not in the least surprise any one who knows Spanish society to be asked whether Germany lies to the south of Switzerland, or if Berlin is the capital of London. Even in the universities things are no better. The course of study in any subject consists in the scholar getting up a textbook written ad hoc by the professor of that subject, in which alone he is examined for his certificate or diploma, and outside of which he is not expected to travel. Indeed, in some of the universities the students are actively discouraged from reading anything except the prescribed textbook of the subject they are studying, and the natural consequence is that a young man who has passed through the University with credit may be, and often is in fact, quite illiterate.

The administrative educational system in Spain is as follows:

At the head is the Minister of Public Instruction, assisted by a consultative Council, which includes the Rectors of the universities. Certain of the functions of the Minister are delegated to the sub-secretary, who is the second authority in the department.

The local administration is complicated. The whole country is divided into ten university districts, at the head of each of which is the Rector of the university. He, inter alia, exercises a general supervision over all the schools in his district, appoints teachers whose salary is below 1,000 pesetas per annum, and proposes to the Minister of Education the appointment of those of higher grade or salary. He is assisted by a consultative Council. The teachers are appointed after some sort of competitive examination.

The Civil Governor of each province is responsible for the fulfilment of all the obligations imposed by the law, but has no voice in the internal management, teaching, &c., of the schools and colleges. He, too, is assisted by a provincial consultative Council. Lastly, in the municipality, the Alcalde, the President of the Ayuntamiento, has the same functions in his district as those of the Civil Governor in the province.[23] The Alcalde also has his local consultative committee, whose functions are not unlike those of school managers in England.

The inspection of all schools except the elementary is the duty of the Rector of the university. The inspection of elementary schools is committed to an Inspector-General, under the immediate orders of the sub-Secretary of State, and forty-nine inspectors, one for each province.

Elementary education in Spain has been compulsory since 1857, and free, since 1901, to children whose parents “are unable to pay.” The compulsory school age is from 6 to 12. The provision of schools and the upkeep of the buildings is the duty of the Ayuntamiento, and a small sum is set aside in the annual Budget of the kingdom for grants in aid to poor districts.

The system under which the teachers are paid is peculiar. The locality finds the money and hands it to the Ministry of Education, which pays the salaries. The reason for this arrangement is characteristic. It was made because of the irregularities in the payment of the teachers which frequently occurred when the local authority administered the funds. The salaries of the teachers in the Elementary schools are from 500 to 3,000 pesetas—say £20 to £120 a year, with a house, and they are entitled after twenty years’ service or upwards, to a pension of from 50 to 80 per cent. of their salary. They also have a right to the fees of “children who can pay them.”

It is easy to see that this system of overlapping authorities and divided responsibility must necessarily lead to waste of time and general inefficiency, even assuming that every one concerned is genuinely anxious to do his duty and to work for the good of education, an assumption which it would be very rash to make.

The teachers in the Government schools have to hold a Government certificate, which is obtained after a two years’ course in a normal school. In the higher-grade schools a superior certificate is required, involving an additional two years’ training. Private schools are reckoned as part of the school supply, in a proportion to the total which varies with the population of the school district. The school supply is calculated, not on the basis of school places but of teachers; roughly speaking, one master and one mistress are allowed to each thousand of population. The total number of qualified teachers of both sexes is eventually to be brought up to 30,000. The private schools have to satisfy the inspector as to sanitary requirements only: no control seems to be exercised over the instruction, nor is any certificate of competence demanded of the teacher.

In addition to the elementary schools, the law provides for the establishment of infant and night schools, schools for the deaf and dumb, and all the machinery of a complete and comprehensive system of secondary and higher education.

So much for the theory: the practice is another matter.

In the universities all the elements of university education are lacking. The professors in many cases are ignorant and incompetent, and those who are properly qualified for their work—and some of them are men of scholastic and scientific attainments of no mean order, often acquired abroad—are isolated, working in unsympathetic and even hostile surroundings, and their knowledge is almost useless in the lecture-room, owing to the fact that the students are absolutely destitute of the grounding necessary in order to benefit by proper teaching. When by chance a group of professors with real knowledge and enthusiasm happens to be formed in an university, the results are surprising. This has occurred at Oviedo, where, thanks to the existence of such a teaching staff, an educational atmosphere was formed, the students were educated and not merely crammed with a few useless facts, and extension lectures were established with extraordinary success, especially among the working classes.

In addition to a body of competent professors, the universities, if they are to fulfil their function, need (a) a certain amount of autonomy—at present they are merely bureaus for conducting examinations and issuing diplomas; (b) reorganisation of studies, with some liberty of choice to the student; (c) reform of the examination system in the direction of substituting for the present examination by subjects either a certificate based on attendance and general proficiency or a final examination on leaving; (d) in scientific subjects, a good deal more practical work; and in all branches of study the abolition of the textbook, the committing of which to memory is now the sole demand made on the candidate for examination.

A professor at one of the universities has summed up to me the present state of these centres of learning in the following words:

“There is an absolute lack of any educational spirit, of any contact between teachers and pupils, of any feeling of solidarity among the students, of any organisation of games, excursions, &c., of any artistic refinement, and of any organised effort to raise the moral standard, to-day perhaps the most degraded in the world.”

When we turn to the administration of the elementary schools, the part of the educational system which more directly and immediately affects the working classes, we find the same general state of inefficiency and neglect.

A volume of school statistics was officially issued not long ago, of which a useful summary was published in the Heraldo de Madrid in November, 1909.

From this it appears that while four provinces have the full complement of Elementary schools required by the law, the supply in all the remaining 45 is deficient, the shortage per province being from 772 schools downwards, and the total deficiency amounting to 9,505 schools. The total increase of school supply between 1870 and 1908 is 2,150 schools, or an average of about 56 schools per year. At this rate it would take over 150 years to catch up even to the school provision required by the school law of 1857, without allowing for any increase of population.

But in another way, about two-thirds of the school districts of Spain, or some thirty thousand towns and villages, have no Government school. In Madrid about half the schools required by law are wanting. Barcelona has a somewhat similar deficiency. And be it remembered that the school supply is calculated in accordance with the law of 1857, the requirements of which are far below those which obtain in any other country in Europe, so that even in the very few districts where there is nominally sufficient school accommodation there is actually a serious deficiency according to modern standards of what is necessary. The consequence, as the Heraldo observes, is that some 12,000,000 of the population do not know their letters.

But the towns where there is a school are not really much better off, educationally, than those that have none. Save in very exceptional cases, no attempt is made to enforce school attendance, and though some of the parents send their children to school, the careless and indifferent do not. The Alcalde, whose business it is to see that the law is carried out, probably is—except in the larger towns—entirely uneducated himself, and is not going to stir up possible ill-feeling by enforcing a law which does not benefit him personally, and of which he does not see the necessity. The Civil Governor, who is over the Alcalde, and whose duty it is to see that the education laws are carried out, probably is equally indifferent, and in any case has not the time to supervise all the Alcaldes of the scores of towns and villages in his province. The schoolmaster naturally does not trouble himself; his salary does not depend on the number of his pupils, but on the population of the school district. And, lastly, any attempt to enforce the attendance required by law, were it made, must necessarily fail, simply for lack of school accommodation, for already most if not all of the elementary schools have many more children on the register than there is room for. Thus school attendance, although nominally compulsory, is in fact purely voluntary, with the usual results.

The supply of school material is the duty of the Central Government, as already stated. This duty the Government delegates, not to the local authority, but to the schoolmaster, who receives, in addition to his salary, an allowance to scale for providing books, &c. The natural result is that he looks on this allowance as an augmentation of salary, and reduces the supply of books to the barest minimum, or to zero. It is not to be expected that the schools should be liberally or even decently supplied with these necessaries when every penny that can be saved on them is so much clear profit to the teacher. The consequence—seeing that books cannot be altogether dispensed with—is that the children have to pay for them, and the intention of the law, that schooling should be free to the poor, is frustrated.

