Public Men of To -Day An International Series v irw y 4 ».0«TfcA. *M9 ciC3QH.»rxLt»» DON EMILIO CASTELAR PUBLIC MEN OF TO-DA Y An International Series BMtc& By S. H. JEYES Forthcoming Volumes Pope Leo XIII. By JUSTIN McCarthy. President Cleveland. By JAMES LOWRY WHITTLE. Lord Cromer. By H. D. TRAILL. Signor Crispi. By W. J. STILLMAN. Previous Volumes The Ameer Abdur Rahman. By STEPHEN WHEELER. Li Hungchang. By Prof. ROBERT K. DOUGLAS M. Stambuloff. By A. HULME BEAMAN. The German Emperor, William II. By CHARLES LOWE. The Right Hon. Joseph Chamberlain. By S. H. JEYES. Digitized by the Internet Arciiive in 2008 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/donemiliocastelaOOhannrich DON EMILIO CASTELAR By DAVID HANNAY With a Frontispiece LONDON BLISS, SANDS AND FOSTER 1896 CONTENTS. C3>3> H3 CHAPTER I. SPAIN. The French Revolution and Spain — Divisions of the Population — The Monarchy and Church — The Inquisition and its influence — Consequences of the French Invasion — Liberalism — The Guerrilleros — Pronunciamientos .... J^a^^es 17-41 CHAPTER II. THE YEARS OF CASTELAR's YOUTH. Don Emilio's family — His Education — Political condition of Spain in his youth — Ferdinand VII. — The War of the Succession — Espartero, Narvaez, and O'Donnell — The Revolution of 1854 and the corruption of the Army . . . . 42 61 CHAPTER III. BETWEEN TWO REVOLUTIONS. Don Emilio's first public appearance — Character of his eloquence — Spanish loquacity — French influence — His political doctrine — The politicians and the Palace — The disintegration of Govern- ment 62-83 CHAPTER IV. THE BEGINNING OF A REVOLUTION. The Democratic party — Narvaez and Castelar — The University riot — O'Donnell once more — The Mutiny in the San Gil barracks — Exile of Don Emilio Castelar — Conspiracy — Don Juan Prim — Last Ministry and Death of Narvaez— The Revolt at Cadiz 84-106 300772 CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. UNDER THE GOVERNMENT OF PRIM. Prim and the Nation — The Partido de la Porra — Divisions of Parties — Debates on Monarchy — The Constitution voted — The search for a King — The Hohenzollern candidature — The choice of Don Amadeo — The death of Prim .... Pages 107-129 CHAPTER VI. THE LAST STAGE BEFORE THE REPUBLIC. The adventure of Don Amadeo — His mistake — The Cortes — The Carlist revival — Growing difficulties of the Government — The Spanish Artillery — The Hidalgo question — Resignation of the Officers — and of the King 130-155 CHAPTER VH. THE FIRST STAGE OF THE REPUBLIC. The Bill presented to the Republicans — Anarchy in the Army, the towns, and the country districts — General Pavia — The 23rd April — Senor Castelar a reactionary — The panic of Senor Figueras — The delusions of Senor Pi y Margall — A prizefighter in a crowd 156-181 CHAPTER VIII. THE DICTATORSHIP OF CASTELAR AND THE COUP D'^ITAT OF PAVIA. Senor Castelar dictator — The task before him — The Deputies puzzled — Settling the question of the Artillery Officers — Refilling the Army — The recantation of Don Emilio — Progress of the Carlists — The Cantonalist ships and the intervention of the British squadron — Revolt of the Federalistas against Castelar — The trap- door through which pronunciamientos arise in Spain — The end of La Federal 182-206 CONTENTS. CHAPTER IX. THE END OF THE REVOLUTION. Don Emilio Castelar returns to private life — Two revelations of honesty — A Provisional Government — Serrano as figure-head — The dog in the manger — Organization of the Royalist party — Don Arsenio Martinez de Gimpos — The last pronunciamiento — The banning of better things .... Pages 207-224 CHAPTER X. THE BENEVOLENT NEUTRALITY OF CASTELAR. Twenty years of peace — Don Emilio's new course — The influence of the Queen R^ent — What is a Possibilista ? — The Constitutions of 1869 and 1876 — A mischievous agitation — The sorrows of the Queen — Castelar reconciled to the Monarchy — His life-work and the prospect for the future 225-239 DON EMILIO CASTELAR CHAPTER I. SPAIN. The French Revolution and Spain — Divisions of the population — The Monarchy and Church — The Inquisition and its influence — Consequences of the French Invasion — Liberalism — The Guerrilleros — Pronunciamientos. THE history of all Europe for the last hundred years has been shaped by the French Revolution. Dis- tance and barbarism have not been able to keep Russia intact. Neither the sea, nor her own stable institutions, nor the disgust which the criminal vice of the Revolu- tionary leaders inspired in a people at once proud and sane, have availed to preserve England herself from the influence of the greatest movement in European history since the Reformation. But while these two States have been merely influenced, the centre and the south of the Continent have been recast under the impulse imparted from Paris. The German Empire, the curious monarchical Federation called the Empire of Austria, the Italian Kingdom, the Constitutional Monarchy of Spain, are all as much the direct results of the Revolution as the French B 17 i8 . - . j)Qjsf EMILIO CASTELAR. Republic itself. The common impulse has affected each differently, because it everywhere found special conditions and a particular character. The qualities of the races acted variously under the same stimulus, and they have largely affected the final result — " For of the soule the bodie forme doth take, For soule is forme, and doth the bodie make." The German is not as the Italian, nor the Italian as the Spaniard, and each acts after his kind, though the same original cause may have put all in motion. No part of this general recasting of Europe is less known to Englishmen than the Spanish share of this universal Revolution. Spain has not been of such im- portance to the world since she made her last great contribution to European history, by setting the example of a national resistance to Napoleon, as to have forced the necessity of understanding her affairs on her neigh- bours. Much, too, of her doings has been little calculated to excite other interest than will always be felt in a furious faction-fight. There has been so much mere anarchy, and so low a level of intellect among the leaders of the conflict, such an apparent absence of any definite in- telligible principle, so much self-seeking of barrack-room conspirators and parliamentary intriguers, that the world has turned wearily from what has all the air of a mere Donnybrook. The ferocity of much of it has been shocking. There were passages in the reign of Isabel II., which resemble nothing so much as the "scuffling of kites and crows " in the wildest parts of Scotch history. Europe seemed to be looking at the survival of fragments MODERN SPAIN. 19 of its own mediaeval past, when it heard how Diego de Leon and Manuel Concha had endeavoured to kidnap the young Queen of Spain and her sister, and had only been defeated through the unexpected hard fighting of a handful of Alabarderos — a body of Palace-guards answering to our Beefeaters. This kind of thing had not taken place in civilised countries, since Bothwell was pushing his fortunes at the Court of Mary Queen of Scots. Other incidents were not redeemed by the agree- able picturesqueness of Diego de Leon's raid on the Palace at Madrid. The shootings of Carlist by Cristino, avenged by the shootings of Cristino by Carlist, were pure barbarism, while such a horror as the execution of the mother of the Carlist leader, Ramon Cabrera, by the order of a general whom he had just defeated, were below the level of what was to be expected of the manlier kind of barbarian. That an old woman should be shot with- out trial, and at the threshold of her house, on the mere order of a general — not for any offence of her own, but merely to "wring the heart" of her son, before whom this general had just fled defeated — and that the man capable of such an act of revolting cruelty should con- tinue to hold his command unrebuked by public in- dignation, seemed