The Burning Question of Spain

I

TO-DAY the history of the world brings Spain to the same crisis as in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella; once more she hesitates between domination and ruin. The Sovereigns, who, having adopted Columbus from Liguria, gave the Americas to Roman civilization and the children of Europe, opened to the unity of Aragon and Castile the kingdoms of the world and their glory. Spain’s own dotage or death was the exchange she made for the mastery of continents. Her constitution fell away from these sorts of sleeping-sickness which spread from the exotic luxuriance of imperialism: megalomania and the loss of enterprising men. In the time of Napoleon she collapsed, and for fifty years after his downfall her story was that of a house divided against itself. Competing royalties, republicans, reactionaries, noble adventurers, unwise priests, and ambitious generals in turn prevented her from finding a succession to either the Hapsburgs or the Bonapartes.

A hundred years ago the throne of Spain was disputed among the factions, first, of the liberal monarch Ferdinand VII and of his successors who finally retained it; second, of the brother of Ferdinand, Don Carlos, who wanted to revive the Salic law in his own favor when Isabella, the grandmother of the present King, was Ferdinand’s only child; third, when Don Carlos had failed, of a party who gave the throne to Amadeo of Savoy, a brother of Humbert of Italy; and fourth, when Amadeo was removed after a few months’ reign, by republicans like Castelar, who were in power when Isabella’s young son, Alfonso XII, returned to the throne in 1875. He had already died before his only son was born, the son reigning since his birth in 1886 as Alfonso XIII.

The present King realizes how Spain, if her spirit revived, might use to glorious advantage the inheritance of her traditions and her language. An example rises before her on the one side with the rise of Italy to a life of sure and certain hope, which grows the more as it is realized. The importance of her language and traditions in countries so rich in resources as Chile, Mexico, or the Argentine, remind her of the part of Britain in a not altogether dissimilar commonwealth of nations of hardly greater promise.

‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’ was the taunt Gauthier flung at Spain. ‘Not Africa, but America!’ is her proud retort, and just after she had lost her last colonies Luis Morote saw something inspiring in the survival from her Empire: ‘Her speech, civilization, art, genius, and racial spirit,’ he wrote, ‘will last forever, and constitute the greater Spain of the planet, the moral and mental country of eighteen nationalities, nearly a whole continent, which, however separate politically, must still for writing and for speech, for song and for love, continue to use the tongue of Castile.’ Language is indeed a link stronger even than blood; and Spanish unifies already a population of a hundred millions.

To what range might the influence of Spain not extend, if to this grand survival she could add the universal civil enterprise of Britain? And might she not add it, if Italy can arise with an American exuberance? The double comparison incites the inheritors of the adopted country of Columbus. She has now had a stable monarchy for fifty years, and much has come with it. On the other hand, her congenital diseases of inertia, of division, of intrigue, of unrest, of wars vainer even than their victories, arrest her growth and threaten to disrupt her altogether. The grand question of her destiny is expressed in the terms of the domestic strain of the second year of her dictatorship.

Spain’s difficulties were those of Italy. It is true she had kept out of the Great War, and so did not have to face either a collapse of the currency or the disillusionment of the people as a whole. But a government incapable of turning to full advantage the changes of modernness in the country — this there was in Spain as there was in Italy. The government in so-called power could not command stable enough majorities to administrate effectively. Lawlessness showed itself during the war in providing oil and shelter for German submarines; after the war in the formation of unions to murder employers, in indiscriminate shooting in Barcelona or Bilbao, in general strikes, in holding up banks and terrorizing juries, in bringing out indecent publications and selling them to students at universities and even to boys at school, in maintaining gambling-dens and playing unlawful games in the taverns and cafés, in bringing in tobacco or spirits without paying customs duty, or even in obtaining a sinecure in a government department at a comfortable salary. When these things can happen, when justice is a question of bribe or terror, trade can hardly be flourishing, and it is not very surprising that, when Italy cured herself of political paralysis by a revolution against parliamentary government, Spain followed a year later — that is to say, on September 13, 1923 — by establishing a dictatorship on the same lines as Mussolini’s. The dictatorship is known as the Directory.

