DURING my stay in CoruÑa I read an article in one of the local papers[193] on a new Agricultural Syndicate that was being formed there with the object of improving the methods of agriculture employed by the peasants, and of teaching the ignorant how to get more profit out of their soil; in short, with the object of making the people happier and more prosperous upon their own little farms, and putting an end to “the bleeding of that terrible wound that is exhausting Galicia”—emigration. The writer of the article pointed out that the priests did no good by going round to the villages and telling the people to work harder; what was wanted was education, a practical training, and an intelligent appreciation of the possibilities of their wonderfully fertile soil.

Week after week I read in the papers and heard on all sides that young men were emigrating in numbers to South America from every part of the province. Local writers alluded bitterly to this emigration as “the only flourishing industry in the province.”

But emigration is not a new, if it is a flourishing industry. Galicia has been steadily drained of the flower of its youth for many a long year. In 1885, SeÑor Ricardo Mella y Cea quoted statistics to the effect that twenty thousand Gallegans emigrated annually to South America, and that of these no less than three-fourths emigrated clandestinely, because their age subjected them otherwise to compulsory military service. In those days Gallegans were also emigrating to other parts of Spain, and to Portugal as well. SeÑor Mella y Cea attributed this emigration, in the first place, to an excess of population, and to an excessive taxation of the land owned by the peasants. Many emigrated to escape conscription. Others who would gladly buy a strip of land and settle down at home were met by insurmountable difficulties. It was then, as it is now, almost impossible to buy small plots of land in Galicia; monopolisation and subdivision of the plots were ruining all but the wealthy.

Twenty-two years have passed since SeÑor Mella y Cea took up his pen on behalf of the peasants of Galicia, but their condition can hardly be said to have improved. Heavy taxes still ruin those who are powerless to pay them. State loans to agriculturists are as yet unknown, and co-operative credit societies are only a dream of the future. Capital is monopolised by the few, and in the absence of credit banks the production of the soil is checked. The difficulty is, as Prudhon pointed out, to know how to enable the greatest possible number of people to produce and consume the greatest possible amount. SeÑor Mella y Cea did not think that emigration could be truly beneficial to any country in the long run, because, by its very existence, it reveals a state of things that is not satisfactory; it reveals, but it in no way helps to correct or remedy, what is wrong. Many emigrate because they find themselves forced to choose between death and emigration. And who has a right to decide for such people which of the two evils they shall choose?

Every man has a perfect right to abandon the country in which his means of existence cannot be guaranteed. Emigration is, after all, a lesser evil than starvation; but, alas! it is not as a rule the most necessitous who emigrate, but the most energetic, the most ambitious, the most capable. We have only to turn our eyes in the direction of Ireland to see this truth exemplified. Norway is another country that complains bitterly of the emigration of her most stalwart sons.[194] The man who is worth his salt does not leave without regret, without sorrow, the land of his birth; nearly all who go cherish the hope that they may some day return. It is not en masse, like the Tartars described by De Quincey, but drop by drop, that the country’s life-blood ebbs away. “Emigration is a poison which prolongs our life upon the borders of the tomb.” No, it can never be favourable to Galicia, it can never be anything better than a harmful alternative. “At any rate,” wrote the above-quoted writer, “if Gallegans must emigrate, let them choose South America—a country where men are wanted, where there is room for all. When they emigrated to other parts of Spain, they only took the bread from other mouths to put it in their own. South America is the land of the future; it will leave Europe behind as surely as Europe did Asia.”

And truly the economical progress that has been made during recent years by the Argentine Republic alone is more than surprising. Prodigious progress has been made in that country,[195] which, with its two inhabitants to the square mile, occupies the first rank among all the South American nations as regards its economic activity. The greater part of the Republic is situated within the temperate zone À l’extrÉmetÉ mÉridional de l’AmÉrique du Sud. It is divided into fourteen provinces and ten territories, an extent of 2,950,520 square kilometres, with a total population of 5,672,191. With the same density as that with which Germany is populated, the Argentine Republic could accommodate three hundred million inhabitants. The emigrants thither in

The cultivable lands can be cultivated as soon as the emigrants take possession of them. There are 104,300,000 hectares available. Railways are in course of construction. Wool and frozen mutton are two of the principal exports.

