Luring the Reader into a Stony Desert--A Duel on the
Carpet--Disappointment of the Special Correspondents--The People
Amuses Itself--How the Ballot Works--A Historic Sitting of the
Congress--Castelar's Great Oration--The Glory of Spain--About Negro
Manumission--Distrust of "Uncle Sam"--Return of Figueras--The
Permanent Committee--A Love-Feast of Politicians--The Writer Orders
Wings.
It may be urged with some show of truth that under the mirage of the
adventurous, I have lured the reader, anxious for the sensational, into
exhausting deviations in the stony desert of politics. I am guilty, and
I am sorry that I shall have to sin again--politics are so ultimately
interwoven with life in Spain. But it must not be imagined that these
accounts of what happened more than a decade ago are no more useful or
interesting than the stale report of the death of Queen Anne. In Spain
history has the trick of literally repeating itself. The country is
split into the same camps still, and occurrences similar to those of
which I treat are certain to be presented to the world anew. The drama
will be the same; the company only will be strange. And the information,
such as it is, which I give now, may furnish the key to much that would
otherwise be hard to unlock when the curtain rings up again.
Before one more error of political errantry, I must tell of a duel which
did not come off, for the sake of its moral. This was how the affair
arose. There was a discussion in the Assembly in reference to an alleged
insurrection in Porto Rico. Señor Padial asked, was it true that the
insurgents had raised cries of "Death to Spain," and demanded the
independence of Porto Rico, and the massacre of the local volunteers?
Several members got up to speak, and one of them, for what reason I
cannot fathom, characterized the question as "a farce unworthy of the
Conservative party." After a little while Señor Ardanay proceeded to
read some documents proving the reality of the disturbances. He was
interrupted by a torrent of voices, and Señor Padial shouted that the
Civil Guards and volunteers of the island had got up the whole row, and
that General Sanz was the author of the farce. General Sanz politely
retorted, "Your worship is wanting in truth." Several honourable
gentlemen sprang to their feet, and asked that Señor Padial's words
should be taken down in writing. And then the Assembly became a
bear-garden. Señor Olavarrieta claimed "la palabra," but the President
would not give him the privilege of speaking. He spoke all the same, and
said, "We shall not allow ourselves to be insulted by those señores,"
pointing to the Porto Rico deputies. The confusion became worse
confounded. The President rang his bell, called "Order," and threatened
to suspend the sitting. General Sanz then rose, looking wicked, and
asked that the words offensive to the Civil Guards and the volunteers
should be taken down in writing. As for what had been said offensive to
himself, he asked nothing; he knew what course to take. In England this
might have meant that the soldier would treat Señor Padial with silent
contempt; in Spain, with my preconceived notions of the pride of blue
blood and the fire of Castile, and all the rest, I took it that it could
only mean "pistols for two and coffee for one." The confession is sad;
but the truth at any price, the truth is so rare under this sky. Sundry
Special Correspondents who had come out to describe the revolution that
would not come off, were cudgelling their brains to discover how they
could assist at this passage of arms, in order that they might render a
full, true, and particular account to the public. The encounter would
have been more diverting than a bull-fight. Opinions were divided as to
whether it was better to go disguised as a hackney coachman or an
apothecary's assistant. I hurried, after dinner, to the Café Fornos, the
great rendezvous of Madrid politicians, to hear the latest details of
the pending affair of honour. It was to come off--no doubt of it; but
when and where, I could not hear. Next morning I read that the
difficulty had been arranged. It may be a satisfaction that the
barbarous "code of honour" has fallen out of fashion in Spain; but it
would be a still greater satisfaction if the practice of gentlemen
giving each other the lie in public were to fall out of fashion also.
The scene was disgraceful, and I am glad to be able to add that most of
the deputies were thoroughly ashamed of it; and in places of public
resort some went so far as to say that they would take their seats no
more in the Assembly. But they were in their places all the same on the
following afternoon. The Congress of Spain is no more mannerly on
occasions than legislatures elsewhere; but the occasions are rare.
My visit to the Café Fornos was not for nothing, after all. There was a
scene there too. A group of low fellows, overheated with wine, entered
about eight o'clock, while the immense hall on the ground-floor was
crowded with Radical deputies, officers, and quiet Madrileños who
frequent it nightly, and commenced bellowing for the Republic after
their hearts--that is to say, the Republic, Federal, Social, and
Uncompromising. The shout was taken up by another group outside, which
blocked up the entrance in the Calle de Alcalá. It was evidently a
premeditated manifestation. A Republican deputy who was present tried to
calm the disorderly crew, but to no purpose. They had come to shout,
and they would have their shout out. Señor Estévanez, the civil
governor, was dining in a room upstairs, but Señor Estévanez did not
leave his repast. When the thirsty and uncompromising federal social
citizens were hoarse they retired. They had effectually succeeded in
annoying the coffee-drinking tyrants who had the impudence to wear
broadcloth, and they withdrew to drain bumpers to their tremendous
exploit elsewhere.