to sink Spain to the level of Dahomey. The Spaniards have no good ground to complain if their neighbours could see little in their three gener- ations of convulsions beyond Cosas de Espana^ things of Spain, of which an unchanging, untameable barbarism, sometimes picturesque, at others merely bloodthirsty, is one. Yet there was more in it than all this. There was a 20 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. struggle between old and new, and the re-shaping of a nation. At the beginning of this sketch of the best- known of living Spaniards, some account of the political, moral, and intellectual condition of his country is in place. It is impossible to understand the life of any public man without some knowledge of his environment, and I do not think that Spain is so well-known among us as to render a few pages of preliminary description superfluous. In course of one of those innumerable occasional speeches, in which Prince Bismarck "rays out curious observations on life " and politics, he has lately noted Spain as a "proud homogeneous nationaUty." Proud it assuredly is, but its homogeneity must be allowed only with reserve. It is true that there is a something Spanish common to all Spaniards which marks them off from their neighbours, and not less distinctly from the Portu- guese than from the Frenchman or the Italian. Un- questionably, there is a Spanish nation which may now be considered "one and indivisible." Yet no one who endeavours to find an answer to the puzzling question, "What constitutes a nation?" could well pick a less satisfactory case to study than will be supplied him by Spain. If he takes language as a test, he will find that, there are four spoken in Spain. The Basque still lingers in the Cantabrian Mountains, and there are, in addition, three tongues of Latin origin; or, if the "Bable" of Asturias is allowed to be more than a dialect, then four. The Catalan, with its two dialects of the Balearic Islands, and of Valencia, is a branch of the Southern French. THE PEOPLES OF SPAIN. 2t The Galician and Castilian are independent descendants of the Latin. The Castilian is what we understand by Spanish, yet the other two are not mere dialects, but real languages. Nor, again, is the unity one of race. There is as much difference between a Castilian and a Galician on one hand, or an Andalusian on the other, as between a Lombard and a Sicilian. The characters of the men of the various provinces differ as widely as their languages. Nor, again, has there been any unity of institutions. Indeed, it would be hard to pick any country in which there has been less. It was only towards the middle of this century that there was any common administration, or uniform system of levying taxes. The very title of King of Spain was, in truth, an abbreviation adopted for purposes of con- venience. In strictness, there was no such person. There was a King of New and Old Castile, of Galicia, of Estre- madura, of Navarre, of Aragon, of Jaen, of Seville, of Granada, of C6rdoba (I abridge severely), a Count of Barcelona, a Lord of Biscay, and of Molina. It came to pass, through marriage and conquest, that all these crowns and coronets were on the same head. But, in every district, the same man ruled by a different title. Each was a little unity by itself, bound to the others only by the "golden link" of the crown, having its own administra- tion, customs, in some cases its own code of laws, and everywhere and always, its local patriotism. It is in the distinctness and the vitality of these " sub- nationalities," that lies the explanation of that resistance to Napoleon, which encouraged, but also surprised, Europe in 1808. By it, too, we can account for the ease with 22 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. which Spain accommodated herself to some seventy years of such convulsions and disorders, as would have torn a more highly-organised nationality to pieces. When we speak of Spain, as it has been almost down to our own time, we should think of a confederation of states bound to one another by their common loyalty to the same Sovereign and the same Church. They had the same interests, and, no doubt, geography has had some in- fluence in binding them together. But neither community of interest, nor the fact that it belongs to the same peninsula, and has no natural frontier except upon the sea coast, have sufficed to attract Portugal to Spain. At a critical moment it fell into the hands of a vigorous ruling family, and was made into a nation so effectually, that it has, in the end, preserved its independence. In all other parts of the Peninsula, the sovereignty came to centre in one family, which could legally claim the homage of Castilian, Aragonese, Valencian, Basque, or Andalusian, as the representative of his old lords. The Castilian obeyed the King of Castile; the Aragonese, the King of Aragon; the Catalan, the Count of Barcelona; the Valencian, the King of Valencia; the Basque, the Lord of Biscay ; the Andalusian, the King of all its four provinces of Seville, C6rdoba, Jaen, and Granada. They all, together with other provinces, which are omitted for brevity's sake, formed the Spanish Monarchy. In all that belonged to the King they obeyed him. He alone made peace and war. He alone spoke for the nation to the outer world. The common army and navy were his business. The revenue, largely derived from the American silver mines, was his to manage or mismanage. THE OLD MONARCHY, 23 But underneath this show of unity, there was a great variety of local uses, customs, rights, and privileges, with which the King did not, and, indeed, dared not, meddle, and which lived a tenacious life of their own. Nothing was more surprising to the majority of con- temporaries, than the contrast which was revealed, in 1 808, between the decrepitude of the Monarchy, and the vitality of its compound parts. But it was very intelligible, and Pitt, at least, seems to have understood that there was a wide difference between Spain and the Monarchy as represented by Charles IV. A pure monarchy, in truth, must depend largely on the character of the royal race. If Spain had had the good fortune to come into the hands of the House of Hohen- / zollern — and a lucky marriage might have given it that' happiness— it would not have fallen so deeply as it fell from its high estate. But the later Habsbourgs, and all the Bourbons, except Charles III., hovered a little above, or below, the line of imbecility. Some of them were not without a certain kind of cleverness of the quite futile order, but they belonged to the stamp of accomplished sovereign which Gibbon has sketched in the character of Gallienus, who "was a master of several curious, but useless sciences, a ready orator and elegant poet, a skilful gardener, an excellent cook, and a most contemptible prince." In the end they sank to imbecility undiluted. A satirist, seeking to make monarchy ridiculous by showing to what lengths an imbecile king can bring a people, could have invented nothing to surpass Charles IV., the com- plaisant husband of the most shameless of women, and the devoted master of a favourite who was openly, and 24 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. avowedly, his wife's lover. In his idiotic hands, Spain appeared to have fallen into the condition of a thoroughly decrepid Oriental monarchy, and to be at the mercy of the first conqueror. That Napoleon believed it had done so, is clear. When the Spanish royal family had been brought into his power, by a fine combination of force and fraud, when there was a French garrison in Madrid, and in most of the northern fortresses, he thought he had the country at his feet. In fact, he had only broken through the crust. Beneath it lay the Spain of the Middle Ages — somnolent indeed, but not dead. Everywhere the ma- chinery for local resistance was ready to hand, in the shape of town councils, and provincial