The working classes, who, as has been said, honestly desire that their children may receive some rudiments of education, do not as a rule like the Government schools, because, they say, nothing is taught in them. It is not at all uncommon for the teacher to absent himself altogether from school during school hours. He may or may not set the children some lesson—for instance, a passage to repeat over and over again—and he may or may not lock the door after him when he goes away, but very often the children are left entirely alone during the hours when the school is open and they are supposed to be receiving instruction. Parents say, and no doubt with truth, that the moral consequences of this lack of supervision are exceedingly bad, and that a great deal of harm is done to the majority by uncontrolled association with a few demoralised children. A working man in a small provincial town complained to me that a whole school had been corrupted by the evil influence of one boy older than the rest.

It will naturally be asked why such a state of things is tolerated. The answer is easy. It is the duty of the Alcalde to see that the schoolmaster does his work and does not absent himself without leave. But the Alcalde may be a friend or relative of the schoolmaster, or may have other reasons for not worrying him by pedantically insisting that he do his duty. Besides which, it is quite probable that the schoolmaster is not being paid. His salary may not have been sent to the Ayuntamiento, or if sent may not have reached him. According to the article in the Heraldo above referred to, the Ayuntamientos are now in debt to the school teachers for arrears of salary amounting to 7,000,000 pesetas—say £280,000. Therefore the negligent schoolmaster is not unlikely to have a conclusive answer to any remonstrance that the Alcalde might be inclined to make: “Pay me my wages and I’ll do my work.”

The parents dare not complain. The Alcalde or the teacher, or both of them, would make things unpleasant for the audacious parent who hinted that either of them was not doing all he should, and there is further the tradition of hopeless submission to misrule of all kinds, from long experience of the uselessness and danger of protesting, which in itself makes the working man reluctant to take any steps against those in authority.

As far as can be gathered, the working classes seem on the whole to prefer the private schools, in spite of the fee charged, on the ground that in these schools the children are under some sort of supervision and do learn something, if only, a little. But the fee, even where quite low, is a serious obstacle to a labourer with a large family, who is only earning some ten or twelve pesetas a week, and, as has been already said, it often happens that only one child can be sent, who in the evenings passes on what he has learnt to the rest of the family. But in these schools it is the custom for the children to bring presents to the master on certain occasions, and it is said that a child who does not bring his present is neglected. “Only the children of those who have money get any teaching,” the parents say.

In many towns most of the private schools are kept by nuns. These schools, generally speaking, have not a good name. It is said that the children who attend them are taught nothing but catechism and needlework, and that the punishments given are often cruel and sometimes disgusting. There was a great scandal lately in a town in the south, on account of a punishment of a nature impossible to describe, inflicted on a little girl in one of these schools. The father took steps to bring an action against the convent in question, but the Civil Governor interfered, and compensation was paid in order to have the matter hushed up.

There are schools, both public and private, where a better state of things prevails, where the master is more or less of an enthusiast, and where in consequence the children get decent elementary teaching; indeed, in one village I was told that “the master of the Government school taught very well, when he was sober.” Nevertheless it is a fact that most of those few of the working classes who can read and write do so badly; indeed, to decipher a letter, say from a domestic servant, or a workman or small tradesman, is a labour of great difficulty, not only owing to the bad writing, but to the extraordinary spelling, although Spanish is the easiest of languages to spell correctly.

Still, in spite of all the obstacles created by administrative incompetence, neglect, and corruption, some progress is being made—enough at least to prove that the people would take immediate advantage of a decently efficient school system. If any members of a family can read, it is usually the children. I have often seen little groups of older people seated round some child who reads the paper to them.

The desire of the working classes for education has brought about a remarkable change in their attitude towards the conscription. This change is the growth of recent years, and is the result of personal efforts on the part of certain distinguished officers. Their feeling in the matter may be summed up in the words of Colonel Ibañez Marin, who met his death in the early days of the Melilla War: “My ambition is that no conscript shall return to his home, after serving his first three years, without being able at least to read and write.”

I am continually asked about the education of the working classes in England.

“They say that in your country every one is taught to read. Is it possible that that is true? But you have a different kind of Government from ours. Over there it seems that they attend to the interests of the poor. Here you must be able to pay if you wish to learn anything.

“England must do something for us now that our King has married your King’s daughter. If things here were conducted as they are over there, Spain would be the happiest country in the world. But England will take our part in everything now, so matters will improve.”

If the connection between King Edward and the Queen of Spain is explained, and it is observed that one nation cannot interfere with the internal affairs of another on the sole ground of relationship between their respective rulers, the speaker will reply:

“You say that because Governments talk in that way, but we know better. Are not kings human beings like ourselves? And if the Spanish Government knows that Don Alfonso asks the King of England for advice, will they not have to respect the advice he gives? It is not possible that England should take no interest in our affairs when our Queen is your King’s niece.”

Perhaps one ought to explain that the only influence that England could exert in their favour is that of public opinion, and that England is too busy with her own affairs to have time to form an opinion about those of Spain, far less to express it in a convincing manner. But it would be cruel to deprive these people of the gleam of hope which has come to them through the King’s marriage, so perhaps I say, “In the meantime here are a few little reals for teaching,” and get the reply: “May God repay you! My second boy can go to the night school for a month for seven reals.”

A movement which has in it great promise for the future was started a few years ago by certain able young university professors, who fully realise how much of the backwardness of their country is due to lack of education, with its resultant narrowness of mind and outlook, and ignorance of the modes of life and thought of other nations.

The fundamental idea of this movement, as described to me by its originator, is to create an organic body, independent of political changes, which shall endeavour little by little to promote contact between the teachers of all grades in Spain and their foreign colleagues, and to form within the country small nuclei of workers to diffuse in Spain the ideas brought from abroad, and to create an atmosphere of sympathy and enthusiasm, without which scientific work cannot flourish. On these lines two Committees were formed by Royal Decree in January, 1907. One of these was charged with reforms in elementary teaching, to be carried out by the establishment of classes for teachers, by school inspection on modern lines, by sending selected teachers abroad (the Government gives a grant for this purpose, the administration of which was entrusted to the committee) and by grouping and grading the schools, and encouraging and supervising holiday resorts for teachers, school games, &c.—the whole of the reforms to be introduced gradually, as circumstances might permit. To the other body then created, a “Committee for the development of studies and scientific research,” was entrusted the gradual formation of a staff of competent teachers and professors for higher education generally and for scientific studies.

But the work of these Committees, which, if steadily pursued, offers the best hope for the intellectual regeneration of Spain, was paralysed in the first year by Government interference. Between the formation of the Committees and the issue of their first Annual Report a change of Government took place, and the Ministry of Señor Maura, true to the traditions of Clericalism, did their best to bring all effective work to an end. They suppressed altogether the Committee charged with reforms in elementary education, and set up in its place a mere official bureau, powerless and useless. And though they did not actually abolish the Committee for Higher Education, they succeeded in putting an end to all effective work, by overriding its statutory constitution and curtailing its freedom of action, by stopping supplies, and by delaying or refusing the necessary official consent to measures proposed by the Committee. For instance, whereas the Committee had made arrangements with the French Ministry of Public Instruction for the disposal of the teachers who held grants for study abroad, the Government refused to recognise these arrangements unless they were made officially through the ambassadors, with the result that in the year 1908 none of these teachers were sent abroad. In the Budget for that year the sum set aside for foreign study was reduced by 110,000 pesetas (about £4,400), although in the previous year a quite exceptional number of applicants for these grants had come forward. These instances are sufficient to show the attitude of the Clericalists towards education, but the whole Report of the Committee shows how at every turn their work was checked and hampered after Señor Maura took office. With the return of a Liberal Ministry to power it is hoped that the work will be once more effectively taken up.

Since the above chapter was written a Report on the present condition of education, addressed to the Cortes, has been prepared by the Minister of Education, and summarised in the Spanish Press. The following quotations from this summary throw a lurid light on the actual state of affairs.

“More than 10,000 schools are on hired premises, and many of these are absolutely destitute of hygienic conditions. There are schools mixed up with hospitals, with cemeteries, with slaughterhouses, with stables. One school forms the entrance to a cemetery, and the corpses are placed on the master’s table while the last responses are being said. There is a school into which the children cannot enter until the animals have been taken out and sent to pasture. Some are so small that as soon as the warm weather begins the boys faint for want of air and ventilation. One school is a manure-heap in process of fermentation, (sic) and one of the local authorities has said that in this way the children are warmer in the winter. One school in Cataluña adjoins the prison. Another, in Andalusia, is turned into an enclosure for the bulls when there is a bullfight in the town.