The Director is the Marqués de Estella, more often known as General Primo di Rivera, a nephew of the captain-general or military governor of Madrid who helped to establish the present King’s father, Alfonso XII, on the throne in 1875. From that time Spain had indeed made much progress, but during recent years the difficulties of government in Spain, as in Italy, had brought things to a crisis which threatened to destroy not only the monarchy but the country itself. Not only was the tradition of public service rotten, but education was so backward that Spain would need sixty thousand more schools to put her population on an equal, in this matter, not with Germany, but with Yugoslavia. She suffered, furthermore, from four chief diseases which were ravaging the country, diseases which General Primo di Rivera gave as his reasons for seizing the government: first, the separatist movement in Catalonia; second, the growth of communistic unions and of revolutionary societies; third, a failure to balance either trade or the budget; fourth, the war in Morocco.

II

General Primo di Rivera has not yet found a final solution to any of these problems. The war is an old business — it began when Spain accepted the Rif at the Conference of Algeciras. The Berber tribesmen of the Rif — a hilly chain, with peaks as high as six thousand feet, extending from east of Tetuan to south of Melilla — have been harassing for many a long year the five hundred thousand native inhabitants of Spanish Morocco who speak Spanish and have been for centuries on friendly terms with their conquerors. In these hills of the Rif it is practically impossible to attack the tribesmen, and a guerrilla warfare drags on, draining Spain, as war drains all countries, both of brave men and of good money. The Berber tribesmen, under Abd-el-Krim, were worked up to new attacks after the King had spoken, at the Vatican, of Spain always being ready to fight for the Cross; for after the King’s speech an attack on Spain could be made to look to Moslems like a Holy War. Spain went into the war long years ago without considering what means she had to wage it, or how impossible it is to wage any war without a strong government. And a guerrilla war never finishes. Almost any compromise would be better for Spain than to continue the war. And since the capture of the allied chief, Raisuli, at the beginning of the year, and the speech in which General Primo di Rivera announced his gradual withdrawal, which naturally encouraged the enemy, Spain has in one sense suffered disaster, but in reality she has consolidated her position. And, when all is said, this is not a war on the grand scale. The whole of Spanish Morocco — a little strip of country, with Tetuan as the centre of administration, and Melilla and Ceuta the chief ports — is roughly equal in size to Massachusetts.

The movement in Catalonia is not a new thing either. The danger of insurrections in its capital, Barcelona, goes back to more than two centuries ago, and since then, whatever party gained an advantage, there was trouble in Barcelona, not because it was more backward than the rest of Spain, but because it was wealthier and more progressive. Barcelona is, like Milan in Italy, a capital of industry and commerce. An old town, with an old cathedral and an old market, known to all readers of the Atlantic as the place where Columbus announced his discovery, Barcelona has more than survived the danger of new continents developing on the other side of Spain. It has doubled its population in the last ten years. It is the head of a province, which in its four departments of Gerona, Lerida, Barcelona, and Tarragona — being less than a tenth of Spain — produces more than seven tenths of the industrial output, has seven tenths of the wealth, and pays, therefore, seven tenths of the taxes of the whole country with its forty-nine departments. Rougher than either the French or the other Spaniards in their looks and their manners, the people of Catalonia have a different language, a different character, different customs from the rest of Spain. They are thrifty, industrious, and enterprising; especially hard at a bargain, they are often called the Jews of Spain. They are not merely industrialists in the sense of workers in factories — their agriculture covers the sides of their hills with the silver of the olive, fills their cellars with wine, and enriches their markets with the finest produce of the garden.

And yet they have for two hundred years been in recurring insurrection. Catalonia never quite amalgamated with Aragon, of which it was long a part, and it never was congenial to Castile. Captured several times by the French, it never quite forgot the advantage of being one with the North of the Pyrenees. In 1714 its enthusiasm for Spain was so well under constraint that Philip V deprived it of its privileges. Like Lombardy under the Austrians or Ireland under the English, it never reconciled itself to the change; and the sense of rankling showed itself even more clearly than in Lombardy or Ireland, in disorders, conspiracies, and revolutions. When Don Carlos was competing to disinherit Isabella, when Isabella went into exile, when Amadeo came from Savoy, when the republic was established, Barcelona rose in insurrection. But at the restoration, in 1875, of Isabella’s son, Alfonso XII, it seemed happier. ‘I wish to be king of all the Spaniards,’he had said at Paris on his way to take possession of his kingdom, and he entered it at Barcelona. A deputation met him before he landed, and his talk to them was all of commerce and industry. He was proud, he said, to be Count of Barcelona rather than King of Spain, and as he left Catalonia for Madrid he said he wanted to make all Spain a Barcelona.