assemblies. It mattered little whether the absent master, in whose name they worked, was dawdling in his palace at Madrid, or was a prisoner in France. Indeed, his imprisonment was a gain. It was with relief that the different kingdoms felt themselves released from the control of Madrid. The local authority everywhere acted as Sovereign against the invader who was forcing his odious presence upon the Spaniards. The inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula behaved as they have ever done in the presence of the intruder, since they fought against the Scipios, and followed Sertorius. They did it by virtue of what remained in them of their primitive barbarism, and what was left of their mediaeval franchises and " particularism," to use an ugly word, for which, unfortunately, we have no satisfactory equivalent. Whatever may be alleged against the folly of the execution, there always remains, to the infinite honour of the Spaniards, the credit of NAPOLEON'S INVASION 25 having set Europe a great example, and of having struck the first successful blow at the power of Napoleon on land. Later Spanish politics are unintelligible unless the consequences of Napoleon's invasion are kept in mind. There is a curious similarity, as well as a marked difference, between the effects of his brutal aggression in Germany and in Spain. In both he provoked national resistance, which, with the help of Russia in the case of Germany, and of England in the case of Spain, succeeded in the end in expelling the foreign ruler. But though the arms of France failed, its ideas conquered. Napoleon himself may have been essentially a mere barbarian conqueror of the old stamp, or, as M. Taine has said, an Italian tyrant come to life again ; but his armies were the missionaries of the French Revolution. If they did nothing else, they at least convinced the peoples whom they trod underfoot, that their old governments were unable to protect them The Spanish monarchy, being more decrepid than any of the German dynasties, was more discredited. Thus, at the very moment that they were most obstinately resolved never to submit to French rule, the Spaniards were being prepared to imbibe French ideas only. The most wilfully blind among them could refuse to see that the King's government had proved itself perfectly incom- petent The determination to be done with it, was strongest among those who had fought best in person against the French armies. Sir William Napier stated the truth in his own figurative way, in his History of the War in the Peninsula^ when he said that the seeds of 26 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. freedom had been sown in Spain by the Cortes at Cadiz. The old order stood condemned in the eyes of a people whom it had brought down to be at the mercy of Charles IV., and his minister, Godoy. No doubt it had its partizans, as every order which endured for centuries will always have, but it was no longer universally accepted as natural by the nation. From the moment of the return of Ferdinand VI I. , from his imprisonment in France, the struggle between old and new began. Under the stress of the French invasion, the old general government had completely broken down. When at last Napoleon's armies had overrun the interior of Spain, the Cortes had been summoned at Cadiz. The Junta General, or general committee, composed of delegates from the various local committees, which had hitherto maintained some sem- blance of a government, had so far represented the monarchy that it had looked upon the meeting of a Cortes with jealousy. It put off summoning one till it had been expelled from Seville, after the scandalous rout of its last army at Ocaiia. When the Cortes did meet, it was such a body as had never been seen in Spain before. It must not be forgotten that there never had been any general Cortes for the whole country. Each crown had its own. When, for instance, Philip IV. had applied for aid in money, to his subjects of the Aragonese crown, he had been compelled to summon three parliaments — one for Aragon proper, one for Valencia, one for the county of Cataluna. They met simultaneously in adjacent towns, and the King had to negotiate with all three at once. THE CORTES. 27 Without going into confusing details, it may be pointed out that these bodies differed widely in constitution, but that they had this in common — that they represented privileged class. There was no knight of the shire in Spain, no direct representation of the burgesses. The nobles, the Church, the " advocates " of the town councils formed the Cortes. These last were not members of Parliament in our sense. They were mere delegates, em- powered to vote " yes " or " no " on certain points. They could not go beyond their mandate without receiving further powers. Moreover, in some cases, the Town Council was limited in its choice of advocates to a few families. Except in the case of purely formal meetings of a general Cortes, summoned by Philip V. and Charles IV., merely to register their orders in regard to the succession, there was no precedent for a universal Spanish Parliament. The old Cortes had withered by the side of the Monarchy. The body bearing the name which met in Cadiz was, in reality, new, and from the nature of the case soon became revolutionary. In order to get over the difficulty of bringing repre- sentatives from the districts in the power of the French, the election was left to the natives of these provinces who happened to have taken refuge in Cadiz. The committee, which had seized power upon the collapse of the Junta General, contained a large proportion of Liberals, and it arranged for the election by means of something very like universal suffrage. In the result the Cortes did, indeed, contain a majority of representa- tives of the old Conservative forces — the nobles and the Church — but they proved singularly destitute of faculty. 28 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. The Liberal minority were the abler men. With the support of the rabble of Cadiz, and of the officers of the army, they succeeded in terrorizing their opponents. It was their hope and intention to make any return to the abuse of the monarchical administration impossible. They intended to set up a constitutional government; and under the pressure they were able to apply, the Cortes was launched on a course of revolutionary con- stitution-making of the most democratic kind. The constitution of 1812, drafted while Marshal Victor was encamped in face of the city, was, for a time, the model of the revolutionists of Southern Europe. Now, a Spanish Liberal was a person who had for years been secretly reading the works of the French philosophes, at more or less risk of imprisonment, or worse. When power came into his hands, he could only draw on his reading. He was proud enough of the history of his Cortes, as proving that the Spaniards had been free; but when he had, or seemed to have, an opportunity of restoring freedom, he could not use the old organisms, which, indeed, had withered, and which, when they were alive, had represented privilege and exclusive rights. He kept the name, but he began to construct a constitution out of his books, out of "Voltaire, Raynal, and Company," out of " The Gospel of Social Contract, and the Rights of Man." The result is one with which we are now very familiar, having nearly a century of world-wide experience to make us wise. The constitution of 181 2, like so many others, was "of no continuance." It was a crude piece of work. The temptation to dismiss those who made it, by quoting THE CONSTITUTION OF 1812, 29 Mr. Carlyle's blandly contemptuous description of the South American Emancipators, is great — "Absurd som- nolent persons, struck broad awake by the subterranean concussion of Civil and Religious Liberty all over the world, meeting together to establish a republican career of freedom, and compile