“The school premises are bad, but most of the Town Councils do not pay the rent, for which reason the proprietors refuse to let their houses. Ninety per cent. of the buildings in which the schools are held are the worst dwellings in the town.

“In Lucena the salary of a mistress is held back because she guaranteed the school rent. The Municipality did not pay it, the school was going to be evicted and the teaching to be interrupted, and that mistress, in order to prevent this, pledged her miserable pay.”

Comment is needless: the facts, vouched for by the Minister of Education, speak for themselves.

TAXATION

SAFFRON PICKERS SORTING THEIR CROP.

To face page 285.

CHAPTER XV

TAXATION

Among the sources of the national revenue of Spain there are several which more especially affect the poorer portion of the community, or, by hampering trade and manufactures, put obstacles in the way of the national prosperity. Among these may be especially mentioned the Customs duties, the tax on trades, business, and professions (contribucion industrial) the octroi, or consumo, the creation and sale of monopolies, and the national lottery. The total taxation of the country is absolutely crushing, and makes Spain one of the dearest places of residence in Europe.

The Customs are excessively high, especially for a country that has comparatively few manufactures of its own to protect. To take a few instances at random from the Tariff: Straw hats pay about 20 pesetas per kilogramme; preserves, 3 pesetas per kilogramme; typewriters, 8 pesetas per kilogramme; timber in boards, 6 pesetas per cubic metre; materials of silk and velvet, from 30 pesetas per kilogramme; woollen materials, from 13 pesetas per kilogramme; drugs at various rates from 36 pesetas per kilogramme downwards, and so forth. The consequence is seen in the prices charged in the shops for ordinary commodities. Thus Danish tinned butter costs pesetas 2.75 per lb.; tapioca, 1 peseta per packet of about ¼ lb.; coffee, pesetas 2.50 to 3 per lb.; Keiller’s marmalade, 3 to 4 pesetas the 1 lb. pot; Burroughs & Welcome’s tabloids, pesetas 2.50 the small bottle of 25; and most other things in about the same proportion.[24] The Customs receipts form, with the exception of the tax on real estate, the largest single item in the Budget. For the year 1909 they were estimated at pesetas 153,600,000 (£6,144,000).

The Contribucion industrial is a tax upon every imaginable trade, profession, and industry that can be exercised: on merchants, manufacturers, shopkeepers, professional men of all sorts, on means of transit, on public entertainments, on schools, newspapers—in short, it is almost impossible to find any kind of business or occupation that is not taxed.

The amount of the tax varies with the population, a scale of ten different rates being drawn up according to the size of the town. Bankers pay from about £300 a year downwards, according to the place of residence; merchants from £200; shopkeepers from £70; hotels from £60; contractors 6 per mil. on their contracts; railways £10 per kilometre constructed, and a tax on their receipts; brokers from £80; newspapers from £35; publishers from £25; private schools from £10; and so on. It is tedious and unnecessary to accumulate instances.[25]

That such a burdensome tax as this necessarily hampers trade and goes to prevent commercial and industrial development needs no demonstration: the thing is self-evident. The compiler of the manual of this law says in his Introduction, with perfect truth, that it has the radical defect of making heavier demands as the trader’s profits fall, and that the framers of the law, so far from attempting to harmonise the interests of the Treasury with those of the taxpayer, thought only how to squeeze him, so that the tax nips in the bud whatever might aid in the increase of prosperity or open new fields for the productiveness of the nation.

This tax immediately affects the professional and commercial classes: the poor, such as street hawkers, journeymen labourers, fishermen, &c., are exempt; but indirectly they too suffer, as naturally it helps to increase the price of necessaries.

The greatest burden on the working classes—and it is a very grievous one—is the octroi, or consumo, a heavy tax on nearly every kind of food, drink, and fuel, and on timber, stone, lime, &c.; in short, on nearly everything that is consumed in use. The fisherman has to pay consumo on his catch before he can sell it; the farmer on his dead meat, poultry, and eggs brought to market; the charcoal-burner on his charcoal; and so on. The tax, varying in details, is levied in every town and village, and thus may be, and often is, paid twice over by the same goods, if they happen to be conveyed from one town to another.

It is obvious that such a tax on the necessaries of life presses with exceptional severity on the poor, and it is, moreover, steadily rising, while wages remain stationary. It is usually farmed out to syndicates which are said, and no doubt with truth, to be making enormous profits out of it. These syndicates are believed by the people to consist in many cases of persons who

A SELLER OF PALM-LEAF BRUSHES AND FANS.

[To face page 289.

represent the Jesuits, and the oppressiveness of the tax and the steady rise in its amount form another count in the heavy indictment of the poor against the Religious Orders. The estimated receipts from this tax in the Budget for 1909 were pesetas 58,000,000 (about £3,520,000).

“Everything in the country is dying of the consumos,” said a working woman of about sixty years of age, who remembers with regret how much easier the life of the poor was in the days of Isabel II. “Every four years the contract for the consumos in our province is put up to auction, and every time they are sold the price is raised four or five thousand duros,[26] and we have to pay the difference. Yesterday Manolo paid four duros consumo for the fish he sold in the market, and all he had for himself after twenty-four hours’ work was ten reals. The man who rents the consumos from the Government is rotten with money (podrido de dinero): millions and millions of pesetas he has, all wrung from the necessities of the poor. Don Alfonso does not like it; every one knows that. If he had his own way there would be no consumo for the poor. Already since he came into power we have been relieved of the consumo on wine, green vegetables, and potatoes, and they say that two years hence, when the contract runs out, he wishes that it shall not be renewed. But that would not suit the Government nor the Jesuits, who are mixed up in this business. They would lose too much which they now are able to put into their own pockets. So they would like to make another revolution to get rid of Don Alfonso, as they got rid of his grandmother, before their contract comes to an end. In her time bread cost just half what it does now, twenty-five eggs cost five reals (pesetas 1.25) instead of two pesetas a dozen, and for four cuartos we could buy a piece of pork as big as we get now for two reals.[27] Salt was free of consumo, so was oil, so was cheese, and shell-fish and chestnuts sold in the street were not taxed, so that they could be bought for much less than now, and the whole reason is because the Government lets the taxes instead of taking the trouble to collect them as was done in the time of Queen Isabella.”

Whether this good lady, whose words I have translated literally from notes made at the time, was right or wrong in her supposition as to the interest of the Jesuits in this tax, and as to the quadrennial increase in the amount paid for it by the syndicate of farmers who exploit it, I cannot say. I quote her words as an instance of what is said on all sides by her class whenever the subject is mentioned, and as far as I can learn she is quite correct in her comparison of the prices of food now with those of forty years or so ago.

Tobacco and sugar are Government monopolies, farmed out to companies, which also are popularly believed to be under the control of the Jesuits. I have never seen any accounts of the profits of the Tobacco Company, but their shares are quoted at about 390 to 400, which speaks for itself. The tobacco they supply is very bad, and outrageously dear. The estimated receipts from this source were pesetas 140,400,000 (£5,616,000).

The sugar trust was created comparatively recently. A short account of the last annual meeting of the shareholders was published by the Press in November, 1909, from which it appears that the trust made a profit in the year, in round figures, of pesetas 8,400,000 on a gross income of pesetas 14,600,000 (say £336,000 on £584,000), and pays a dividend of 8 per cent. And during the past twelve months the price of sugar has been rising, and now stands at about 7d. per lb. Figures like these, relating to a necessary of life which is the one luxury of the poor, do not require comment, especially in view of the fact that enough cane and beetroot sugar for the entire needs of the population could be produced in the country, where both soil and climate are suitable in a great part of the southern provinces. But one company after another has been crushed out of existence, and only ruined factories remain to remind the traveller of what ought to be prosperous undertakings, beneficial to the whole nation. From this source the State gets pesetas 31,600,000 (£1,264,000).

Matches are another monopoly, also farmed out. They are of course bad and very dear—½d. or 1d. for fifty matches, according to quality. The conditions under which the operatives work are, I am told on good authority, simply deplorable, and growing worse instead of better. The estimated receipts are pesetas 10,000,000 (£400,000).

