SPAIN AND HER COLONIES.
Although the present King of Spain, Alfonso XIII, is the
great–great–grandson of Charles IV, Don Carlos V, the “pretender,”
is also a great–grandson of that monarch, and has probably a more
strictly legitimate claim to the throne than its occupant. Yet again,
the mother of Alfonso XIII, the Queen–Regent Christina, although
frequently alluded to by some of her subjects as “that Hapsburg woman,”
can claim an unbroken line of descent from Isabella and Ferdinand,
through Ferdinand I, second son of “Juana Loca” and Philip of Burgundy.
Thus the ancestry of his maternal parent may be said to legitimize
this titular King of Spain, while his posthumous birth “has excited a
feeling of pitying loyalty which may help to secure the Bourbon dynasty
in the last kingdom which is left to it.”[1]
Spain, under the regency, has been governed by a constitutional
monarchy, which was proclaimed in 1876. By its Constitution, the king
is inviolable; he is the executive, and the power to make laws is
vested in him and the Cortes, which comprises a senate and a congress,
coequal in authority. The senators are of three classes: First, those
by their own right, as grandees of the kingdom, privileged through
their titles and possessions; in the second place, those nominated by
the Crown; in the third, those elected by the communal and provincial
states, the church, universities, etc. Congress is composed of
deputies, at the rate of one to every fifty thousand in the population;
though since 1878 Cuba has been entitled to one in every forty thousand
of free inhabitants paying taxes to the amount of twenty–five dollars
annually.
The whole country is, or should be, represented in the legislative
power, and by the Constitution mutual checks are placed upon both king
and Cortes; for while the former issues his decrees, yet they must be
countersigned by one of his ministers, and he can not marry without
their approval. Further details of government are divided amongst the
ministers—of war, marine, agriculture, commerce, public works, justice,
finance, colonies, foreign affairs, and a president of the council.
Thus, while the king might be morally responsible for an unpopular law,
yet he could not be held accountable through his inviolability, and
the odium of it would fall upon the ministers of his appointing, who
might placate popular resentment by resigning. This explanation will
account for the frequent changes in the ministry, not only during the
reign of Alfonso XII, but under the regency. After the death of Alfonso
XII, and after the queen regent had taken the oath of allegiance to
the Constitution, a ministry was formed under the leadership of the
great Liberal, Señor Sagasta, to whom the Conservative Canovas promised
his support, as well as the Republican Castelar. Beneath the shadow
of their great calamity, all parties nobly rallied to the support of
the queen with a loyalty which was, if anything, intensified by the
birth of the infant Alfonso XIII, on May 17, 1886. But in September of
that year a revolt broke out under General Villafranca, in which ten
thousand men were more or less implicated, and which was suppressed
only after great exertions on the part of the loyal troops. The
premier, Sagasta, had pledged himself to reforms of many kinds, but he
had the greatest difficulty in redeeming them without the support of
the Government officials, who were as corrupt as they were numerous;
for, since the times when Spain owned vast colonial possessions, there
had always been a corrupt official class revelling in the uncounted
millions that overflowed from the colonial treasury. Even so late as
1888 it was estimated that nearly three million dollars were embezzled
during that year by civil employees, and thus the annual deficit was
vastly enhanced.
So, Liberal and Conservative ministries alternated every little while,
sometimes Canovas being in power, and again Sagasta. The position of
prime minister to the regency was at best a thankless task, and only
the highest patriotism could induce one to accept its onerous duties.
In 1893, for instance, Señor Sagasta was stoned by a mob at San
Sebastian; and in 1896, on the 7th of June, that upright and patriotic
statesman, Señor A. Canovas del Castillo, was assassinated by an
Italian anarchist; at the same time, other anarchists were attempting
to excite a revolution by means of bombs and dynamite. The trivial
pretexts upon which a ministry might be overthrown are illustrated in
an incident of the queen regent’s journey from Madrid to Valencia on
matters of state. She intrusted her nominal powers to the Infanta
Isabella, as also the military watchword; but the latter concluded
that she would take a little journey, and she in turn informed the
military governor, General Campos, that the “watchword” would be
given him at the proper time by her sister Eulalia. Thereupon General
Campos announced that, inasmuch as Eulalia was married to the Duc de
Montpensier, who held only the military rank of captain, he, a general,
could not, of course, receive the countersign from a subordinate! The
Minister of War being appealed to, General Campos resigned, and the
affair was not concluded until after the resignation of the entire
ministry, and Premier Sagasta had twice surrounded himself with a
new body of advisers. It would seem, indeed, that etiquette, not
patriotism, was paramount at the court of Spain! Next to etiquette,
superstition perhaps holds rank; for quite recently the bones of a
thirteenth–century saint were carried through the streets of Madrid,
followed by a procession of eight hundred priests, in order that a
threatened drought might be averted and the war with Cuba concluded.