Few Spaniards have lived in Barcelona without feeling a sympathy for the claims of Catalonia. And when the Marques de Estella went from his post as Captain-General of Barcelona to be Director at Madrid he sought to give them all possible concessions. Already a great concession had been given to the province in a sort of regional Parliament called the Mancomunidad, which united the councils of the four departments. It was given power over education, communications, and social welfare. It made great advances, the most important of which was that it organized at Barcelona, on really modern lines, a rival to the University, the Instituto di Studios Catalanes, appointing for the most part foreign professors. That is a step which arouses feeling in many countries, sometimes even in America. ‘Aren’t we good enough?’ is a bitter question not easy for tact to answer when better men have been appointed. And the injured pride became a mixture more of fear than of envy when in 1918 the chief Catalan politician, Senor Cambo, pressed for self-government. Self-government is a big step toward independence, and when Senor Cambo’s plea was refused the extremists grew furious. Senor Cambo, finding himself unable to control them, retired over the French border, and waited for a chance to return and moderate. He has since returned.

When the Marques de Estella failed, on account of the nationalism in the capital, to carry out the liberal policy he brought with him from Barcelona, the fury of the Catalans drove him far in the other direction. He dissolved the Mancomunidad which gave Catalonia the means of all her privileges. He closed the Instituto which the Mancomunidad had made so modern and so cosmopolitan. He suppressed the provincial organizations. He forbade the old songs which used to accompany the national dance, the Sardana, because a reference to Spain was often not in any of the words of the songs. He established a rigorous censorship over the newspapers, and for months the Catalan newspaper of Barcelona, Publicitat, appeared every day with a blank in the space of its leading article. The inevitable result was furious indignation. Instead of asking merely for local self-government, or for the restoration of the privileges they enjoyed centuries ago, the younger Catalans began to demand emancipation from Spain altogether. Señor Maciá, who had, owing to the hotheads, displaced Señor Cambo as leader, retired over the French border to Perpignan to organize revolutionaries; the responsible leaders dropped out, the young men took charge, and in a fury of provincial patriotism which generally showed itself in hatred of Spain, as Ireland’s patriotism had sometimes shown itself in hatred of England, the masses of inexperienced partisans — students, clerks, and mill-hands — met in noisy meetings, or talked in wild anger of the madness of being enslaved to Spain. So general was the feeling that little boys in Barcelona would refuse a piece of candy if the paper wrapper was tinged with the scarlet and yellow of the Spanish flag.

All through the autumn and winter of 1924 the difficulties remained, but the repression tended to relax. The appointment as Civil Governor of that courtly general, Milan del Bosch, in place of General Lossada, was a great concession. On March 20, General Primo di Rivera, in an edict containing hundreds of pages, announced his solution of his greatest problem. It shows a statesmanlike spirit. The Mancomunidad is not to be revived, and nothing will be allowed which could be used as an organization to cleave Catalonia from Spain, but the four departments are to be allowed to unite to make their own arrangements about trade and transport. In a word, they will be allowed to use their own skill to develop their trade; they can keep their languages and their customs; they will not be allowed to make their fury into a propaganda for separation or to employ officials who are other than Spaniards. Home rule in any matters which do not menace Spain — that is the Director’s medicine for Catalonia. The extremists have tried to spit it out; the province as a whole has already swallowed it and feels better for it. Catalonia smiles in the summer breezes more freely than in the mild sunshine of her winter. Her people are suiting their temperaments to the charm of their climate.