A tax which combines a maximum of irritation with a minimum of profit is one which is levied on the business books of persons engaged in commerce. Every page of the ledger, cash book, press copy book, &c., has to be officially stamped at a charge of so much per page: the total charge for a complete set of commercial books sometimes amounting to 500 pesetas (£20), and not only so, but the Government—presumably in order to get more out of the tax—prescribes the method by which the merchant must keep his books. I was told by the manager of a large foreign industrial concern that he has to employ twice as many clerks as he needs, solely because the authorities insist on a cumbrous and obsolete system of book-keeping.

The law enacts that pious foundations which offer their manufactures for public sale are liable to taxation. It is currently said that this obligation is evaded. Whether this is the case or not I cannot say from personal knowledge, but certainly any visitor can purchase sweets or needlework made in the convents. Indeed, some of them are celebrated for their confectionery, which is always sold a trifle under the cost of similar goods made by a lay tradesman.

If the taxes were fairly and honestly collected, their amount could be materially reduced. But as a matter of fact many are not collected at all from the persons most able to pay. The tax-collector is usually willing, for a consideration, to play the part of the unjust steward, and take less than the proper amount. It is sometimes said that only fools and foreigners pay the taxes, and cases have occurred in my own knowledge where bribery in the proper quarter has effected a substantial reduction in the amount accepted. Every resident in Spain knows of such instances: the thing is notorious, is talked of quite openly, and is done with hardly any attempt at concealment. It is impossible to conjecture what proportion of the total taxes due is thus informally remitted, but it must be something considerable.

Complaints about evasions of taxation frequently appear in the papers: thus it was stated as a fact in the Liberal in February, 1910, that about 45 per cent, of those liable for Contribution industrial evade payment. In the same newspaper, in the same month, appeared a long statement, signed by the officials of the Guild of Cab Proprietors in one of the large towns, accusing certain owners of livery stables, who let smart carriages for hire, of defrauding the municipality of some 50,000 pesetas (about £2,000) a year by falsifying the declarations on which they take out their licences, and no attempt was made to show that the accusation was unfounded. Complaints about evasion of taxation by large landowners also are of frequent occurrence.

Quite recently the Government has seriously taken up this question of falsified returns, especially in the case of real estate, and is making a systematic inspection of the properties liable for taxation. An immense amount of fraud has already been discovered in the towns, and the case of the rural estates is probably worse. I was lately told of an instance where, to my informant’s knowledge, an estate which adjoins his own has been paying 60 pesetas a year, whereas it should have paid about 2,000. In some parts of the country the large landowners are doing their utmost to oppose the carrying on of the Ordnance Survey, because the effect of it would be to define and make public the extent of their property.

An ingenious mode of defrauding the exchequer of succession duties is practised on a gigantic scale. This consists in depositing personal property in the banks in the joint names of all concerned, actual holders and heirs apparent, to the order of any one of them. Thus on the death of the father, the owner of the personal estate, it passes to his son without any legal intervention, and the Treasury is powerless to collect the succession duties. Under the Spanish law as it now stands, if one of the owners of such a joint deposit dies, the deposit pays a proportion of the duties corresponding to the number of names in which it stands: a half if there are two, a third if there are three, and so on. In January, 1910, there were “undefined deposits” (depósitos indistintos) as they are called amounting to nearly 519,700,000 pesetas (about £20,788,000) in the Bank of Spain alone, and Alvarado, Moret’s Minister of Finance, obtained a Royal Decree dealing with these deposits. His plan was simple: merely to make the joint deposit liable for the whole duty on the death of any one of those interested. As this would oblige the owner to pay if the heir died first, it is obvious that the practice of depositing in joint names would at once come to an end. But Cobian, Alvarado’s successor in Canalejas’ Ministry, suspended the decree, a proceeding inexplicable in a Minister whose Chief loudly proclaims his democratic principles. Meanwhile the depositors took immediate advantage of the respite afforded them by the suspension of the decree to transfer some 200,000,000 pesetas (about £8,000,000) to banks abroad, and most probably a good deal more will go the same way. The Religious Orders are fighting the decree tooth and nail, because while legally formed associations, who do not desire to conceal their capital, do not object to the decree, illegal associations, who have reasons for secrecy as to their affairs, find in the system of joint deposits an easy way of escaping their liabilities. It must be remembered that most of the Religious Orders now established in Spain are illegal, the Concordat only allowing of two, together with a third not yet named.

It is always assumed, as a matter of course, that the whole administration of the country is corrupt. When an unexpected deficit appears in public accounts, governmental or municipal, when a sum of money voted for a certain purpose has evidently not been spent as intended, when, as frequently happens, money owing by the State or the Municipality is not paid—in short, whenever there is anything in the national or local administration of the public funds which calls for explanation, it is taken for granted that some one in office has been stealing. Whether this assumption is justified or not I do not pretend to say. All I know is that it is universally made.

I asked a Spaniard on one occasion why a certain public building had never been finished. “No doubt the Alcalde uses the money to keep up his carriage,” was the reply. The man certainly did not know the facts, but this was to him the most plausible explanation. When a few years ago Admiral Cervera was ordered to fight the United States with ships armed with obsolete guns and shells that did not fit them, every one said, and still says, if the subject is spoken of, that officials in the Government stole the money that ought to have been spent on the Navy. The system extends, or is said to extend, from the highest ranks of officialdom downwards, and if this is true, it must necessarily operate in substantially reducing the total funds available for the Treasury.

A minor matter, which I only mention because, it goes to illustrate once more the system of over-taxation with no adequate result, is the postal service. A letter in Spain does not cost a penny, as it does everywhere else; it costs twopence: of this three-halfpence are paid by the sender and a halfpenny by the receiver. In exchange for this, the Government gives a service which is indifferent in the large towns, and infamously bad in the smaller towns and the rural districts, where there is no security whatever that any given letter will reach sender or receiver, and where, to my own knowledge, a very large number are lost.

Gambling in the national lottery, which is drawn about three times a month, is almost universal, and an immense amount of money must be wasted on it. I remember seeing a man in a second-class railway carriage, after borrowing my newspaper to see the result of a drawing, throw away at least a dozen tickets, representing a cost of either three or five pesetas each. The lottery is conducted with absolute fairness, and it might be argued that, as people will gamble, it is better that they should do so on a straightforward lottery than, e.g., on horse-racing or some other sport of doubtful honesty. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the fact of these lottery tickets being thrust under the noses of the public all day long, coupled with the reports current in conversation and the particulars given in the Press of the sudden wealth which has accrued to this and the other working man through a lucky number, must foment the gambling spirit, which is sufficiently rife in Spain without any such official encouragement. The estimated net receipts from the lottery for 1909 were pesetas 35,250,000 (£1,410,000).

It must be borne in mind, in connection with the universal venality of the lower grades of the bureaucracy, that a certain amount of excuse is to be found in the salaries they receive, which are miserably small in amount and often in arrears. When a man has to keep himself and his family on two pesetas a day, it is not surprising that he takes advantage of the opportunities which his official position gives him to increase by illicit means a wage on which it is quite impossible that he should live decently and honestly.

THE PROCESS OF REGENERATION

CHAPTER XVI

THE PROCESS OF REGENERATION

The regeneration of Spain must necessarily be a slow process, for the causes of her degradation are deep-seated, and are not to be removed by mere legislative enactments or alteration of the machinery of government. One of the principal difficulties with which the country has to contend is the dishonesty of the bureaucracy, which paralyses any reform that may be attempted. Of what use is legislation, when the laws are not honestly administered? If what is the common talk of all classes has any foundation whatever in fact, the whole of the bureaucracy, from top to bottom, not excluding the inferior judiciary, is venal and corrupt, and until a tradition of honest administration is established amendment will be difficult, if not impossible.

The history of Spain for the last three hundred years affords an illustration of the proposition established by Lecky[28] that “the period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind.” In no country in Western Europe has the Church of Rome been so entirely absolute and dominant, since the Reformation, as in Spain, where the Inquisition instantly and finally crushed out all freedom of thought and all opposition to theological orthodoxy. The Church in Spain to-day enjoys the unique position of holding a monopoly of the spiritual direction of the nation. Although other creeds and forms of worship are tolerated, there is no religious liberty. Everywhere else, even in Catholic countries, there is a vigilant and hostile body of opinion, of more or less weight, which necessarily contributes by its very existence to moralise the Church and to enforce on the priesthood a certain standard of duty. In Spain this check is absent. There is no rival Church, for the Spanish Protestants are too few in number and too insignificant in position to make their influence felt, and the working classes, who, as has been shown, are bitterly hostile to the priesthood, are inarticulate, and powerless as an influence corrective of abuses, while the middle classes, who might do something towards enforcing a higher standard, are generally speaking, indifferent.