These individuals were all in favour of the "social liquidation." This
cry of the drones had partisans in every citizen with an empty pocket
and a patch on his garments, for it means that the provident shall be
robbed to satisfy the improvident. But nathless these agitators, Spain,
I was told, was likely to be quiet for five or six weeks--that is, quiet
in the Spanish sense, with an insurrection in one stage of heat or
another, smouldering or flaming, in half a dozen provinces. The
elections would be tranquil, with "scrimmages" here and there; they
would not be elections without. The voting is by ballot. Theoretically
the system is faultless, but in practice jugglery is possible, and does
habitually occur. The alcalde has some influence in the matter, so has
the parish priest, so has the nearest large landed proprietor, so has
the local police functionary, and so has the mob. Ballot-boxes have been
broken open or have disappeared mysteriously. And thus it happens that a
Spanish constituency sends in a buff man as its representative by a
crushing majority at one election, and a blue man or a red man by a
crushing majority at the next. The constituency has not changed in the
interval, but the Minister in the Gobernacion, or, as we should call it,
the Home Office, has. There lies the secret.
I pass over small squabbles, which were of daily occurrence at the
Palace of the Congress, to come to the sitting of the 21st March, 1873,
which deserves to be handed down to history. On that day the Bill for
the Abolition of Slavery in Porto Rico was introduced by Castelar, in a
speech over which all Madrid went into raptures. The "inimitable
tribune," as his admirers call him, surpassed himself. He led off in the
usual oratorical style by pretending that he was not going to be
oratorical--"the bench on which he sat was one for actions, not
words"--and then, in the usual oratorical style, he contrived to say so
many words that the official paper next morning was full of them.
His first speech, made when he was but twenty-one, in the year 1854, was
on the very same subject, as he reminded his hearers. The Christian
religion, he said in the course of his remarks, was the religion of the
slave, and the Apocalypse the poem of the slave. Christ was the
descendant of enslaved kings, a bondsman of Roman conquerors. But I must
give up the attempt to follow the "inimitable tribune;" his lengthened
and dazzling chain of eloquence was too elaborate to be picked up link
by link. He was historical, passionate, and poetical by turns, but
always intensely rhetorical, keeping a close watchfulness for effect,
for Señor Castelar does not argue so much as declaim. He had the good
taste to defend the Radical Ministry from the charge of having acted in
favour of emancipation because the influence of the United States was
brought to bear upon it. Such a course, he asserted, would be unworthy
of the dignity and independence of the country.
I must tell you that the way to make Spain recoil from doing an act she
admits to be good and needful is to counsel her to do it--she will not
be advised by others. It would not be Spanish. If a Spaniard has a
notion of getting himself re-vaccinated, take care, if you are a friend
of his, how you talk to him on the subject. If you recommend him to have
the operation performed, he will change his mind at once. He will not be
bidden, he will risk small-pox in preference. It may happen that he will
die, but at all events he will have the satisfaction of having had his
own way.
Señor Castelar flattered the self-love of his countrymen by assuring
them that they were magnanimous of their own free will, and not because
foreigners had advised them to be magnanimous. He next delivered himself
of some tuneful periods about humanity, and then wandered off into a
spoken essay on the behaviour of the great European Powers on this
question of serfdom. He alluded to England as "the least democratic, but
most liberal of nations," and praised Russia for having set Spain the
example of unriveting the shackles of the slave. He apostrophized the
opponents of abolition, telling them that on their heads would fall the
responsibility if the law were not passed, but that he and his
colleagues would be answerable for the consequences if the law were
passed. Then the speaker waxed patriotic, and spoke the stereotyped
sentences on the glory and grandeur of Spain. Why should there be
rivalries between Creoles and Peninsulars--those who were born in the
colonies and those who were born in the mother-country? It was
deplorable. Were they not all of the same race? Was not the blood of the
Cid and of Pelayo careering in all their noble veins, and the spirit of
Spain living in all their generous souls? His peroration was
grandiloquent; he appealed to them to cease their bickerings, to close
up their ranks, and to labour unitedly for the maintenance of order,
authority, and the integrity of the territory, and they would earn the
benediction of history and of conscience, which was much more, for it
was the benediction of God.
At the close of his discourse, which was incontrovertibly a masterpiece,
Señor Castelar was surrounded by numerous colleagues, and warmly
congratulated. His speech established among other welcome things that
the orator-minister was no atheist. His remarks breathed the truest
Christianity. Next it was manifest that Spain, Republican as
Monarchical, would not, without a bitter struggle, cede one inch of
territory over which the national flag floated. Those who were
interested in the retention of slavery in the colonies were the holders
of slave property, and the deputies who had lived there and shaken the
pagoda-tree to some purpose, and who, now that they were back in Spain,
had a grateful recollection of what they owed to slavery. Those
gentlemen predicted that the immediate emancipation of the negro would
be the ruin of the colonies, and would inevitably lead to their loss by
the mother-country. The Ministry of King Amadeus originally brought in
the measure for the abolition of slavery in Porto Rico, preliminary to
the introduction of another to get rid of the system in Cuba. The chief
argument against the measure was that it was due to intriguing on the
part of American politicians, whose object was to smooth the way to the
ultimate incorporation of the Antilles with the United States. The
sincerity of American friendship is suspected by Spaniards. They know
that Uncle Sam has a longing eye on the islands in the Caribbean Sea;
and has already tried to negotiate Spain out of her American
possessions. Spain, recollecting this keenly, mistrusts him. And Señor
Castelar, whilst acquitting his predecessors in office of having acted
at the suggestion of the United States, let it be very plainly
understood that this Republic would fight that other and greater and
aggrandizing Republic to her last man and last dollar, before she would
consent to the abandonment of one square foot of soil. The vested rights
of slave-owners would not suffer completely, for the bill embraced a
proposition to pay them an indemnity equivalent to eighty per cent. of
the value of their live chattels. Forty per cent. of this was to be
guaranteed by the mother-country, and forty by the enfranchised colony,
so that twenty per cent. was the comparatively small pecuniary
sacrifice the inheritors of an odious system would have to make to
conscience.