official papers out of Rollin, are not a subject on which the historical mind can be en- lightened. The historical mind, thank heavens, forgets such persons, and their papers, as fast as you repeat them." Yet some pity is due to the unlucky Liberals of that time. The old government was utterly decrepid. It depended on the personal qualities of the Royal House, and the Spanish Bourbons had sunk almost below humanity. Some change was inevitable. That the model of a new and better government was sought in the French philosophes^ by dreamers and pedants of schoolboy knowledge, was a misfortune, but it was one for which the whole responsibility does not lie with the Liberals. Part of it rests on the Monarchy, which, after absorbing all the powers of the general government, became itself incapable of ruling. Part rests on the Church. If any knowledge of modern Spanish politics is worth acquiring, it is absolutely necessary to take the work of the Church into account. It has gone all through Spanish history. In the days of the struggle with the Moors, their common creed had been the one bond which united the Spanish Kingdoms. The Church was one, while the States were divided. When the Mahom- etans were fairly conquered, the Spaniards strengthened 3P DON EMILIO CASTELAR. the hands of the Church by reforming the Episcopal Inquisition, and organising it into the Holy Office, in order that they might be the more effectually cleansed of all taint of Moor and Jew. During the sixteenth and seventeenth century, they looked to the Inquisition to preserve them from the heresy which had caused such dreadful commotions in Germany and France. They believed that they had to thank the care with which the purity of the faith was protected, for preserving them from such miseries as the French wars of religion, and the Thirty Years' War. Nothing is more contrary to the evidence than the theory that the Inquisition was imposed on the Spaniards by the Crown and the Church. The Crown was poor, and always in straits for money. The country was thinly inhabited, full of natural fortresses in the mountains, which cross it in every direction. The race is warlike, and has, at all times, been only too ready to betake itself to a life of roaming and fighting adventure. If the Inquisition had been really hateful to any considerable section of the population of Spain, more blood would have been shed than would have sufficed to float the Armada, before it was established. It came into being because the people would have it so, and they wished for it, because it served their jealousy, fear, and hatred of the Jew, the Moor, and the heretic. The case is one for applying the saying that "Men make institutions, and that then the institutions make men." The Inquisition was set up in order that the Church might the more effectually preserve the purity of the faith. The institution thus created, reacted on the THE INQUISITION. 31 Spaniards in ways which they did not, and, indeed, could not, foresee. Its first duty had been to superintend the complete conversion, or, failing that, the expulsion of the Jews and Moriscoes, as the conquered Moors were called. The Jews were forced into, at least, outward conformity, or driven out. The Moriscoes lingered for a time, till they, too, were cast out. But before that day came, the Church and the Inquisition had been long engaged in efforts to preserve Spain from the Lutheran and Calvinist heresies. The Inquisition was not, in theory, an enemy to learning. Indeed, it occasionally had the liberality to permit the reading of books which were forbidden in the Roman Index. Yet, in the long run, the most effectual way of keeping all Spaniards in "the gloom of an im- penetrable orthodoxy," was found to be to make them ignorant. All intellectual curiosity and inquiry were discovered to have a deadly tendency to lead towards " the twilight of sense and heresy." Though men might not be forbidden to inquire, and to think, in express terms, they soon learnt that inquiry must be carefully directed to avoid hitting upon anything new, since heresy might lurk in the most unexpected quarters; and that their thoughts must conform strictly to an established pattern, under penalty of incurring the notice of the Holy Office. The Spaniards, in fact, were forced, by their own acts, into one intellectual and moral mould, and in the process all originaHty of intellect was destroyed. It was so dangerous to read, lest you should come upon something heretical ; so dangerous to think, lest you should be led into committing yourself to heterodox propositions — that learning and thinking were renounced. It was far safer 32 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. to be ignorant and thoughtless. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Inquisition had done its work so effectually, that it might, without the least exaggera- tion, have been addressed in the concluding lines of the Dunciad : — " Thy hand, great anarch ! lets the curtain fall, And universal darkness buries all." To make its triumph complete, the Inquisition should have been able to shut Spain off from all contact with the outer world. Then, perhaps, what native force of intellect there was in the race, might, in time, have been destroyed by want of exercise, and the Spaniard might have become the European equivalent of the Chinaman. This, how- ever, was impossible. The estabhshment of the Bourbon dynasty in the early eighteenth century, brought the country into closer relations with France, just when the great anti-clerical and anti-Christian philosophic campaign was beginning. Spain might seem, at first, to be very little affected. Its orthodoxy was very sincere, and, to the end, the Church had power to prevent anything like open attack. Yet, little by little, secretly and quietly, the freethinking of France began to penetrate south of the Pyrenees. The fascinating quality of French literature triumphed here, as it did elsewhere. Spaniards could not but see that their country had fallen behind its neighbours. They saw the prosperity, allied with heresy, in England, and with license, in France. They began to wish, if not to emancipate themselves from the beliefs of their fathers, at least, to be allowed to inquire, and think for themselves. Not many were animated by the wish, but some were, LIBERALISM. 33 while more, who were not, had been brought to such a state of docility, that they were wholly passive. A small body which acts, will soon penetrate a dull, quiescent mass. So, little by little, the handful of Spaniards who had secretly fallen away from the old standard of orthodoxy, began to influence their countrymen. It would be a mistake to suppose that it was only, or even mainly, laymen who were thus affected by the anti-clerical and unbelieving teaching of the eighteenth century. There were churchmen among them. The early part of the autobiography of Blanco White, the best existing picture of the inner life of Spain in the eighteenth century, show that infidelity, all the more acrid because it was cherished in silence and terror, had begun to spread among the Spanish clergy. The Count of Toreno, an active Liberal politician of the early part of this century, a member for his native province of Asturias, of the Cortes which drew up the fantastic constitution of the year 181 2, and the author of a history of the war against Napoleon, written in answer to our own Sir William Napier, was first made acquainted with liberal speculation by a priest. The power of orthodoxy was, in fact, undermined in Spain before the end of the eighteenth century. When the framework of government was shattered by Napoleon's invasion, it was natural that those who had long been secretly rebellious against the old order, should break out. It was natural that they should be all the more violent, because they had been repressed, and that their actions should be unwise, because