The only person who was able to cope with the revolutionary societies and their terrorist gangs was General Martinez Anido, who is now working under the Directory. These gangs involve a complicated story, the motives of some being anticlerical, some communist, some international. But their power was so great that at one time they committed twenty-one murders in thirty-six hours, and in a few years five hundred employers were shot, poisoned, or kidnapped. This gives some idea of the power they had before the Directory began to deal with them. Their favorite weapon in Spain as in Italy was the strike; and strikes that hold up trains, paralyze posts and telegraphs, or cut off electricity, are as irritating to the general public as those that arrest work are ruinous to business. The Directory took with these revolutionary secret societies exactly the same line as Mussolini had done. ‘Syndicalism’ is the word the Fascist! of Italy give to their plan of remoulding economic life on the guild system of the Middle Ages. Syndicalism is used in Spain for the secret societies which threatened the existence of both individuals and the established order. The Directory declared it would not tolerate them and handed over one or two murderers to summary execution. There was no more trouble. The situation was for all the world like that of an unruly class in a school. The approach of a disciplinarian reduces it to instant order. The Director’s supreme achievement is to guarantee calm.

In Spain the strength of the Government has been assisted by a very interesting institution of which hardly anything has been heard outside the country. It is a society of civilians, not to attend the sick or bury the dead, like the Misericordia in Italy, but to maintain public order. It is known as the Somaten. The Somaten is in fact the model of the Italian Fasci — groups of coercive authority outside that organized by the Government or the municipality. But the Somaten remain in civilian clothes, though they carry a stick or a revolver. They very soon showed their strength when a soldier seized the dictatorship, and they do under him much what the Fascist! had done under Mussolini. In Spain, as in Italy, parliamentary government had failed; it could not control administration. In each country the king’s government had to be carried on by other means, and the means found was a dictator, assisted by a band of private citizens. So irregular a system depends upon a capable head and a spirit of sanity in the people, and those are difficult to guarantee. But so far it is proving less intolerable than ineffectiveness, and it will remain at least until something better can be suggested. There is no prospect of that yet.

General Primo di Rivera’s last and most complicated trouble is that of finance. Spain’s trade has long been improving. Her exports to America have doubled in the last twenty years, and have increased with all her neighbors. She made a hundred million dollars out of the war. Yet the peseta has declined in value from five to the dollar before the war to seven to the dollar now. The chief reason for this is that the budget failed to balance. The deficit in 1922-1923, before the Directory, was approximately 1,000,000,000 pesetas, or roughly 143,000,000 dollars for a population of not much more than 20,000,000 — a ruinous figure. Much of it, of course, was due to the war in Morocco, from which nothing was being gained. The Director has been able to reduce the deficit by forty per cent. If he could stop the war in Morocco, the great problem should not be difficult. And with sound finance, and the traders free to develop their resources, with Barcelona beside them for an example, Spain should not be unsuccessful. Indeed it is the position of Barcelona which makes it certain that Catalonia will not dig the ditch of a tariff between herself and Spain. She owes her position, first to her being able to supply Spain with textiles, and secondly to her taking a toll from imports and exports. Spain’s resources in minerals, especially copper, in wines not known so far, with the exception of sherry, promise more than she is yet making.

At the present time, trade is not good. In March one of the chief banks of Bilbao failed, the Credito de la Union Miniera, following the failures during the winter of the Bank of Barcelona, the Bank of Vigo, and the Bank of Castile. And though the directors of the Union Miniera are in jail, the failure of banks implies a general commercial strain. One of the reasons is foreign competition, helped by depreciated currencies. The other is America’s tariff wall, which left Almeria last summer with grapes to the value of 50,000,000 pesetas on her hands. America’s commercial treaty with Spain, which expired and was renewed on May 5 for an indefinite period, enables her to bring motor-cars and many other articles into Spain at generally half the regular duties. But America does not, of course, stimulate Spanish trade by a similar concession; and at the present moment Catalonia is particularly suffering through the textile industry.

And, in spite of her position and the immense improvement in her hotels in the last ten years, so that everywhere one can get excellent accommodation for from three to five dollars a day, including food as well as lodging, Spain is not yet making her tourist traffic pay as Italy and Southern France make it pay.