To what extent the corruption of the spiritual power in Spain is responsible for the low moral standard of the laity is an exceedingly difficult question, on which I am not capable of pronouncing an opinion. There is no doubt that Spain for the last three hundred years has suffered from a succession of some of the worst, the most incompetent, and the most corrupt rulers known to history. During all this time, except perhaps during the thirty years when Charles III. was on the throne, the Church was supreme. If the clergy, the directors of the conscience of the nation, armed with the power of the confessional and supported if necessary by the secular arm, had deliberately set their faces against the system of public venality and corruption instituted by Lerma and Olivares and continued by their subordinates and successors, it is difficult to believe that the upas-tree would have grown so tall and struck its roots so deeply as it has.

The excessive centralisation of the whole administration in Madrid, coupled with the Spanish habit of writing long letters and reports about every trivial question, which reports are referred for further information from one official to another before the Minister or other authority gives his final decision, paralyses all initiative and causes infinite delays and annoyances over the simplest matters. On the other hand, if effective local self-government were given under existing conditions, the Cacique would be even more powerful than he now is, and Spain would be ruled, not by a single bureaucracy, but by a number of irresponsible autocrats.

Thus before Spain can effectually reform herself there is needed a change of heart, a vital conviction that only through honest and fearless administration is redemption possible. An educated Spaniard once observed to me, when discussing this matter: “In England you act on the supposition that a person in office is an honest man, and if you find that he is not, you punish him severely. In Spain we presuppose dishonesty, and do not chastise the rogue when he is found out.” This is perfectly true. There are swarms of official inspectors who are supposed to inspect everything connected with the public administration. But the inspectors themselves are venal, and for a sufficient consideration will report that all is well when it is far from well. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? It is the rarest thing to hear of any official being punished for peculation or receiving bribes.

Every educated Spaniard is fully aware of this canker, which is rotting the whole body politic: they talk to each other and to foreigners about it with the utmost frankness, entirely recognising the greatness of the evil and usually despairing of any amendment.

To turn to another side of the same question. In a different way the bullfight is responsible for an amount of moral degradation that no one but a Spaniard can adequately estimate. It is not only that the spectacle of broken-down horses gored to death and a wild beast worried for half an hour at a stretch is in itself debasing, but the whole atmosphere created by the amusement is thoroughly vicious and degrading. This is not merely my private opinion: I repeat what has been told me by cultured and thoughtful Spaniards, who see in its popularity one of the many obstacles to the growth of a higher standard of morality. Happily there are indications that the taste for the sport is on the wane. I know numerous members of the upper middle class and many working people, both men and women, who object strongly to the institution, and never attend a bullfight, and bullrings have been closed in many of the smaller towns during the last ten years or so, for want of support. But the vested interests—the cattle-breeders who make their living by breeding the bulls, the impresarios who get up the shows, the companies who have invested millions of pesetas in building bullring’s, the thousands of men employed in them in various capacities, and the bull-fighters themselves—form together a very powerful combination with a good deal of political influence, and it will be many years yet before this blot on civilisation disappears.[29]

One deplorable fact connected with the bullfights is the extent to which they are patronised by foreign visitors, and of these the English are among the worst offenders. I have been told, though I cannot vouch for the truth of the statement, that one bullring close to Gibraltar is practically kept going by the English spectators, and that but for their support it would be closed. I know that Englishmen and English women, in scores and hundreds, every year, some of them ardent supporters at home of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, make a point, when they come to Spain, of going to see the show. “No, I daresay I shan’t like it,” they will say, “but when one is in Spain it is one of the things one ought to see.” Let us hope that they do not realise that their example goes to make the task of the Spanish social reformers even more up-hill and heart-breaking than it need be.

I may instance an University professor who was wearing himself out in the endeavour to raise the moral and intellectual standard of his pupils. He himself was educated in England, and had the highest respect for English customs and institutions and for the general code of English honour. He told me that he had lain awake all one night trying to find a reply to his lads when they said: “If the English, whom you hold up to us as an example in so many ways, support the bullfight, there can be no reason why we should condemn it.”

“And meanwhile,” said the professor bitterly, “your English ladies come out of the bullring and tell me that what they have seen there proves us to be a nation of barbarians.”

In this connection it should be remembered that Spaniards of all classes have a great admiration for England and English institutions, which has been recently increased thanks to the popularity of the Queen. One sees this in all directions. English is beginning to replace French as the first foreign language a young Spaniard learns; English games and English fashions are rapidly being introduced; and one of the leaders of the Republican party has proclaimed a democratic Monarchy on English lines to be the best compromise possible under existing conditions in Spain. So that the support which English visitors give to the bullring is probably more influential for harm than that of other foreigners.

Materially, moreover, the bullring operates in a manner prejudicial to the country. All the best land has to be given up to the bulls, which require immense space to keep them from fighting each other. Thus great estates, which, if cultivated, would employ numerous labourers and produce a rich return, are lost to the nation.

In this matter, too, the Church might exercise a good influence and does not. On the contrary, the Clericalist newspapers give at least as much space to reports of the bullfights as do any others, and one of the reproaches levelled against the clergy by the working classes is that they attend these shows disguised in lay dress, and associate with bullfighters, regardless of the prohibition of the Church. In the parish leaflet already quoted, one of the cases of conscience put is “whether it is a sin to attend a bullfight”: to which the answer returned is, “No, it is not.”

Setting aside the question of a moral reform, without which legislative and administrative changes can produce little or no fruit, it may be useful to consider what measures are urgently needed to contribute to the intellectual and material development of the country.

First and foremost the Church should be confined to its spiritual functions, and restrained from active interference in politics, education, and business.

In a circular issued by the Bishop of Madrid in December, 1909, on the duties of Catholics in the elections, it is laid down that the Catholic voter must not vote for a Liberal as against a Catholic, and that a Liberal is, inter alia, “one who refuses adhesion to the propositions and doctrines laid down by the Apostolic See, principally in reference to the relations of the Church to the State” (italics mine).

The attitude of Rome to what it calls “liberalism” is so well known that there is no need to dilate upon it here. It is quite certain that unless and until the Church can be excluded from intervention in the State, no progress will be possible. The struggle will, no doubt, be severe, for Spain is now the last stronghold of the Roman Church; but once the democracy can make its voice effectively heard, the end will not be doubtful.

In education the dominance of the Church is, if possible, more prejudicial, more of an obstacle to progress of the best kind, than it is in other branches of the work of the State, and the clergy in Spain, as elsewhere, are resisting with might and main every attempt to set up schools which are not under their control. A sufficiency of good and well-conducted schools is one of the crying needs of the country; the Clericalists say they are unable to finance even the Catholic schools which already exist, yet the lay schools supported by the party of progress, although trivial in number, are not only virulently attacked, but are made the basis of a campaign against the Crown and the Constitution, and every nerve is strained to rally “good Catholics” to the fight against the spread of education among the poor.

Decentralisation of the machinery of administration is badly needed, because under the present system vexatious and unnecessary delays must occur, even were there every desire for progress on the part of all concerned. But local government cannot be effective, as has already been said, until the Cacique is abolished.

Among what may be called the material elements of progress may be briefly mentioned the need of improved means of communication, especially good roads. Most of the roads which do exist in Spain are very bad, and there are officially stated to be five thousand villages to which there is no road at all—nothing but a track or path, impassable for wheeled vehicles.

Much needs to be done to encourage agriculture, and to introduce improved methods. Systematic irrigation would render fertile hundreds of square miles of land, now sterile for lack of water. Phylloxera is ravaging the vineyards, and a contagious blight is devastating the orange plantations all over the southern provinces. Neither of these plagues can be effectively combated by private enterprise: public aid and public organisation are essential.

The postal service requires to be overhauled, and security taken, which now does not exist, that postal matter shall reach its destination, and that the contents be not stolen en route, as not infrequently happens.