they were ignorant, or, what was worse, half educated by stealth, and at second hand. c 34 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. In the circumstances, it was inevitable that the Spanish Liberals should be little more than an echo of the French. No Spaniard dared speak for himself. " Why are you so silent," said Catherine II. of Russia, to the Spanish Ambassador. "Madame," answered the Diplomatist, "in my country men who speak are burnt." " Con el Rey y la Inquisicion Chiton." " Hush, for the King, and the In- quisition," is the proverb which sums up popular wisdom on this point. All, then, who wished to hear more than their orthodox instructors would tell them, were compelled to go to foreign teachers. They inevitably had recourse to their French neighbours, who were at hand, who wrote a kindred language, and whose literature has an un- paralleled power of " vulgarisation," to use its own word, for the practice of explaining and making things clear. Fiercely as the Spaniards are prepared to fight for national independence, in political speculation, in thought, in literature, and even in art, they have, throughout this century, been the imitators of the French. The new wine poured into the old bottle was foreign wine. It may be that they would, in no case, have had an active original share in the intellectual movement of modern times. The Spanish genius, says M. Guizot, is a home- keeping one. But whatever chance they had of taking a part with France, England, and Northern Germany, they deliberately killed, when they directed the whole of their tenacity of will, and their faculty for vigorous repression, towards keeping permanently at the end of the middle ages. They in so far succeeded, that they did not move till they were swept onwards by forces acting on them from without. THE GUERRIELERO SPIRIT, 35 The other consequence of the French invasion must be noted, in order to complete the political picture of Spain. It revived the historic taste of the race for a state of martial anarchy. Ferdinand the Catholic told Guicciardini that his subjects were admirable for war, but that it was impossible to govern them in peace. The King spoke of war as he understood it, that is, of adven- ture, forays, and personal prowess — not of the orderly scientific warfare of modern times. That kind of fight- ing has ceased in Spain only during two or three brief intervals. The Romans stopped it for a time, and it was suspended again when the power of the King, as general mediator and judge, was established at the end of the fifteenth century. Even then the Royal authority would hardly have prevailed, if the discovery of America had not opened a magnificent foreign field to the Spanish adventurer. Hernan Cortes, the Pizarro brothers, Valdivia, Soto, and the other heroes of the conquest, were the Minas and Empecinados, the Ramon Cabreras, and Zumalacarreguis of their time. The endless wars of Italy and the Low Countries kept up a steady drain, and so the land had peace at home. At the end of the seventeenth century the Spaniard appeared to be ex- hausted — bled almost to death by war and adventure, yet no sooner was he stirred by the War of the Succession than it was found that the old qualities of the race were intact Our ancestors, in Queen Anne's time, were almost as much surprised as the contemporaries of the Peninsular war, at the apparently incoherent conduct of the Spaniards. They had sat still with the utmost apathy, while courtiers and intriguing churchmen had disposed of 36 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. the crown of Spain to a Bourbon. They saw PhUip V. come in, and the Habsbourgs go out with languid acquiescence. When the Habsbourg claimant came to fight for his crown, the centre of Spain seemed unmoved. A com- parative handful of heretic Germans and EngHsh, of Catalans and of Portuguese, drove Philip from his capital, and, as it seemed, from his kingdom. Then all at once, with the suddenness of gunpowder to which a light has been put, Spain broke out. The Spaniards might care little whether the King — since there must be a king, and he must have his taxes — was Bourbon or Habsbourg. But when they saw the Portuguese and the Catalan marching among them, in arms, to impose a king upon them, their "pundonor," that is, the profound pride of the Spaniard in himself, was touched to the quick. To be held down "by a rat," was what he could not endure, and he flew to arms. Philip V., who had been a fugitive one day, was at the head of a determined united people prepared to make any sacrifices for him, the next. So a century later it was the sight of the French soldier, marching through his fields, occupying his villages, playing the master in his country, which roused the Spaniard. The six years of partisan warfare which followed Napoleon's colossal act of brigandage, threw the Spaniard back for centuries, as far as respect for "law and order" was concerned. The patriotic purpose for which it was undertaken gave dignity to the life of the guerrillero. The nature of the country, the economic condition of the people, and their character, all alike favoured this recrudescence of the old wild life of THE COUNTRY, 37 fighting and adventure. Spain is thinly inhabited, full of " dehesas " and " despoblados " tracts, that is, of untilled, uninhabited country, and of mountain chains. No small part of the population, that which is engaged in cattle and sheep-breeding, is nearly as nomadic as the Arab tribes of the Soudan. The peasant of the agricultural districts lives generally in large villages, far from his fields. He walks for miles to and from his work, and in harvest he camps out. This is the case even now, when the population has increased from ten to eighteen millions. In 1808 it was still more true. The country, too, was very poor. Every form of industry had been hampered and restricted, till the means of gaining an honest liveli- hood had been reduced to a minimum. Spain, therefore, swarmed with vagabonds, whose numbers the well- meaning government of Charles III. had endeavoured to reduce, with very trifling success. The prolonged existence of internal Custom-houses had formed a whole population of smugglers. All these men — the shepherd and herdsman, the peasant, the smuggler, the rogue and vagabond — carried arms, and could use them. The raw material for scores of irregular armies, existed on all hands throughout Spain. Nowhere in Europe was so large a proportion of the race trained by the habits of its life to take kindly to anarchy. The Spaniard was poor, and so had little to lose by disorder. He was hardened to long marches, to sleeping in the open-air, to short commons, to the heat by day, and the cold by night. He settled his private quarrels with the knife. Whether as poacher, shepherd, or smuggler, he had learnt to be a good shot — to watch with untiring patience for the vulture, the wolf, 38 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. or the Custom-house officer; to be vigilant against sur- prise; to be sleepless in looking for the chance of surprising others. What is even more to the purpose, he had the taste, and the capacity, for the life of the guerrillero. It is not an accident that his favourite types in literature have been the Knight-Errant, and the Picaro, that is, the Rogue. To roam in valley and mountain, free from the bore- dom of regular industry, suits him to perfection. It was not only the wastrel and the rolling stone, to whom this was the happiest of lives in Spain. Worthy and honest men took to it with a facility unparalleled elsewhere. As they had the taste, so they had the faculty. The contrast between the badness of all the Spaniards attempted in the way of regular organization of their finance and their armies in the Peninsular war, and the excellence of the guerrilleros, was amazing. Not one real general was brought out by the war; but it produced