Of every twenty-five Gallegans who emigrate to South America, twenty are usually simple villagers from mountain villages, and the remaining five are young men from the towns who have received a fairly good education. The twenty villagers will live in South America as simply as they have been accustomed to live from their childhood, earning, let us say, five pesetas a day; they will put by four, and live on one, and at the end of each year they invest the little sum which has accrued, and it brings them in some fifty per cent.: thus, after a few years, they find themselves in comfortable circumstances, and soon they are comparatively rich men. But the five town-bred youths, on the contrary, having been accustomed to more expensive living and better clothes at home, continue to require the same luxuries abroad: they find themselves compelled to use up every penny of the five pesetas they earn in a day, and, having nothing to put by, they do not grow rich. The twenty villagers are quite content with vegetable soups, maize bread, no beverage but water, and simple pleasures that cost them nothing, but the five town-bred men would be miserable on such fare.

Land is given to the emigrants on their arrival, and all the necessary implements are supplied to them by Government on a five years’ hire system. The soil is so rich that no manuring is wanted, and it can be sown fourteen years in succession without need of rest. The Government of Chili is so desirous of increasing its industrial and agricultural population, that it gives the peasants of Galicia their passages free to Valparaiso, and in order to get the people to go it employs agents to talk to them and persuade them to embark. The agents get a commission on every passenger they book. Formerly it was only the men who emigrated, but now it is becoming quite a common thing for their wives and children to accompany them.

One morning I took a walk outside the town of Santiago beside a stream where several women were washing clothes at a public wash-shelter, with stone slabs along the banks, on which to rub their clothes. They were on their knees, and with sleeves up above the elbow, energetically kneading away at the linen they had brought with them. I stood beside them, silently listening to their conversation.

First Woman: “Yes, he went to Buenos Ayres.”

Second Woman: “How did he like it?”

First Woman: “Oh, he found that if you wanted to eat you had to work, just the same as here.”

Second Woman: “Clearly.”

First Woman: “And he felt dreadfully lonely so far away from all his people. Yes, he found that what was bad here is bad there, and so he made up his mind to come back here again.”

Second Woman: “Of course.”

First Woman: “Of course.”

Among five thousand Gallegan peasants it would be difficult to find one who was not a proprietor—who did not own a little cottage and a little plot of ground. One result of this is that Socialists are also extremely rare in Galicia. In Andalusia, on the contrary, the land is all owned by a few rich landlords, and that province consequently swarms with Socialists. Many Italians also emigrate to South America, and there are spots there where the population is an equal mixture of Italians and Spaniards. This is particularly the case in Ecuador, where the mixture of the two peoples has already produced a new dialect, and the inhabitants are unconscious that the words they use are drawn from two languages. As I have said, in every town I visited in Galicia, without an exception, I saw notices on the street walls tempting the people to emigrate. During a drive from Noya to Santiago we passed on the road more than two hundred youths who had come down from the mountain villages to seek for work; each carried a hoe across his shoulder, and on it was slung a handkerchief containing his worldly goods. Here and there we saw a young man resting beneath some shady tree, a sort of Dick Whittington who, if he does not find work in Galicia, will emigrate, make a fortune, and perhaps return to buy ground and settle in Galicia, and become eventually a public benefactor to his native land. But, as a poor woman in the neighbourhood of Pontevedra told me, though they do make money quicker in South America than in Galicia, a large proportion of them suffer from the change of climate, and, what is more, they too often acquire the expensive habits and extravagant ways which counterbalance other advantages. “Many who have come back,” the woman told me, “say that, after all, there is no country in the world like Spain, for health and good climate and productiveness of the soil.”

Although the climate and soil of Galicia are the best in Spain, it is mainly from Galicia that the emigration takes place. A small proportion of Spaniards from south of the Peninsula emigrate annually to Morocco, where most of them keep the idle habits of their old home, standing about at street corners from morning to night. Some travellers attribute the innate laziness of the Spaniards to the effect of their brilliant sunshine. Even the energetic Borrow, when he was in Seville, wrote: “I lived in the greatest retirement during the whole time that I passed at Seville, spending the greater part of each day in study, or in that half-dreaming state of inactivity which is the natural effect of the influence of a warm climate.”