Last, but not least, the conduct of elections must be reformed, so that the working classes may have an effectual, instead of, as now, a merely nominal vote. With a few notable exceptions they distrust their rulers, of whatever party; it should be made possible for them to return to the local councils and to the Cortes men in whom they have confidence, who know what they want, and who will devote themselves with singleness of mind to getting it. The hope for the future of Spain lies in the democracy. The peasantry, from whose ranks the whole of the working classes are more or less directly recruited, are sober, honest, and industrious. They work long hours for low wages without complaint, and employers—English, American, and so on—who come into contact with large numbers of them in the numerous industries established by foreign enterprise in the Peninsula, all speak in the highest terms of them as labourers. In America, too, they are highly valued, and it is said that the men who in the long run prove the most satisfactory and the best able to bear the trying conditions of work on the Panama Canal are the Spanish emigrants, of whom thousands cross the Atlantic every year.

As yet practically no member of this class, no matter what his natural gifts may have been, has ever risen to a position in which he could make his voice heard in the counsels of his nation. Many Spanish peasants have, no doubt, succeeded in Spanish South America, and some of them have come home again to spend their money and their declining years in their native land. I am not aware that such men have been encouraged to play a part in the politics of Spain, although their experience of the outside world would be of the greatest value. But the frequent instances of Spanish peasants rising to affluence abroad show that it is not their own incapacity, but the crushing burdens imposed on them by those in power, which are the cause of the miserable condition of the peasantry at home. When a Spanish peasant gets a chance, he is well able to profit by it.

Spain always seems to me like a great tree which for centuries has been allowed to go unpruned. It is half smothered with branches which bear no fruit, and the top is a mass of decay. Yet the trunk and the roots are sound and strong, so that once the barren wood which saps the life of the tree is cut away, a new and healthy growth will soon replace it. But the longer the difficult and painful process of pruning away the dead wood is delayed, the greater must grow the danger of a storm which will tear up the tree, roots and all.

Still, in spite of all the drags on the wheels of progress, in spite of ignorance, incapacity, and corruption, in spite of all the forces of reaction and all their efforts to keep Spain in the Slough of Despond from which she is struggling to emerge, one may say with Galileo, “e pur si muove.” Some little advance is being made, slight and slow though it be, and among the more thoughtful members of the younger generation one sees signs of a new spirit—an intelligent appreciation of the needs of the country and an honest and sincere resolve to work for their attainment, which cannot fail to spread and to bear fruit in due season. From the older generation nothing is to be hoped, but ere long they will have yielded their places to the young men—university professors, officers in the Army, journalists, and so forth, many of whom have ideas and ideals, and only lack power and opportunity to put them in practice. The little leaven is working, and though as yet it is small in amount and the lump is large, those who wish Spain well need not despair.

“For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light,
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look! the land is bright.”

POSTSCRIPT

While this book was in the press, the Spanish Government took a step, the ultimate consequences of which may be of the utmost moment for the country. In June, 1910, Señor Canalejas resolved to take definite action in the matter of the Religious Orders.

The immediate cause of his determination appears to have been the general discontent created by the numerous cases of clerical corruption and intimidation alleged to have occurred in the recent elections to the Cortes. A great meeting of protest was held at Madrid, in which both Republicans and Socialists took part, and Señor Melquiades Alvarez, the Republican leader, who not many months before had expressed his willingness to compromise with the Monarchists on the lines of a democratic Monarchy like that of England, deliberately went over to the Socialists. This important volte face, coupled with the fact that at the elections Madrid returned an overwhelming majority of Republicans, seems to have spurred Canalejas to action.

This action consisted of a modest Royal Order requiring the fulfilment of an edict of 1902, which compels the registration of all Religious Orders established in the country since that date, and the payment of the industrial tax on the trades they carry on. This was followed by a decree permitting members of other than the State religion to display emblems and notices outside their places of worship, and to hold funeral processions, in accordance with the provision made by the law of the land for liberty of conscience.

These two decrees hardly strike one as revolutionary; but they have been enough to set the whole of the Church party in an uproar; and the Primate, the Archbishop of Toledo, has thrown down the gauntlet, defying the Government to put the decrees in force, on the ground that the Church owes obedience to Rome alone, and that the State has no power to interfere with it. At the moment of writing the Vatican is trying to bully the Government by threatening to break off relations, the Catholic Associations have telegraphed their grief and distress at the outrage inflicted upon the Pope by these Royal Orders, the ladies of the Ultramontane aristocracy have petitioned the Premier to reconsider his determination to destroy the national Church and drag Spain’s religion in the dust, and the whole clerical party are preparing a furious campaign against the Government, which, needless to say, is warmly supported by all the Liberal elements in the country. The working classes are naturally delighted, and several of them have congratulated themselves in my hearing on this excellent result of the King’s marriage.

“He has seen what religious liberty means in England, and that has given him courage to defy the Jesuits. Viva Alfonsito!”

APPENDIX

NOTES ON POLITICIANS AND PERIODICALS

Liberal-Monarchists

When Sagasta died three men were proposed as leaders of the Liberal party, Moret, Montero Rios, and Canalejas, Montero Rios gave way in favour of Moret, in order to secure the unity of the party, but Canalejas preferred to lead a group of his own.

Moret.—Was a Republican until Alfonso XII. was proclaimed. He then joined the Monarchical forces, the road being opened to him and many others by the broadly liberal policy of Sagasta. He is English on the mother’s side.

Montero Rios.—Also was a Republican until the Monarchy was re-established. Then he also adhered to Sagasta, bringing in with him his own group, thenceforth to be known as the Radical wing of the Liberal-Monarchists.

Rafael Gasset.—A staunch supporter of Moret’s policy. He is the author of the great irrigation scheme which is one of the most popular features in Moret’s programme. His enthusiasm for this improvement in the conditions of agriculture is so strong that his opponents have nicknamed him “The Duke of the Reservoirs.” He is one of the strongest of the younger Liberals, and his sincerity and devotion to the interest of the working-classes have won him their confidence and respect.

The policy of the Liberal-Monarchist party is supported by the Sociedad Editorial de España, which publishes three daily papers, all sold at 5 cmes. per copy, or 1 peseta per month:

El Liberal.—This paper has by far the largest circulation of any in Spain. Its political news is edited in Madrid, and telegraphed thence twice daily, for the morning and evening editions, to branch offices at Bilbao, Murcia, Barcelona, and Seville, where the local notes and news are added. Although conducted on Liberal-Monarchical lines, it is tinged with democratic feeling. The Reactionists profess to consider it a dangerous enemy to religion, and label its readers atheists and anarchists. It is universally popular with the working classes.

El Heraldo de Madrid.—Edited and published in the capital on Radical-Monarchical lines. On sale all over the country, but with a comparatively small circulation among the working men outside of Madrid.

El Imparcial.—Edited on Liberal-Monarchical lines in the interest of the working classes, with full reports and articles on public works of every description, trades unions, schemes for social and industrial reform, &c. It is on sale everywhere, and probably has the largest circulation of any Madrid paper among the working classes in the provinces, but does not come near El Liberal in popularity.

The literary style of the writers employed by the Sociedad Editorial is cultivated and refined, the flying of political kites is discouraged, and personal abuse of opponents in politics finds no favour with the directors. The Society is abusively called a “Trust” by the Opposition, and reactionary journals daily publish headlines proclaiming that they do not belong to the “Trust.” As a matter of fact the Sociedad is an ordinary limited liability company, well managed, and paying a good dividend, and partaking in no respect of the evils of the Trust system.

Liberal Democratic Group

Canalejas.—Was a Republican, but maintained his independence, although adhering to Sagasta’s party, by proclaiming himself chief of a group of progressive Liberals with Republican sympathies. The main plank in his programme has always been a direct attack upon the Church and Religious Orders. His policy is supported by the Diario Universal, but it has a small sale and is hardly known by working men outside of Madrid.

The Republican Party

The three most distinguished men in this party—Melquiades Alvarez, Blasco Ibañez and Rodrigo Soriano,—are all celebrated for their literary and oratorical gifts, and enjoy the respect and confidence of the veteran Liberal leaders, Moret and Montero Rios. Their policy may be described as Republican in idea, but democratically Monarchical in practice, and their demands for vigorous measures of reform have materially strengthened the hands of the Liberal-Monarchists.