scores of guerrilleros. They came too from all classes; Porlier and Santocildes were gentlemen, Mina was a farmer of the small peasant-proprietor class, Julian Sanchez was of about the same order ; Juan Martin El Empecinado had been a common soldier, and was a dairyman in his native town of Castrillo del Duero when the war broke out ; El Cura Merino was a parish priest, Rovigo was a doctor either of laws or medicine. Even the soldiers by pro- fession who distinguished themselves most, Romana, Pablo Morillo, Garcia Conde, Enrique O'Donnell, and others, did so rather in partisan than in regular warfare. It would be grossly unjust to underrate what there was of heroism and patriotic loyalty, and real utihty, in the THE HABIT OF DISORDER, 39 fighting of the guerrilleros. To say, as Sir William Napier — who never forgave the Spaniards for resisting his idol, Napoleon — does, that without the Duke of Wellington's army, Spain would have been conquered, is to tell only half the truth, and whatever our patriotism may think, not the most important half. If Spain had submitted to the French, the Duke could have made no impression, even if his army had been doubled or trebled Two hundred thousand French soldiers, supported by the inhabitants, would have been more than he could manage, and Spain would have become what Napoleon meant it to be, an admirable basis of operations against England. The Spanish war would never have been " the cancer " which destroyed him, as he was finally driven to confess, that in fact it was. Now this prolonged national resistance was mainly the work of the guerrilleros. Yet all this heroism, honourable as it was to Spain, and inestimable as was the service it rendered to Europe, left a melancholy legacy to the country. It formed a whole generation which was unfitted for a settled and peaceful life. Even in the minds of the more honest of the guerril- leros, there remained a regret for the free adventurous days of the patriotic struggle with the French. They were only too ready to take to the old habits on the first plausible excuse. Nor can it be denied that a proportion of the guerrilleros was not honest in the common sense of the word. The bands were at all times recruited by smugglers, and mere unsettled vagabonds. Such men might be honest as between their country and the invader. Many of them fought well against the French. But as between then: country and their own passions, they were 40 DON EMILIO CASTELAR, not honest. They were ready at all times to take up again with the old life which gave them an excuse for living at free quarters. The war, too, had given the Spaniards an exaggerated opinion of the efficacy of guerrillero fighting. They were pardonably inclined to over-estimate the services the bands had performed against the French, and they had conceived, not without good cause, a very poor opinion of the qualities of their army. They would not willingly have confessed in words that it was inferior to another, but they had no great fear of it. What a Spaniard would have said if he had spoken quite candidly, would have been that if the guerrilleros would overcome the soldiers of Napoleon, they had very little cause to be afraid of the Spanish army. A very capable government might, perhaps, have kept the nation quiet; but Spain suffered from a succession of incapable administrations. What they call '*el cau- dillaje," the disturbance of the country by "caudillos," or leaders, threatened to become permanent. There was a perpetual succession of these leaders, from Mina and El Empecinado, in the War of Independence, to Lizarraga and Tristany, sixty years later. Every district had its heroes, and they their followers, who were for ever ready to shoulder their guns, and be off to the mountains again. These disturbances were not regarded by those who took no part in them as an unmixed evil. A pronunciamiento generally meant the temporary suspension of the octroi duties, and it was always an excitement. The army, so far from putting down the guerrilleros, became infected with their spirit. Between a political general and a cau- dillo, the difference was mainly in the uniform, and both THE CAUDILLOS. 41 flourished because they were not condemned by effective public opinion. The country was not rich enough to feel these disturbances acutely. There was no great internal commerce to suspend; while in the country districts, the rude husbandry and pasturage were still what they had been in the days of the Moorish wars, and they accommodated themselves to civil confusion without much difficulty. \i pronunciamientos and their consequences have ceased within the last twenty years, it is, at least, partly because the development of the material prosperity of the country, which, in spite of everything, had been very rapid, has made them too costly. If they have ceased for ever, which it would be rash to guarantee, it will be because the Spaniards can no longer afford them. Eighteen millions of people, who do a considerable amount of business with one another, can no longer live as ten millions did, when one district had little or no dealings with its neighbours. The history of Spain, from the French invasion till the establishment of the present prolonged truce, may, then, be summed up as something like this. A country, which was in reality composed of a combination of countries, was suddenly taught that the government under which it had drifted on — working not much, and thinking less — had broken down. It had first to struggle for national existence through anarchy, and then to fight its way to a reconstruction of government, through a succession of other anarchies, by the light of political and moral ideas which it has borrowed from its neigh- bours, the French, and has hardly yet succeeded in so far assimilating that it can call them its own. CHAPTER II. THE YEARS OF CASTELAR'S YOUTH. Don Emilio's family — His Education— Political condition of Spain in his youth = Ferdinand VH. — The War of the Succession — Espartero, Narvaez, and O'Donnell — The Revolution of 1854 and the corruption of the Army. DON EMILIO CASTELAR was born at Cadiz, in 1832, and he first became known beyond the circle of his friends and colleagues in 1854. We cannot expect details of the youth of a man still living ; and what is known of the early years of Don Emiho may be told in a few words. His father is described as a man of business. In Spain, as it was sixty years ago, this implies that the future republican leader was not, in the full sense of the word, born a gentleman. It is significant, and indeed natural, that he should come from the class which is least wedded to ancient ways, and from that part of Spain which is most under foreign influence. Cadiz, too, was not only then, as always, a great sea- port, and therefore exceptionally accessible to the outer world. It had been the home of the famous Cortes, which had drafted the constitution of 181 2. Liberalism had its head-quarters there. Accordingly we learn that the elder Castelar had been a strong Liberal. He had been 43 HIS FAMILY, 43 secretary to the Revolutionary Junta, or committee, which had for a time imprisoned Ferdinand VII. He even bore arms in the resistance, such as it was, made to the French army, under the Due d'Angouleme, which came into Spain, in 1820, to release the legitimate king from his revolutionary subjects. The hundred thousand sons of St. Louis, as the Spaniards call the relieving army, met with general acquiescence on the part of the Spaniards. The mass of the nation had little love of " Liberal principles," and so, to the surprise of some who remembered the fierce struggle against Napoleon, stood quietly aside, while the army of the Holy Alliance rescued the king out of the power of mutinous soldiers, and a handful of middle classes progressives. Don Emilio's father must either have found refuge abroad for a time, or have been little