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

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.