Divisions into Provinces--Ancient Demarcations--Modern
Departments--Population--Revenue--Spanish Stocks.
In the divisions of the Peninsula which are effected by mountains,
rivers, and climate, a leading principle is to be traced throughout, for
it is laid down by the unerring hand of nature. The artificial,
political, and conventional arrangement into kingdoms and provinces is
entirely the work of accident and absence of design.
These provincial divisions were formed by the gradual union of many
smaller and previously independent portions, which have been taken into
Spain as a whole, just as our inconvenient counties constitute the
kingdom of England; for the inconveniences of these results of the ebb
and flow of the different tides in the affairs of man’s dominion--these
boundaries not fixed by the lines and rules of theodolite-armed land
surveyors, use had provided remedies, and long habit had reconciled the
inhabitants to divisions which suited them better than any new
arrangement, however scientifically calculated, according to statistical
and geographical principles.
The French, during their intrusive rule, were horrified at this “chaos
administratif,” this apparent irregularity, and introduced their own
system of _départements_, by which districts were neatly squared out and
people re-arranged, as if Spain were a chess-board and Spaniards mere
pawns--_peones_, or footmen, which this people, calling itself one of
_caballeros_, that is, riders on horses _par excellence_, assuredly is
not: nor, indeed, in this paradise of the church militant, can the moves
of any Spanish bishop or knight be calculated on with mathematical
certainty, since they seldom will take the steps to-morrow which they
did yesterday.
[Sidenote: PROVINCES.]
Accordingly, however specious the theory, it was found to be no easy
matter to carry departementalization out in practice: individuality
laughs at the solemn nonsense of in-door pedants, who would class men
like ferns or shells. The failure in this attempt to remodel ancient
demarcations and recombine antipathetic populations was utter and
complete. No sooner, therefore, had the Duke cleared the Peninsula of
_doctrinaires_ and invaders than the Lion of Castile shook off their
papers from his mane, and reverted like the Italian, on whom the same
experiment was tried, to his own pre-existing divisions, which, however
defective in theory, and unsightly and inconvenient on the map, had from
long habit been found practically to suit better. Recently, in spite of
this experience among other newfangled transpyrenean reforms,
innovations, and botherations, the Peninsula has again been parcelled
out into forty-nine provinces, instead of the former national divisions
of thirteen kingdoms, principalities, and lordships; but long will it be
before these deeply impressed divisions, which have grown with the
growth of the monarchy, and are engraved in the retentive memories of
the people, can be effaced.
Those who are curious in statistical details are referred to the works
of Paez, Antillon, and others, who are considered by Spaniards to be
authorities on vast subjects, which are fitter for a gazetteer or a
handbook than for volumes destined like these for lighter reading; and
assuredly the pages of the respectable Spaniards just named are duller
than the high-roads of Castile, which no tiny rivulet the cheerful
companion of the dusty road ever freshens, no stray flower adorns, no
song of birds gladdens--“dry as the remainder of the biscuit after the
voyage.”
The thirteen divisions have grand and historical names: they belong to
an old and monarchical country, not to a spick and span vulgar
democracy, without title-deeds. They fill the mouth when named, and
conjure up a thousand recollections of the better and more glorious
times of Spain’s palmy power, when there were giants in the land, not
pigmies in Parisian _paletots_, whose only ambition is to ape the
foreigner, and disgrace and denationalize themselves.
[Sidenote: PROVINCES.]
First and foremost _Andalucia_ presents herself, crowned with a
quadruple, not a triple tiara, for the name _los cuatro reinos_, “the
four kingdoms,” is her synonym. They consist of those of Seville,
Cordova, Jaen, and Granada. There is magic and birdlime in the very
letters. Secondly advances the kingdom of _Murcia_, with its
silver-mines, barilla, and palms. Then the gentle kingdom of _Valencia_
appears, all smiles, with fruits and silk. The principality of grim and
truculent _Catalonia_ scowls next on its fair neighbour. Here rises the
smoky factory chimney; here cotton is spun, vice and discontent bred,
and revolutions concocted. The proud and stiff-necked kingdom of
_Arragon_ marches to the west with this Lancashire of Spain, and to the
east with the kingdom of Navarre, which crouches with its green valleys
under the Pyrenees. The three _Basque Provinces_ which abut thereto, are
only called _El Senorio_, “The Lordship,” for the king of all the Spains
is but simple lord of this free highland home of the unconquered
descendants of the aboriginal man of the Peninsula. Here there is much
talk of bullocks and _fueros_, or “privileges;” for when not digging and
delving, these gentlemen by the mere fact of being born here, are
fighting and upholding their good rights by the sword. The empire
province of the _Castiles_ furnishes two coronets to the royal brow; to
wit, that of the older portion, where the young monarchy was nursed, and
that of the newer portion, which was wrested afterwards from the infidel
Moor. The ninth division is desolate _Estremadura_, which has no higher
title than a province, and is peopled by locusts, wandering sheep, pigs,
and here and there by human bipeds. _Leon_, a most time-honoured
kingdom, stretches higher up, with its corn-plains and venerable cities,
now silent as tombs, but in auld lang syne the scenes of mediæval
chivalry and romance. The kingdom of _Gallicia_ and the principality of
the _Asturias_ form the seaboard to the west, and constitute Spain’s
breakwater against the Atlantic.
[Sidenote: POPULATION]
It is not very easy to ascertain the exact population of any country,
much less that of one which does not yet possess the advantages of
public registrars; the people at large, for whom, strange to say, the
pleasant studies of statistics and political economy have small charms,
consider any attempt to number them as boding no good; they have a
well-grounded apprehension of ulterior objects. To “number the people”
was a crime in the East, and many moral and practical difficulties exist
in arriving at a true census of Spain. Thus, while some writers on
statistics hope to flatter the powers that be, by a glowing exaggeration
of national strength, “to boast of which,” says the Duke, “is the
national weakness,” the suspicious _many_, on the other hand, are
disposed to conceal and diminish the truth. We should be always on our
guard when we hear accounts of the past or present population, commerce,
or revenue of Spain. The better classes will magnify them both, for the
credit of their country; the poorer, on the other hand, will appeal _ad
misericordiam_, by representing matters as even worse than they really
are. They never afford any opening, however indirect, to information
which may lead to poll-taxes and conscriptions.
[Sidenote: DIFFERENT RACES.]
The population and the revenue have generally been exaggerated, and all
statements may be much discounted; the present population, at an
approximate calculation, may be taken at about eleven or twelve
millions, with a slow tendency to increase. This is a low figure for so
large a country, and for one which, under the Romans, is said to have
swarmed with inhabitants as busy and industrious as ants; indeed, the
longest period of rest and settled government which this ill-fated land
has ever enjoyed was during the three centuries that the Roman power was
undisputed. The Peninsula is then seldom mentioned by authors; and how
much happiness is inferred by that silence, when the blood-spattered
page of history was chiefly employed to register great calamities,
plagues, pestilences, wars, battles, or the freaks of men, at which
angels weep! Certainly one of the causes which have changed this happy
state of things, has been the numerous and fierce invasions to which
Spain has been exposed; fatal to her has been her gift of beauty and
wealth, which has ever attracted the foreign ravisher and spoiler. The
Goths, to whom a worse name has been given than they deserved in Spain,
were ousted by the Moors, the real and wholesale destroyers; bringing to
the darkling West the luxuries, arts and sciences of the bright East,
they had nothing to learn from the conquered; to them the Goth was no
instructor, as the Roman had been to him; they despised both of their
predecessors, with whose wants and works they had no sympathy, while
they abhorred their creed as idolatrous and polytheistic--down went
altar and image. There was no fair town which they did not destroy;
they exterminated, say their annals, the fowls of the air.
The Gotho-Spaniard in process of time retaliated, and combated the
invader with his own weapons, bettering indeed the destructive lesson
which was taught. The effects of these wars, carried on without treaty,
without quarter, and waged for country and creed, are evident in those
parts of Spain which were their theatre. Thus, vast portions of
Estremadura, the south of Toledo and Andalucia, by nature some of the
richest and most fertile in the world, are now _dehesas y despoblados_,
depopulated wastes, abandoned to the wild bee for his heritage; the
country remains as it was left after the discomfiture of the Moor. The
early chronicles of both Spaniard and Moslem teem with accounts of the
annual forays inflicted on each other, and to which a frontier-district
was always exposed. The object of these border _guerrilla_-warfares was
extinction, _talar, quemar y robar_, to desolate, burn, and rob, to cut
down fruit-trees, to “harry,” to “razzia."[2] The internecine struggle
was that of rival nations and creeds. It was truly Oriental, and such as
Ezekiel, who well knew the Phœnicians, has described: “Go ye after
him through the city and smite; let not your eye have pity, neither have
ye pity; slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children and
women.” The religious duty of smiting the infidel precluded mercy on
both sides alike, for the Christian foray and crusade was the exact
counterpart of the Moslem _algara_ and _algihad_; while, from military
reasons, everything was turned into a desert, in order to create a
frontier Edom of starvation, a defensive glacis, through which no
invading army could pass and live; the “beasts of the field alone
increased.” Nature, thus abandoned, resumed her rights, and has cast off
every trace of former cultivation; and districts the granaries of the
Roman and the Moor, now offer the saddest contrasts to that former
prosperity and industry.