III

But the grandeur of Spain was never exactly due to those things which make for wealth, and therefore power, in the modern world. Only now is she identifying civilization with comfort. An enterprise like that on which Columbus sailed, the introduction of a system of military efficiency into religion like that of the Society of Jesus, a painter of truth like Velasquez or like Goya, a satire like that of Cervantes, a system of religious mysticism like that of Santa Teresa, a story of such exquisite sympathy and delicacy as A alera s Pepita Jiménez, a gorgeous monument like the Escurial, Gothic cathedrals like those at. Seville, Toledo, or Burgos, the city of Segovia, or the cloister at Salamanca, or a collection like the Prado at Madrid, draw year by year thousands to admire the grandeur and the fascination of Spain. But they do not guarantee her success in giving prompt attention to a business order.

Her attractions are wild scenes, grand monuments, gorgeous galleries. A spirit of adventure, a sense of the desert and both the crescent and the Cross, attract many who want something other than the exquisite accords of Italy’s serenity. There is still a sense of novelty in Spain. The peasantry is as sturdy as Italy’s, and has much of the industry and of those unbought graces of life which still linger on in what we call the Latin countries. Life there is still an art, and its daily offices are finely done. But yet a sensation of ineffectiveness returns to us at the thought of restless nights in inns off the beaten track, of the sanitary arrangements of the houses of Toledo, or the rumble of the carriages between Alcoy and Jativa.

Dignity and variety and passion — these are there; and Spain’s greatest men even to-day are known of everywhere: Miguel de Unamuno, General Primo di Rivera, King Alfonso, Senor Blasco Ibáñez, and Cardinal Merry del Val. They represent five great movements or powers in Spain: liberal culture; administrative efficiency; the Monarchy at the head of a great old aristocratic system; extreme eagerness for reform, change, revolution; and, not least among powers in Spain, the Catholic Church.

What are the inherent weaknesses with which they have to cope? A rather low birth-rate, for it is only twenty-one per thousand against Italy’s thirtytwo; but still the population of Spain is steadily increasing. Large tracts of barren soil, for two fifths of the country defies the heroic industry of the Spanish peasant; and this means that: Spain, which in square miles is almost as large as France, is in reality as small as Italy. But, as both Unamuno and Altamira pointed out long since, the country is not receptive enough to the example offered in other countries; the need still remains to harmonize the ideals and genius of Spain with all that is good and sound in modern civilization.

To this plea of Altamira, Ricardo Macías Picavea in Il Problema National, published as long ago as 1900, added a very acute observation. He said that in the Spanish character there were two defects: first, the predominance of passion over will so that the Spaniard prefers imagination to common sense, and takes the idea of doing a thing for having done it, Spain finally becoming the land of ‘to-morrow’; second, the preference of friendship and affection to justice, so that, as we saw, a place could always be found for a friend in need of favor at the cost of someone who was not a friend. The consequence of the first fault was that nothing was done, the consequence of the second was the reward of inefficiency, and finally an absolute corruption of public life. The faults in their original moral valuation are not so very unlovely; apply them to the life of a nation, and they mean its ruin by laziness and intrigue.

Is there then some radical defect in the Latin character, or is there something hostile to progress in the strong influence which the Holy Roman Church still holds over Spain? An institution so varied and so unchanging as that Church, so vast and yet so versatile, cannot explain Spain any more than Spain can explain it. There were times when its life seemed to be incorporated with that of a monarchy like that of Charlemagne or Charles V, but in America its breath is the very spirit of democracy. The tawdriness of its altars is a byword among cultured people, but yet it mastered and made its own the most cultured age the world has ever seen — the age of Michelangelo. In the bracing modernness of New England and in the tropic antiquity of Ceylon it is in our own times daily securing new conquests. Its position is unchallenged in Europe’s three busiest areas — Belgium, the Ruhr, and High Silesia. It cannot explain away the lethargy of Spain.

Yet it is true that Spain clings to Catholicism with a tenacity that hints a very close relation between its life and hers. The priests are everywhere, and their hold is strong. The fervent spirit of Ribera and the warm piety of Murillo, t he holy fame of Saint Francis Xavier or Saint John of the Cross, mingles with the vast and not undisciplined institution which has glorified the Peninsula with churches and pictures which leave in the memory a glory like the flash of jewels, and a fragrance everywhere the same as that of the incensed coolness of the Mosque at Córdoba. This is the institution which Spain represents by the great Cardinal who was for ten years Secretary of State at the Vatican and is now the head of the Holy Office.