Whether the manumission of the bondsman in Cuba, which was bound to
come, would hasten the independence of that island--or, what was more
likely, its annexation to the United States--I am not competent to
pronounce. Ultimately, it is the conviction of the wise and experienced
that the Queen of the Antilles must achieve her independence; but it
will be less on account of abolition than for reasons geographical,
climatic, and military. The ocean rolls between Spain and the sunny
cluster of isles, the climate is deadly to the Spanish soldier, and the
Spanish army cannot afford a perpetual depletion.
Nobody in Spain dares to defend slavery as moral, or protest against its
abolition on grounds higher than those of political expediency. The
adversaries of the bill affirmed that gradual abolition would be safer
than immediate abolition, and that the matter could well afford to wait.
The newly-proclaimed Republic had interests of far greater present
importance to attend to, they said; but the philo-negrists retorted that
it was a shame not to free the negro under the Republic, which was based
on the broad principle of freedom to all, without distinction of colour,
and that a beneficent and noble act could not be done too soon. If the
Monarchy had lasted, there could be no denying it, this project of
abolition would have been enacted without fail.
Late in the night, after Castelar had delivered his oration, Señor
Figueras returned from his trip to the provinces. He was met at the
railway-station by groups of friends, personal and political, and
escorted to his residence, where he was serenaded by the band of a
regiment of foot artillery. The night was dark and rainy, which was an
ingratitude to the patriotism of the musicians. If it did not savour of
ill-nature one might be permitted to remark that speeches, however
splendid as specimens of composition from a bench, which the speaker
admits should be one for acts, not words, and midnight clangours of a
brass band under the dripping window-sills of a tired Minister, were
hardly what was needed most and first in the country. But Spain is not
like any place else.
On the 22nd the Assembly sat until seven, when there was a break-up of
two hours for refreshments; after which was held a night sitting (a most
unusual thing), prolonged until half-past one the next morning. This was
the last of that Assembly. The powers of the Cortes, save and excepting
such as were purely legislative, were delegated to a Permanent Committee
of twenty, which was to aid Ministers in their task, until the meeting
of the Constituent Cortes. In the interval between the two sittings this
committee was chosen by the nominating sections of the Radical and
Republican parties respectively, all shades of opinion being represented
upon it. The President of the Assembly, the four Vice-Presidents, and
the four Secretaries, held _ex-officio_ seats on the board. An analysis
of the names of the twenty-nine shows that there were fourteen Radicals,
eight Federals, four Conciliadores (who may be counted with the
Federals), two Conservatives, and an Alfonsist.
This moribund sitting was unique in its unanimity and enthusiasm. The
Bill for the Abolition of Slavery in Porto Rico was passed without a
dissentient voice. There was kissing and clasping of hands, and friendly
hugging all round. Señor Padial and General Sanz, who were anxious to
fight a duel to the death a few days before, met in the Salon de
Conferencias and made up their quarrel. They cemented their
reconciliation with an embrace, and one sentimental Deputy who was
looking on, cried, "May this be an auspicious omen of the union between
Spain and the Antilles!" Señor Figueras promised that the Executive
Power would faithfully see to the maintenance of order during the
elections. Another señor proposed that the act they had accomplished on
the date of the 23rd should be recorded on a marble tablet, to be
erected in the chamber. The proposition was received with cheers; and
truly the act which knocked the chains off the limbs of 35,000 slaves
merited record. The Marquis of Sardoal, who occupied the presidential
throne, prayed God to enlighten the minds of the Government and the
Permanent Committee, and then declared the Assembly dissolved. There
were loud shouts for the "Federal Republic," and just one weak voice for
the "Spanish Republic."
The clouds had blown over. Now was the hour for congratulations. Many
persons who were preparing to send away their families resolved to let
them remain. I had no further occupation in Madrid. A Deputy who had
thirty years' experience of life in the capital told me that this was
the last place in Spain where there was likely to be a disturbance for
the present; but he added, "If you think of going elsewhere, be sure to
give me an address where I can telegraph to you, for something may
always turn up." I had waited nigh five weeks in the expectation of that
something turning up, and at length I began to think I had better seek
fresh fields and take a look at real Spain.