[Sidenote: BUONAPARTE’S INVASION.]
To these horrors succeeded the thinning occasioned by causes of a
bigoted and political nature: the expulsion of the Jews deprived poor
Spain of her bankers, while the final banishment of the Moriscoes, the
remnant of the Moors, robbed the soil of its best and most industrious
agriculturists.
Again, in our time, have the fatal scenes of contending Christian and
Moor been renewed in the struggle for national independence, waged by
Spaniards against the Buonapartist invaders, by whom neither age nor sex
was spared--neither things sacred nor profane; the land is everywhere
scarred with ruins; a few hours’ Vandalism sufficed to undo the works of
ages of piety, wealth, learning and good taste. The French retreat was
worse than their advance: then, infuriated by disgrace and disaster, the
Soults and Massénas vented their spite on the unarmed villagers and
their cottages. But let General Foy describe their progress:--“Ainsi que
la neige précipitée des sommets des Alpes dans les vallons, nos armées
innombrables détruisaient en quelques heures, par leur seul passage, les
ressources de toute une contrée; elles bivouaquaient habituellement, et
à chaque gîte nos soldats démolissaient les maisons bâties depuis un
demi-siècle, pour construire avec les décombres ces longs villages
alignés qui souvent ne devaient durer qu’un jour: au défaut du bois des
forêts les arbres fruitiers, les végétaux précieux, comme le mûrier,
l’olivier, l’oranger, servaient a les réchauffer; les conscrits irrités
à la fois par le besoin et par le danger contractaient _une ivresse
morale_ dont nous ne cherchions pas à les guérir.”
“So France gets drunk with blood to vomit crime,
And fatal ever have her saturnalia been.”
Who can fail to compare this habitual practice of Buonaparte’s legions
with the terrible description in Hosea of the “great people and strong”
who execute the dread judgments of heaven?--“A fire devoureth before
them, and behind them a flame burneth; the land is the garden of Eden
before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness, yea, and nothing
shall escape them.”
[Sidenote: REVENUE.]
No sooner were they beaten out by the Duke, than population began to
spring up again, as the bruised flowerets do when the iron heel of
marching hordes has passed on. Then ensued the civil fratricide wars,
draining the land of its males, from which bleeding Spain has not yet
recovered. Insecurity of property and person will ever prove bars to
marriage and increased population.
Again, a deeper and more permanent curse has steadily operated for the
last two centuries, at which Spanish authors long have not dared to
hint. They have ascribed the depopulation of Estremadura 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 Andalucia
to the similar outpouring 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, and wafts to the uttermost parts of the
sea, on the white wings of her merchant fleets, the blessings of peace,
religion, liberty, order, and civilisation, to disseminate which is the
mission of Great Britain.
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; this all who run may read in her lonely land and
silent towns. But Spain, if the anecdote which 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 presented him to the Virgin,
who forthwith desired him to ask any favours for 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.”
[Sidenote: THE BOLSA.]
The present revenue may be taken at about 12,000,000_l._ or
13,000,000_l._ sterling; but money is compared by Spaniards to oil; a
little will stick to the fingers of those who measure it out; and such
is the robbing and jobbing, the official mystification and peculation,
that it is difficult to get at _facts_ whenever cash is in question. The
revenue, moreover, is badly collected, and at a ruinous per centage, and
at no time during this last century has been sufficient for the national
expenses. Recourse has been had to the desperate experiments of usurious
loans and wholesale confiscations. At one time church pillage and
appropriation was almost the only item in the governmental budget. The
recipients were ready to “prove from Vatel exceedingly well” that the
first duty of a rich clergy was to relieve the necessitous, and the more
when the State was a pauper: croziers are no match for bayonets. This
system necessarily cannot last. Since the reign of Philip II. every act
of dishonesty has been perpetrated. Public securities have been
“repudiated,” interest unpaid, and principal spunged out. No country in
the Old World, or even New drab-coated World, stands lower in financial
discredit. Let all be aware how they embark in Spanish speculations:
however promising in the prospectus, they will, sooner or later, turn
out to be deceptions; and whether they assume the form of loans, lands,
or rails, none are _real_ securities: they are mere castles in the air,
_châteaux en Espagne_: “The earth has bubbles as the water has, and
these are of them.”
For the benefit and information of those who have purchased Iberian
stock, it may be stated that an Exchange, or _Bolsa de Comercio_, was
established at Madrid in 1831. It may be called the _coldest_ spot in
the hot capital, and the _idlest_, since the usual “city article” is
short and sweet, “_sin operaciones_,” or nothing has been bought or
sold. It might be likened to a tomb, with “Here _lies_ Spanish credit”
for its epitaph. If there be a thing which “_La perfide Albion_,” “a
nation of shopkeepers,” dislikes, worse even than a French assignat, it
is a bankrupt. One circumstance is clear, that Castilian _pundonor_, or
point of honour, will rather settle its debts with cold iron and warm
abuse than with gold and thanks.
The Exchange at Madrid was first held at _St. Martin’s_, a saint who
divided his cloak with a supplicant. As comparisons are odious, and bad
examples catching, it has been recently removed to the _Calle del
Desengaño_, the street of “finding out fallacious hopes,” a locality
which the bitten will not deem ill-chosen.
[Sidenote: SPANISH “STOCK."]
As all men in power use their official knowledge in taking advantage of
the turn of the market, the _Bolsa_ divides with the court and army the
moving influence of every _situacion_ or crisis of the moment: clever as
are the ministers of Paris, they are mere tyros when compared to their
colleagues of Madrid in the arts of working the telegraph, gazette, &c.,
and thereby feathering their own nests.
The Stock Exchange is open from ten to three o’clock, where those who
like Spanish funds may buy them as cheap as stinking mackerel; for when
the 3 per cents, of perfidious Albion are at 98, surely Spanish fives at
22 are a tempting investment. The stocks are numerous, and suited to all
tastes and pockets, whether those funded by Aguado, Ardouin, Toreno,
Mendizabal, or Mon, “all honourable men,” and whose punctuality is
_un-remitting_, for in some the principal is consolidated, in others the
interest is deferred; the grand financial object in all having been to
receive as much as possible, and pay back in an inverse ratio--their
leading principle being to bag both principal and interest. As we have
just said, in measuring out money and oil a little will stick to the
cleanest fingers--the Madrid ministers and contractors made fortunes,
and actually “did” the Hebrews of London, as their forefathers spoiled
the Egyptians. But from Philip II. downwards, theologians have never
been wanting in Spain to prove the religious, however painful, duty of
bankruptcy, and particularly in contracts with usurious heretics. The
stranger, when shown over the Madrid bank, had better evince no
impertinent curiosity to see the “Dividend _pay_ office,” as it might
give offence. Whatever be our dear reader’s pursuit in the Peninsula,
let him--
“Neither a borrower nor lender be,
For loan oft loseth both itself and friend.”
Beware of Spanish stock, for in spite of official reports, _documentos_,
and arithmetical mazes, which, intricate as an arabesque pattern, look
well on paper without being intelligible; in spite of ingenious
conversions, fundings of interest, coupons--some active, some passive,
and other repudiatory terms and tenses, the present excepted--the
thimblerig is always the same; and this is the question, since national
credit depends on national good faith and surplus income, how can a
country pay interest on debts, whose revenues have long been, and now
are, miserably insufficient for the ordinary expenses of government? You
cannot get blood from a stone; _ex nihilo nihil fit_.
[Sidenote: PUBLIC DEBT.]
Mr. Macgregor’s report on Spain, a truthful exposition of commercial
ignorance, habitual disregard of treaties and violation of contracts,
describes her public _securities_, past and present. Certainly they had
very imposing names and titles--_Juros Bonos_, _Vales reales_,
_Titulos_, &c.,--much more royal, grand, and poetical than our prosaic
_Consols_; but no oaths can attach real value to dishonoured and
good-for-nothing paper. According to some financiers, the public debts
of Spain, previously to 1808, amounted to 83,763,966_l._, which have
since been increased to 279,083,089_l._, farthings omitted, for we like
to be accurate. This possibly may be exaggerated, for the government
will give no information as to its own peculation and mismanagement:
according to Mr. Henderson, 78,649,675_l._ of this debt is due to
English creditors alone, and we wish they may get it, when he gets to
Madrid. In the time of James I., Mr. Howell was sent there on much such
an errand; and when he left it, his “pile of unredressed claims was
higher than himself.” At all events, Spain is over head and ears in
debt, and irremediably insolvent. And yet few countries, if we regard
the fertility of her soil, her golden possessions at home and abroad,
her frugal temperate population, ought to have been less embarrassed;
but Heaven has granted her every blessing, except a good and honest
government. It is either a bully or a craven: satisfaction in
twenty-four hours _à la Bresson_, or a line-of-battle ship off
Malaga--Cromwell’s receipt--is the only argument which these semi-Moors
understand: conciliatory language is held to be weakness: you may obtain
at once from their fears what never will be granted by their sense of
justice.
[Sidenote: TRAVELLING IN SPAIN.]