A few moments with Cardinal Merry del Val are sufficient to recall all that is great in the history of the Church in Spain — its urbanity, its dignity, its ready sympathy, its profound knowledge, its passionate devotion. But what unites it to the soul of Spain is its scope for intensity. That both gives it its power and explains its difficulty. For in Spain, as sometimes elsewhere, it finds among its servants many who suffer from the human deficiencies of bigoted and conservative natures,and these have been able to exploit its hold over passionate temperaments in the interest of their prejudices. So violent is the prejudice of a certain type of reactionary ecclesiastieism in Spain that fault has been found with King Alfonso for his knowledge of his country and for choosing a Queen who, though the most devout of converts, began life as a member of the Episcopal Church. When it is remembered that the Pope signally honored the Queen by giving her the Order of the Golden Rose, it is seen that the difficulty is due to a few bigots, and must not be confused with the official attitude of the Catholic Church. Catholics and Protestants arc in fact on unusually friendly terms in Spain.

Alike with regard to the Monarchy and to the Church, Vicente Blasco Ibanez shows prejudice at the other extreme; and the illogicalities of the book he has just published, called Alfonso XIII, prove it for the shallow and worthless diatribe it is. It is indeed surprising that a man with all the vigor and the imagination of Senor Ibanez should unite himself with the forces of revolution and use both his fortune and the prestige of his genius to rob his country of the advantages it owes to its courageous, agreeable, enterprising, and liberal sovereign.

More valuable as a critic of affairs, though still more hostile to the King, is Don Miguel de Unamuno. For many years Rector of the University of Salamanca, he has won his reputation as a philosophic thinker. His difficulty is in reconciling the power the Church has to satisfy both the will and the instinct of life, with what he considers the failure of dogmatic theology to satisfy the reason. That is a problem familiar to all modernists. But the peculiarity of Unamuno is that he is more modern than the modernists — the modernists fear the danger of believing too much; the Spanish professor fears still more the danger which comes from another quarter, ‘from seeking to believe with the reason and not with life.’

The problem of Spain, therefore, is not only temperamental, it is intellectual. It is to reconcile the indisputable glory and sanity of her traditions, and the loyalty of her people to their religion, with what is greatest in the modern world. That has not proved impossible in Italy; and let us hope it will not prove impossible in Spain. It requires an eagerness of life which combines the fact of human nature with the highest speculations and desires of which it is capable, and the definite decision in thought and action in which they find expression. Spain provides for this a profound thinker on social problems who is still comparatively young, and who is not yet known as he deserves. He has lived long in London, and has published one book in English — Authority, Liberty, and Function. He is Don Ramiro de Maeztu, and it is an excellent sign that such a man is one of the regular writers for Madrid’s chief newspaper, El Sol. As for the works of Senor de Maeztu, however, they are too profound in their expression to capture the mind of his country. Spain’s charter of freedom from her own inherent faults, from her incapacity to revive the enterprise of her great days, is still the King’s speech to t he Pope. The Spaniards, for all their faults, never failed to leave in all their traces a tradition of Christianity which is still strong; and Spain as a whole still thrills to the King’s declaration that the Cross is the banner of culture and of prosperity, of civilization and of progress. It is only when the people as a whole arc inspired by an ideal of this kind that they will be free from that old weakness explained to them in the Ideario Español by Angel Ganivet, the weakness they owe to a genius who, judging them by himself, sets them a task beyond their power.

Can anyone inspire them so? Will the Directory maintain its strength and its vigor long enough? Will the King arouse the soul of Spain, so that, freeing its intensity from the lethargy of conservatism and bigotry, from the slavery of faction and intrigue, the country will find itself one with reviving Italy, and not with the dwarfed and diseased republic which nestles into its side? Is Spain to share the decrepitude of Portugal or the exuberance of Rome? The issue is obscure, but the question is not less fascinating because we cannot solve it. It gives both to Spain’s old romance and to the complicated questions of her dissimilar provinces a pregnancy of interest in which thrilling visions and halfforgotten dreams keep pressing and mingling their tides with those of the most immediate issues. It makes the children of her enterprise ask an unnatural question: Is she worthy of us? The answer depends on her relation to her own great men.