* * * * *
At the beginning of the year 1898 Spain’s colonial possessions in
America comprised Cuba and Puerto Rico, the former with an area
of about 45,000 square miles, and a population then estimated at
1,600,000; the latter, about 3,600 square miles in area, and with
813,000 inhabitants. In Asia, the Philippine Islands, about 2,000 in
number, 114,300 square miles in area, and with a population of about
8,000,000; the Carolines and Palaos, 560 square miles in area, and
36,000 population; the Sulu Islands, 950 square miles, and 75,000
inhabitants; and the Marianne or Ladrone Islands, 420 square miles in
area, and with 10,000 population—a total of 164,830 square miles, and
10,521,000 people. In Africa and off its west coast, several small
colonies, aggregating 3,650 miles in area, and 461,000 population. A
grand total in America, Asia, and Africa of about 168,480 square miles,
and 10,982,000 population. Thus, notwithstanding her enormous losses in
the past, Spain still held foreign possessions, at the opening of 1898,
with an aggregate area nearly seven–eighths that of the mother country,
and a population more than half as large.
Three centuries and more ago Spain swayed the world, the possessions
pertaining to her great empire being vaster than those to–day
controlled by Great Britain. Her losses began near the close of the
sixteenth century, under Philip II, when her North African provinces
slipped away; under Philip III she lost Naples, Sicily, and Burgundy;
early in the seventeenth century she lost the Netherlands; a little
later, the rich Spice Islands of the East; in 1640, Portugal; in 1659,
the Pyrenean provinces of France; in 1704 Gibraltar fell into British
hands, and has been retained by Britain ever since; in 1800 Louisiana
was ceded to France, and that vast territory was forever lost when it
was sold by Bonaparte to the United States in 1803. The first quarter
of the nineteenth century saw the severance from Spain of all her South
American colonies, Central America, Mexico, and the Floridas; the
year before its close she lost her last remaining islands in the West
Indies—Cuba and Puerto Rico; and in Asia, the Philippines and the Sulus.
Rapidly reviewing the barbarous colonial policy of Spain—a policy
which has been consistently cruel and rapacious ever since it was
inaugurated in the time of Ferdinand and Isabella—the only wonder is
that she so long retained such vast and distant possessions, separated
from the governing country by broad oceans, and containing peoples
so numerous and dissimilar. The first large island discovered by
Columbus, which still retains its native name of Cuba, was inhabited by
Indians of gentle nature, courteous and kind. They were numerous also,
and cultivated the most fertile portions of the island. For nearly
twenty years after the discovery Cuba was left in peace; but when the
settlements were founded, the barbarities of Haiti and the Bahamas were
re–enacted, the Indians were enslaved, and reduced to such a condition
of misery that hundreds killed themselves in despair. It was not many
years, in truth, before they had entirely disappeared, having been
murdered, directly and indirectly, by the despicable Spaniards.
To fill their places, the Spaniards imported negro slaves from Africa,
who were treated, like the Indians, with excessive cruelty, but who
were more tenacious of life than the unfortunate aborigines, and their
descendants constitute a large proportion of the Cuban population at
the present time. One of the largest and wealthiest of Spain’s islands
beyond the sea, Cuba early became a prey to Spanish adventurers and
English freebooters. For more than three hundred years, except for
a short period in 1762, Cuba has been in the clutches of Spain, her
lands cultivated until within a few years by slave labour, her revenues
plundered by rapacious officials. Gradually there has grown up a
native population, distinct from the “peninsular” Spanish—a population
speaking the same language as the immigrants from the home country,
yet differing from them, inasmuch as about half the islanders have
mulatto or negro blood in their veins, and are looked upon and treated
by the “peninsulars” as inferiors.
During more than three hundred and fifty years the natives patiently
submitted to oppression and extortion in every form; but the political
disquietude in Spain was soon reflected in her colonies, and long after
the loss of Mexico, Central and South America to the motherland, Cuba
attempted to break the chains that bound her to Spain. There was an
uprising of the blacks in 1844, and in 1851 a filibustering raid under
General Lopez, a Venezuelan, who was killed in his third invasion of
the island, as well as several filibusters from the United States.
An offer to purchase the island, shortly after, made to Spain by the
President of the United States, met with no favour, as Spanish pride
and interests were against it.
The most serious revolt against the Spaniards occurred in 1868,
consequent upon the distracted condition of Spain during the
revolutionary proceedings which exiled Isabella II. The leader of this
revolt, Carlos de Cespedes, was subsequently elected president of a
republic which the insurgents finally set up, and for ten years,
during which at least seventy–five thousand Spanish soldiers perished
in the island, and the natives suffered every conceivable indignity
from the “peninsulars,” the war was waged, only to be concluded by a
deceitful promise of reforms which were never granted. General Martinez
Campos, then the Captain–General of Cuba, and authorized representative
of Spain, signed the “capitulation” of El Zanjon in 1878, by which
the insurgents were induced to surrender, under a pledge that their
demands should be acceded to; but Señor Canovas, then Prime Minister
of Spain, refused to recognise this treaty, and so all their terrible
sacrifices came to naught. It was but natural that the patriots should
feel resentful; but they remained quiescent for seventeen years, at the
end of which period, in February, 1895, the long–smouldering embers of
revolt again burst into flame.
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