The organ of this party is El Pais, which, although its sale is very much smaller, has the largest circulation among the working classes after El Liberal. The paper, as might be expected from the literary renown of the leaders who direct it, is extremely well written, the staff including some of the most highly educated Progressives in Spain. It is possible, however, that the standard of intellectuality maintained in its leading articles militates against its success with the people. The numerical strength of the Republicans is small. Thus, the circulation of El Pais being comparatively limited, the Reactionists are not nearly so much afraid of its influence on the country as of that of El Liberal, and indeed seem to treat it almost with indifference. It is sold at the same price as the papers of the Sociedad Editorial.

The Socialist Party

Lerroux, Pablo Iglesias, Nakens.—The Socialists in Spain have a very small following, and that confined to a few of the industrial cities, chiefly in the north. They formed a coalition with the Republicans to secure the rout of the Clericalists at the Municipal Elections of 1909, but the party is disunited, Iglesias and Lerroux seldom coming into line with each other, while neither of them goes so far as Nakens, editor of the Socialist organ El Motin and a violent revolutionary. El Motin has a very small circulation, and the programme of the Socialists has no serious influence in Spanish politics.

The Separatist, Regionalist, and other groups of Catalans exist solely for the political purposes of that province, and play no part in the programme of either of the national parties.

The so-called Anarchist party, of which so much has been heard abroad, is practically non-existent. Their sporadic publications have no genuine circulation and seldom live for over a month.[30]

The Reactionary, Clericalist, or Ultramontane Party

The leader of this party, Maura—for many years a Liberal and the intimate friend of Moret—adopted Conservative principles under Silvela, and on his death was chosen to be leader of the Conservative party. His Liberal proclivities at first influenced him in the direction of reform, and gave him a strong and united following among the true Conservatives. But as time passed he developed so much religious fervour that he has now become recognised as the protagonist of the Religious Orders and the hope of the Church in the rapidly approaching final struggle with the State. Down to July, 1909, Maura was able to hold the Conservative party together, notwithstanding the marked development of reaction in his policy. But after the events at Barcelona the Conservatives proper withdrew their support on his programme of repression, and since his Cabinet fell in October of that year, he has been universally regarded more as the tool of the Ultramontanes than the leader of the Conservative party.

The organ of Maura is La Epoca. It is sold in Madrid at 10 cmes., but is never seen on the bookstalls at any distance from the capital, and can only be obtained in provincial towns by paying three months’ subscription to the Madrid office in advance. Its circulation is exclusively confined to the Clericalist aristocracy and plutocracy, by whom it is subsidised.

The Carlist, Jaimist, or Traditionalist Party

This party, which numbers many of the richest men in Spain among its adherents, besides all the Religious Orders, with their enormous wealth and influence, is directed from the Castle of Frohsdorf by Don Jaime, Duke of Madrid, through persons whom he appoints in every province of Spain. The name brought most frequently before the public in connection with the party, after the Pretender’s own, is that of Llorens, whose work in the Melilla campaign is referred to in Chapter VII. The Pretender has a complete organisation all over Spain, with Caciques in a large number of provincial towns and villages, and is supported by numerous religious associations, clubs, colleges, &c., of a confessedly militant character, but confined to the upper classes.

The leading organs of the Carlists are the Correo Español and the Correo Catalan, with offices in Madrid, Paris, and Barcelona; but practically all the reactionary Press supports the claims of the Pretender more or less openly. The Carlist papers have no sale among the working classes, and can only be obtained outside of Madrid (like La Epoca) by paying three months’ subscriptions in advance.

Among military politicians much in the public eye may be mentioned Generals Luque, Weyler, and Lopez Dominguez, all on the Liberal side, and all strong men, in whom the people feel confidence. Aguilera, twice Alcalde of Madrid under Moret, who has been referred to in Chapter XIII., is highly popular with the poor of Madrid, owing to his consistent kindness to the children, whom he takes under his special protection.

Count Romanones, who engineered the crisis of February, 1910, is credited by the working classes with having large interests in the mines of Beni-bu-Ifrur, and with having schemed to bring about the war in Morocco, in order to put money into his own pockets. This impression, whether well or ill founded, is sufficient to make him cordially hated by them. He is credited with aspiring to the leadership of the Liberal party, but it is hardly probable that his following would prove strong enough to give him that position.

La Cierva, Minister of the Interior in Maura’s Cabinet, obtained an unenviable reputation in 1909, through his share in administering Maura’s policy of repression. Since his leader went out of office La Cierva’s name has hardly been mentioned among the working classes.

The Conservative-Monarchist Party

Dato, Sanchez Toca, and Gonzalez Besada are the three leading dissentients from Maura’s policy of reaction, and now stand for the old Conservative-Monarchical programme of peace and conciliation without sensational reforms. Their organ is the Correspondencia de España, an eight-paged paper, well printed and got up, containing the fullest military intelligence and the best foreign news to be found in the Spanish Press. It has a far larger circulation than any other Conservative or Clericalist paper, and is to be seen on most of the kiosks in large towns. If it were not believed by the people to be subsidised by the party opposed to electoral and social reforms, its influence in the country would doubtless be considerably stronger than it is. At present the working classes do not read it, although no other paper gives nearly as much matter for the price, which is 5 cmes.

INDEX

A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, Z.

Aguilera, Señor, 240
Alcalde, the, 265 note
Alfonso XII., 112
Alfonso XIII., 122-4, 182, 318
All Souls’ Day, observation of, 46;
scandal connected with Masses on, 84-6
Ayuntamiento, the, 265 note; 274

Baptism, 47
Barcelona, effect of riots, 17;
refugees from, 90, 92;
Carlist activities in, 134 ff.;
stories of riots, 165-6;
bombs in, theory of, 181 ff
Beatas, 21
“Bull of the Crusade,” 64
Bullfight, the, 307 ff
Burial, 48, 50-1

Cacique,the 230-3
Canalejas, Señor, 243-6, 317-9
Carlists, alleged plots of, 167, 176;
army, 155-6;
party, 321
“Catholic Associations,” 163
Church, attitude towards people, 31-2;
illegal disposal of property, 80 ff;
unique position of,in Spain, 304
Civil Guard, the, 175, 218 ff
Clergy, children of, 79-80, 106-7;
arming and drilling of, 161, 164
Clerical Press, the, 28, 169, 235, 320-1
Confessional, the, 43, 73 ff
Conscription, consolidates Monarchy, 111;
conditions of exemption, 209;
proposals for alteration, 210
Conservatives, the, 251, 256, 322
Consumo, the, 15, 288
Contribucion industrial, 286
Convent schools, 275
Correo Catalan, the, 151, 172, 243, 321
Correo Español, the, 163, 321
Correspondencia de España, the, 254, 322
Crossing, modes of, 65-7
Cuban War, stories of, 200-3
Customs’ duties, 285

Demonstrations, clerical, 191-4
“          popular, 174

Education, desire for, 15, 33
Ejercito Español, the, 152, 238
Electoral system, 229-33
Employers and employed, relations of, 23 ff
England, misunderstanding of Spanish politics in, 227, 257;
hopes of people from, 277, 318;
admiration of, in Spain, 309

Ferrer, 147-9, 170, 325

Gasset, Señor, 236, 317
Governments, distrusted by working classes, 30

Heraldo de Madrid, the, 187, 229 note, 257, 270, 318
Honesty, 62
Hume, Major Martin, quoted, 133, 228

Illiteracy, 263, 271
Images, belief in, 52-3, 55-8
Imparcial, the, 114, 318
Irrigation scheme, 237

Jaime, Don, of Bourbon, 117, 153-4, 166, 170

Lay schools, the, 169;
clerical campaign against, 190-1, 193
Liberal, the, 35, 172, 294, 317
Llorens, Señor, 152-3, 163, 321
Lottery, national, 298
Luque, General, 238

Madrid, attitude of, towards the South, 26-8
Marriage among working classes, 48-9
Matches, monopoly of, 292
Maura, Señor, 35, 115, 137-8, 144, 150, 203, 234, 245, 251-3, 256, 280, 320
Melquiades Alvarez, Señor, 259, 317, 319
Monopolies, Government, 291-2
Montero Rios, Señor, 242, 317
Moret, Señor, 137, 173, 228, 234, 237, 239, 241-3, 253, 258, 317
Morocco, war in, 200 ff
Morral, 144, 148
Moslems, mixed with Spaniards, 28-9;
traditional feeling against, 207
Municipal elections, 1909, 237