known as a con- spicuous Liberal, for he escaped the wholesale vengeance which Ferdinand executed on those who had imprisoned him, and to whom he cringed in the most abject fashion, while he was at their mercy. He died while his son was a boy of only seven. The mother took her children from Cadiz, after her husband's death, and established herself at Elda, a village near the famous palm forest of Elche, in the kingdom of Murcia — the most African portion of the Spanish peninsula. It is mainly from this province that the Spanish emigrants, who have filled the French province of Oran, are drawn. They are Berber in look, semi-Oriental in dress, and even more than semi-Oriental in manners and character. From Elda he went to school at Alicante; and then, at the age of 44 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. sixteen, and in 1848, to Madrid. It is to be presumed that he was destined to complete his education at the university, to become a lawyer; and it is not unfair to suppose that the hope of his family was that he would attain to a "destino," which is, being interpreted literally, a destiny, and means that paradise of the Spanish middle class, a place under government — with a pension. The most eloquent of the Spaniards was then, by birth, an Andalusian, as was but appropriate. The Andaluz is the Irishman, the Gascon, not to say the Tarasconnais, of Spain. His "boato" and " ponderacion," his brag, and his preference in all relations of life for the use of the superlative, are the joke of all other Spaniards. No other inhabitant of the peninsula is so subject to the infirmity, familiarly known in America, and not unknown to ourselves, as " swelled head." If there were a degree beyond the superlative, he would use it. He is the life of every Spanish regiment, by virtue of his good humour, his jokes, generally practical, his songs, and the unfailing ingenuity with which he contrives to evade the regula- tions. He is the pest of his company officer, for that very reason. A leaning to every kind of trade which combines opportunities for show, with a dash of vaga- bondage, is to be found, more or less, in the Andaluz. In the old heroic days, he supplied a large proportion of the restless intrepid adventurers who overran America. To-day, the trades of bull-fighter, smuggler, journalist, and politician have an irresistible attraction for him. His flow of words is astonishing, even in a nation which is unrivalled in its command of language. Therefore, he THE ANDALUSIANS, 45 has flourished exceedingly in an epoch of Parliamentary eloquence. At no period of Spanish history have the Andalusians been so conspicuous as during the last sixty years or so. I fear it must be added that of all the types of the Spaniard, he is the least trustworthy — not because he is deliberately more dishonest, but through the working of that histrionic faculty, that capacity of really being for the moment the thing he is moved to represent, which has also been noted in the races to which he has just been compared. What he says is not by any means always what he means, but only what his fine artistic faculty tells him he ought to say. His reputation as a fighting man does not stand high. Here his heroic words are apt to be belied by actions which indicate a keen regard for his personal safety. Yet it must be allowed, that he is an alert man in a casual scrimmage, and that he can not in- frequently show the way gallantly when all eyes are on him. He does not enjoy a character for steady industry, but he can work by spurts very zealously, when stimulated by the prospect of considerable immediate reward. It would be most unjust not to warn the reader at once against supposing that Don Emilio Castelar shares the character of his fellow provincials to the full. He is certainly not an untrustworthy man, for even in the whirlwind of his eloquence, there has always been a considerable body of sincere conviction. Yet, as we shall see, he has the Andalusian's love of the grandiose, and of what his own sonorous language describes by adaptation from the kindred Italian as the 46 DON EMILIO C A STELA R. " rembombante," the merely swelling, ear-filling, and meaningless. We are told that during his school days at Alicante, he was a retiring boy, with a taste for reading, and a love of the classics. This last phrase must not mislead the English reader into supposing that Don Emilio was afforded an opportunity of acquiring that love of accuracy which is the fruit of the assiduous practice of Latin verse -making. Spanish education, which is still very far from good, was at its worst in his youth. A smattering of a great many subjects, in which the mere remnants of the old scholastic training are mingled with a "modern side," represented by French text-books, is the usual course now. There was probably less modern side in Castelar's day, but there was little that was better. He acquired a fair working knowledge of Latin, which is not difificult for an intelligent Spaniard. Fine scholar- ship — in the English sense of the word — is, and always has been, rare in Spain ; but it is not uncommon to find both laymen and churchmen, who can both speak and write the Latin language fairly. It must be allowed, how- ever, that both his books and his speeches are marked by an appalling fluency in talking about all time and all knowledge which, in the case of an Englishman, would be considered to amount to proof that he had read at secondhand about a host of things, but had never mastered any one thoroughly. As has been already said, Don Emilio Castelar emerged from obscurity in 1854. It may now be added that his first appearance was at a public meeting, and took the appropriate form of a speech. He was then twenty-two. POLITICS OF THE TIME. 47 The occasion was an important turning point in the history of modern Spain, and deserves our attention. No sooner had Ferdinand VII. been released from his captivity in France, than he fulfilled the Duke of Wellington's prophesy by turning the Cortes out, and tearing up its well-meant, but fantastic, paper constitution. He not only had no difficulty in so doing, but was invited to the act by the very great majority of his subjects, who greeted him on his return as "El Rey Absoluto" — the Absolute King. The Cortes had no effectual friends, and few of any kind. If his own want of capacity, and his character, had not been insuperable obstacles, he might have reigned in peace to the end of his days. But Ferdinand is one of the most unpleasant of all the poor races of Spanish and Italian Bourbons. He was what our Charles II. would have been, if he had had neither wit, good nature, nor personal courage. He was a self-indulgent man, who looked upon his position of king as only a possession to be enjoyed; not a duty to be discharged. There were in him two of the basest traits of which human nature is capable — a love of inflicting pain, and a poorness of spirit which made him grovel in the presence of danger. The position to which he returned was a very difficult one. Spain had been greatly impoverished by the war, and was now burdened by the revolt of its colonies, on the mainland of America. Even a great king would have found it hard to avoid a troubled reign in such conditions, and Ferdinand had no capacity beyond the cunning of a trickster. He hated the Liberals, because they were to be expected to 48 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. curtail the liberties of kings. He treated the public revenue as meant, first of all, to minister to his own private gratification. The Inquisition was restored, and the administration was replaced, as far as possible, on the old footing. The struggle with the colonial insurgents was carried on in an inefficient way, which led to no results in America, but was none the less a heavy drain on the population of the mother country. After lasting for about five years, his government was upset by the revolutionary movement headed by Riego. It is to be noted that this was a military, not a popular, rising. The Spanish officers were generally Liberals. Many of them had been prisoners in France, and all of them had been taught to entertain a certain respect for those principles which they found associated with high military efficiency in their French enemies. The motive of the common soldiers in joining the revolt seems to have been largely dislike of the service in America. The result of Riego's rising was another temporary Cortes and Constitution, which, after a very brief exis- tence, much troubled by the hostility of the Church, were swept away by the intervention of a French army. Ferdinand ruled despotically for what remained of his life. But he did not venture to restore the Inquisition, and, in reality, the cause of Absolute Monarchy was lost. It had been killed by the incapacity of its representatives. Before his death, Ferdinand himself was beginning to make advances to the Liberals. Although he had been repeatedly married, he had no children, except by his last wife Christina, a Bourbon of Naples, and a sister of THE SUCCESSION. 