It has sometimes been stated that the Spaniard is too proud a fellow to work hard in his own country among his own people, but that once he finds himself in a new country in the midst of strangers he will work as well as any fellow in the world. However that may be, it is undoubtedly a fact that the Gallegan wakes up wonderfully in South America, and when he returns home in comfortable circumstances he is loud in his expressions of dissatisfaction at the stagnation and lack of progress so patent in Galicia. Ford, writing in the fifties of the nineteenth century, said, with regard to emigration: “They have ascribed the depopulation of Estremadura (the province to the south of Galicia) to the swarm of colonist adventurers and emigrants who departed from this province of Cortes and Pizarro to seek for fortune in the new world of gold and silver; and have attributed the similar want of inhabitants in Andalusia to the similar outpourings from Cadiz which, with Seville, engrossed the traffic of the Americas. But colonisation never thins a vigorous, well-conditioned mother-state—witness the rapid and daily increase of population in our own island, which, like Tyre of old, is ever sending forth her outpouring myriads.... The real permanent and standing cause of Spain’s thinly peopled state, want of cultivation, and abomination of desolation, is bad government, civil and religious.... But Spain, if the anecdote her children love to tell be true, will never be able to remove the incubus of this fertile origin of every evil. When Ferdinand III., captured Seville and died, being a saint he escaped purgatory, and Santiago (St. James) presented him to the Virgin, who forthwith desired him to ask any favours for his beloved Spain. The monarch petitioned for oil, wine, and corn—conceded;—for sunny skies, brave men, and pretty women—allowed;—for cigars, relics, garlic, and bulls—by all means;—for a good government;—‘Nay, nay,’ said the Virgin, ‘that never can be granted; for, were it bestowed, not an angel would remain a day longer in heaven.’”

Galicia is a province where railways have preceded roads, and where automobiles have preceded railways. There are towns in Galicia that are decaying for want of roads by which they can carry on commerce with their neighbours. All the water used in CoruÑa has to be carried by women from the fountains, and the town waterworks are only now in course of construction.

Aguiar speaks of the strong nomadic instinct of the ancient Celts as being inherited by the Gallegan people—and certainly the Irish Celts are addicted to emigration. As regards education—of the various provinces in Spain, Galicia can boast of having the best educated lower classes. Recently, when soldiers were being levied for the Spanish army, it was found that ninety per cent. of the Gallegans could read, that five per cent. could read but not write, and five could do neither; whereas in Castille, fifty per cent. could read and write, and fifty could do neither; and in Andalusia only ten per cent. could read and write, while ninety could do neither.

Yet almost every writer on Galicia from Strabo onward speaks of the stupidity of its inhabitants! Yes, the idea that the Gallegans are a stupid people is quite classic. “The Romans,” says SeÑor Eladio Oviedo, “thought them stupid because they would not submit, and were the stubbornest of all the barbarians that Rome attempted to conquer. Even Lope de Vega repeated this classic error—and we have it direct from the classic writers of the sixteenth century.” Aguiar indignantly refutes the belief, which was very widespread all over Spain in his day. He is indignant with Morales for saying that one reason why the body of St. James was lost for seven hundred years was the crass stupidity of the Gallegans—calling it an atrocious insult, and remarking that the page in question ought to be publicly burned.

Aguiar relates the following story which was current all over Spain in 1836, as an example of Gallegan dulness. “A sick man died, and the doctor who had been attending him having pronounced him to be dead, he was carried by his comrades in an open coffin to the cemetery. On the way the corpse moved and showed unmistakable signs of life, then, to the astonishment of the coffin bearers, sat up and cried, ‘Good heavens, where on earth are you taking me?’

“‘To the cemetery,’ replied his friends.

“‘But if I am not dead?’ cried the poor fellow.

“‘You must be dead, because the doctor says so,’ was the reply, and on went the procession.”

There appeared in the year 1902 a little book on the subject of Gallegan emigration by SeÑor Valdes Failde, with a preface by Don Antonio CerviÑo, a Canon of Tuy, whose acquaintance I made during my stay in that town. Both these gentlemen are confident that the emigration which is going on is seriously debilitating the country, and if not checked will be disastrous for the State. “Galicia,” says CerviÑo, “is losing every year the healthiest and most robust of her children.”

The sad spectacle which so many of the Gallegan villages offer to those who see below the surface, and have an eye to the future, is indeed a sad one. The fields are worked by women, the carts are driven by women, the seed is sown by women,—everything, in short, is done by women. But where are the men? They have gone to seek their fortunes on the other side of the Atlantic. Some say it is a spirit of adventure inherent in their Celtic blood which carries the men away; others, we have seen, put it down to the density of the population. But if you ask the women, they will tell you, as they told me, that it is the multitude of taxes.

Certainly all these things have to do with the increase of emigration, but there are other causes which must also receive our consideration. The people do not know how to deal with what they have, they are wofully ignorant of the most elementary rules of agriculture, and they have no one to teach them. If Galicia were a province of Japan, it would soon have a thriving agricultural college in its midst, and the men, however poor, would have a chance of learning what they need so much to know. There would be a free library from which books could be borrowed by all who could read, and fresh hope and energy would stir the people’s minds.