Nuevo Mundo, the, 7

Pais, the, 171, 223, 319
Paz, Infanta Doña, 207
Penitential dress, 64
Penitents, 53
Police, various bodies of, 215 ff
Politics, difficulties of understanding, 228
Popular songs, 142-3
Postal service, 298
Prayers quoted, 67-8
Primo de Rivera, General, 203
Public instruction, system of, 264 ff
Purgatory, popular view of, 44

Queen, the, animus of clergy against, 120;
feeling of working people towards, 121-2, 128;
courage shown by, 182
Queen-Mother, the, 113, 115

Religious Orders, the, change of people’s attitude towards, 17;
positions in Spain illegal, 90;
relations to working classes, 93;
underselling of workpeople by, 94-5, 105;
people ruined by, 97-102;
refusal to help at time of distress, 102;
evasion of taxation by, 295;
measures adopted by Government, 317-8
Republicans, the, 239, 258-60, 317, 319
Reservists, supposed protest against calling out of, 204
Romanones, Count, 240, 322
Royal Family, suppression of news about, during the Maura régime, 116, 123-6

Sanchez Toca, Señor, 254
School supply, facts about, 270
Serenos, the, 217
Socialists, the, 237
Sociedad editorial, the, 139, 171-2, 317
Squilache, Marquesa de, 116-7
Sugar monopoly, 291

Taxation, evasions of, 294
Tobacco monopoly, 291
Tradition, influence of, 16, 145
Truth-telling, 61

Universities, the, 268
Upper classes, general character of, 32; religion of, 40

Vigilancia, the, 217

War Fund, initiated by the Queen, 117 ff, 127;
contributions of workpeople to, 119
Working classes, general character of, 14, 30;
what they read, 34;
religion of, 39 ff

Zaragoza, explosion of bombs at, 188

The Gresham Press
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED
WOKING AND LONDON

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The last edict of expulsion was issued in 1712.

[2] Isabella the Catholic made an order for the expulsion of the unconverted “Moors” in 1501, but a very large number of them, whether nominally Christian or not, remained until driven out by Philip III. After the massacres commanded by Philip II. in Granada, the Moriscos who were expelled from that kingdom did not apparently leave Spain, for two years later an edict was issued for their registration.

[3] What Lecky says about the seventh and following centuries might be applied to the religion of the upper classes in Spain to-day: “It is no exaggeration to say that to give money to the priests was for several centuries the first article of the moral code” (“History of European Morals,” ii. 216).

[4] I know several cases of lads of fourteen or fifteen who return after working from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the fields, to sit over their A B C and pot-hooks until they can keep their eyes open no longer, while the rest of the family look on and encourage the student.

[5] One of the various local terms for what the guide-books call olla podrida—a universal dish in Spain.

[6] Lecky, “History of European Morals,” ii. 213.

[7] Sweet cakes and patisserie, the foundation of which is generally finely grated stale bread.

[8] Two favourite sweetmeats.

[9] From the Basque ama, a mother; applied to the head servant in the house of a priest or other man living alone.

[10] Hume, “Modern Spain,” p. 550.

[11] It is said—although I repeat the statement with all reserve—that there are “parish” doctors employed by the Municipality of Madrid who refuse to prescribe for a dying child unless the mother can show her marriage certificate.

[12] “Modern Spain,” p. 563.

[13] It was stated as a fact that nineteen men in one regiment had been shot for refusing to go into action, and an Ultramontane of my acquaintance, who never reads anything but the newspapers of his own party and never travels ten miles from his own village, solemnly assured me that the tale was true!

[14] I was told at the time that many people in Madrid thought the bomb was thrown on behalf of the Pretender.

[15] The names of the monastery and of all the people concerned were given me, but I refrain for obvious reasons from publishing them.

[16] It is said that the Association of Social Defence promises its working men members a retaining fee of 3 pesetas a day should political exigencies compel them to leave their work at any time, the average labourer’s wages all over the country being from 1.50 to 2 pesetas. It has not been possible to obtain trustworthy information, either as to terms of membership or the actual numbers who have joined the league during the last twelve months, but there is evidence that it has no influence among the working classes generally.

[17] I have been told by an English friend that a Spanish acquaintance of his has, to his knowledge, lately made a substantial sum by selling arms to the Religious Orders.

[18] Most of them had been re-opened after Moret took office in October, 1909, as already mentioned.

[19] This story evidently relates to the early days of the Cuban war.

[20] This is not the only statement of the kind that I have heard.

[21] “Modern Spain,” p. 531.

[22] So clearly is this recognised on all sides, and so impossible does political honesty on the part of the rich appear to Spaniards, that the Heraldo, the leading moderate-Liberal paper, in the course of its comments on the rejection by the English House of Lords of the Budget of 1909, said that if the Lords permitted the people to vote as they pleased, this action on their part would have been justifiable, but that naturally they would take the usual means to secure the suffrages of those over whom they had control, and with the immense wealth at their command would easily influence the elections in the direction they desired.

[23] In Spain not only every city, but every town and nearly every village, has its Ayuntamiento, more or less equivalent to our town or village Council, and its Alcalde, who has a good deal more power than the Mayor of a Corporation.

[24] The peseta is the same as the franc.

[25] The sums set down in the schedules are less than those named. The tax has been increased at different times, and the additions amount in all to about 66 per cent.

[26] The Spanish dollar, value five pesetas, and counted by the poor as twenty reals.

[27] The cuarto was a little over two centimes.

[28] “History of European Morals,” Chap. IV.

[29] In a decaying town of some 15,000 inhabitants, once wealthy and prosperous, two large new buildings have been erected during the last half-century, while on all sides dwelling-houses, great and small, are falling into ruin. These are the Jesuit College and the bullring; and the people say that the one is the parent of the other.

[30] For a full account of the political parties in Spain see “The Backwardness of Spain,” by John Chamberlain. The author has an exhaustive knowledge of the country, and of many phases of society in Spain, but in my opinion he has not informed himself of the mind of the provincial and rural population. This class, if only from their numbers, cannot fail to exercise a strong influence over politics, when once they obtain the right to vote which the Constitution gives them.

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Table of Contents

- SPAIN FROM WITHIN
- PREFATORY NOTE
- CONTENTS
- ILLUSTRATIONS
- INTRODUCTION

- RACIAL AND CLASS DIVISIONS CHAPTER I RACIAL AND CLASS DIVISIONS

- THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE
- CHAPTER II THE RELIGION OF THE PEOPLE
- MORALITY AND CEREMONIAL
- CHAPTER III MORALITY AND CEREMONIAL

- THE CONFESSIONAL AND CHURCH ABUSES CHAPTER IV THE CONFESSIONAL AND CHURCH ABUSES

- THE POOR AND THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS CHAPTER V THE POOR AND THE RELIGIOUS ORDERS

- THE MONARCHY AND THE PEOPLE

- CHAPTER VI THE MONARCHY AND THE PEOPLE

- THE REVIVAL OF CARLISM CHAPTER VII THE REVIVAL OF CARLISM

- THE CHURCH MILITANT CHAPTER VIII THE CHURCH MILITANT

- BARCELONA AND THE LAY SCHOOLS CHAPTER IX BARCELONA AND THE LAY SCHOOLS

- THE ARMY, PAST AND PRESENT
- CHAPTER X THE ARMY, PAST AND PRESENT
- THE POLICE CHAPTER XI THE POLICE
- POLITICS
- CHAPTER XII POLITICS

- POLITICAL PARTIES CHAPTER XIII POLITICAL PARTIES

- EDUCATION
- CHAPTER XIV EDUCATION
- TAXATION
- CHAPTER XV TAXATION

- THE PROCESS OF REGENERATION CHAPTER XVI THE PROCESS OF REGENERATION

- POSTSCRIPT

- APPENDIX NOTES ON POLITICIANS AND PERIODICALS

- Liberal-Monarchists
- Liberal Democratic Group
- The Republican Party
- The Socialist Party

- The Reactionary, Clericalist, or Ultramontane Party

- The Carlist, Jaimist, or Traditionalist Party

- The Conservative-Monarchist Party

- INDEX

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE