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

ILLUSTRATIONS

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 ——

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.”