SeÑor Failde complains of the absolute disunion of agriculture from the home industries, of the evil effect of usury, of the immorality of the people, and of the excessive division of territorial property. He suggests that usury might be suppressed by law, and urges that the taxes on food stuffs should be removed. He also wishes to see those heartless agents, who, to fill their own pockets, tempt the people to emigrate prosecuted and punished. Further, he would like to see wholesome literature that would show the people the evils of emigration widely distributed among them. This writer says that density of population is not one of the causes of Gallegan emigration, for the population of Galicia is not dense: this he proceeds to prove by statistics. Finally he tells us that we shall find in a volume of poems by Rosalia Castro, called Follas Novas, a masterly study of the principal causes of Gallegan emigration.

The potato disease in 1845 led to the emigration of a million Irish to the United States within the space of five years. Potatoes are also a staple food in Galicia. Yet when they were first introduced, the people, in their ignorance, refused point blank to grow them. There is hardly a family in Galicia, however poor, that does not possess at least one cow. When the animal begins to grow old they fatten it with maize and potatoes, and sell it to the butcher. The extreme humidity of the climate produces such abundant pasture that the keep of cattle amounts to very little. The people of Galicia have been cattle breeders from time immemorial,—in fact, this was until the last century the popular industry of the province, and many hundred head of cattle were annually exported from CoruÑa to London. The Count of Campomanes, in a lecture on the subject in the thirties of last century, spoke of the Gallegans as model cattle breeders.[196] Why has this industry died out? Failde attributes its decline to the fact that the United States now export such fabulous quantities of fresh, salted, and tinned meat into Great Britain, and sell them at the lowest possible prices, that British industries of that class are no longer a paying concern. It is more than probable that if the British Government were to put a small tax on all American imports of that nature, England would again preserve her own beef, and be glad once more to trade in live cattle with Galicia. Why should Chicago workmen pickle beef for English tables, while Englishmen parade our streets for want of employment, and Gallegan cattle breeders emigrate to South America to evade starvation? Portugal has recently put a prohibitive tax of fourteen pesetas per head on all cattle imported into that country from Spain, and a period of renewed depression has resulted in Galicia, for even half that sum would exclude the poor Gallegan peasants from the market.

In central Galicia it is customary for all the peasants to breed mules. At the age of a year and a half they used, formerly, to sell the female for about 12,000 reals, and the male for half that price. But mules are now being introduced from France, and they are also being extensively bred in Andalusia and Estremadura, so that this industry has been killed in Galicia.

The long rains of this most rainy province impose long hours of idleness on peasant labourers, and SeÑor Failde suggests that these hours might be usefully and beneficially employed in factories, but there are none: there are practically no factories in Galicia beyond a few small ones for salting fish and tanning leather. The land being divided into very small holdings, numerous families are out of work half the year, and the products of their other half-year’s work stagnates for want of proper roads and means of transport to favourable markets. Many of the peasants actually feed their pigs with milk, when they might be making butter to rival that of Holland, Switzerland, or Denmark!

Galicia is a province peculiarly adapted to the cultivation of the vine, but each peasant makes his own wine from his own grapes, and there is no wine-making industry. Beetroot grows there to perfection, but there are no sugar factories. Salmon trout are so plentiful in many parts that they are almost given away, and cartloads of sardines are used by the peasants as manure for their fields.

A close union of agriculture and industrial labour would, in the opinion of SeÑor Failde, form a solution to the whole problem of Gallegan emigration. This is not a new suggestion; Le Play put it forward long ago in his study of the working classes of Europe.

SeÑor Failde has a sorry tale to unfold as to the immorality of Gallegan peasants, but I have heard equally serious allegations brought against the Presbyterian crofters of western Scotland by people dwelling among them. Illegitimate births are, we hear, on the increase in Galicia. SeÑor Failde assures us that quite fifty per cent of the young men who emigrate from Galicia to South America are illegitimate children, and youths who go to hide their dishonour beyond the sea. The village festivals and country fairs are centres of corruption, however poetically they may present themselves to foreigners.

Usury is almost as rampant among the Gallegans as it is among the peasants of Russia, and it hides itself under the most varied forms. Not only does this evil despoil the poor at home, it even accompanies them in their emigration, for the very agents who make a living out of enticing the wretched fellows to embark are usurers of the worst kind; their agents make special efforts to persuade those who are liable to military service to escape the duty that their country imposes upon them, because they know that for every man persuaded to emigrate they will be well remunerated.