49 the Queen of Louis Philippe. By this marriage he had two daughters — the Queen Isabel, who still lives, though dethroned and in exile, and her younger sister, the Duchess of Montpensier. When the failure of his health deprived Ferdinand of the hope of a son, he was naturally anxious to secure the succession for his daughters. Ac- cording to the old laws of all the Spanish Monarchies, there could be no question as to the right of Doiia Isabel to be her father's heir. It requires an absolute ignorance of the history of the country of Queen Urraca, of Queen Petronilla, and of Isabel the Catholic, to suppose that it was ever a land of the Salic Law. Philip V., the first of the Spanish Bourbons, had, indeed, limited the succession to heirs male by "pragmatic sanction," which means by his own order; but the act was irregular, was never properly registered by any Cortes, and was pro- tested against at the time by the Council of Castile. Charles IV., the father of Ferdinand, had revoked it at the beginning of his reign, when there appeared to be a possibility that he would be left without heirs. The revocation was not, however, published; and it seems to have been forgotten when the birth of several sons appeared to have secured the succession. When it became necessary to secure the crown to his daughter, Ferdinand published his father's revocation of his great-grandfather's pragmatic sanction. He made a will, appointing his wife regent in case of his death during the minority of Dona Isabel, and naming a council by whose advice she was to act. But it was now found, that the extreme clerical and Conservative party was resolved to consider the pragmatic sanction of Philip V. as a D 50 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. fundamental law of the monarchy. There is something more than a little absurd in the position of a party which boasted that it was the defender of tradition and ancient right, when it is found adhering to an illegal innovation in defiance of the king. But the action of the clerical, or, as the Spaniards called them, the apostolic party, was intelligible enough. They knew that in spite of the future of Riego, Liberalism was making its way steadily. They knew that the influence of France was growing, and they were acutely aware that their countrymen were getting, in regard to the religious orders, into much the state of mind of the Englishmen of Henry VIII.'s genera- tion. Without ceasing to be good Roman Catholics, the Spaniards had become widely disposed to secularise the immense tracts of land which remained in the power of " the dead hand " of the religious orders. Therefore the Church looked for a defender, and it found him in the king's brother, Don Carlos. It is possible that if Ferdinand had lived longer, he might have been com- pelled to grant a constitution, in order to provide himself with a defence against his own party — the supporters of absolute monarchy. From this absurdity he was saved by death. His widow was compelled, by the necessities of her position, to rely on the Liberals, who again had to rely on the army, while the Church threw itself heartily on the side of the so-called "legitimate" king, Don Carlos. Spain was plunged for seven years into the atrocious welter called the Carlist War. The pith and substance of the clerical cause was supplied by the three Basque Provinces of Guipuzcoa, Alava, and Biscaya, which believed that their "fueros," or local rights, would RESULTS OF THE CARLIST WAR. 51 be abolished by the Liberal supporters of Queen Christina and her daughter, in favour of some brand-new con- stitution on a French model. Here again the par- ticularism of Spain was manifested. The Carlist War was less of a struggle for principles, than a fight between the bulk of Spain, and a portion of it which aimed at preserving its individual existence. While the war lasted, Spain was in a condition of anarchy, in which military pronunciafiiientes alternated with savage partisan fighting. Yet when it ended in 1840, through the exhaustion of all parties, rather than the decisive victory of one, it was found that something had happened. The Church lands had been confiscated, the old order had vanished, and it had got to be generally understood that the Crown could not govern without a Cortes. What now remained to be done was to find some way in which it could govern with a Cortes. A long generation was to pass before the new order had been so far established that the land could have per- manent peace. From 1840 to 1854 there was a succession of disturbances and revolutions, on which Don Emilio Castelar had to look as a witness. From 1854 to 1873 there was another series in which he was destined to take an active part. The first period must be dismissed briefly. When the Carlist war ended, it was immediately followed by a new little revolution. Queen Christina had been compelled to grant a royal charter, in order to secure the support of the Liberals. She was next driven to grant a real con- stitution by the military revolt, headed by the Sergeant Garcia, who threatened to shoot her morganatic husband, 52 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. Munoz, afterwards created Duke of Rianzares, if she did not yield to the demands of the people, as expressed in this summary way. Queen Christina had as little love of constitutional principles as might be expected in a Neapolitan Bourbon. She would fain have governed despotically, and have kept on good terms with the Church, if she could have so done without sacrificing the cause of her daughter. When the war was over, she immediately quarrelled with the Progresista, i.e. Pro- gressive Party, whose chief was Don Baldomero Espartero, the most successful of her generals. By them she was expelled, and Espartero was made Regent in her stead. From Paris the Queen Dowager Christina fomented intrigues against Espartero. It was in the execution of one of these schemes that Manuel Concha, an artful adventurer, and Diego de Leon, a beau sabreur^ and valiant blockhead, made their famous night attack on the palace at Madrid, with the intention of carrying off the girl Queen. Concha, in whom there was more of the fox than of the lion, escaped, but Leon was captured, and shot to death as a mutineer. In the next year Espartero was upset. He was a brave man, and an honest, but he had no political faculty, and was of an indolent, undecided character, except when actually under fire. The rivals by whom he was defeated, were Narvaez and O'Donnell, two men who were destined to alternate at the head of affairs for the next twenty-six years. Narvaez was undoubtedly a very remarkable man. A shrewd American observer, Mr, S. T. Wallis, who saw him at the height of his power, has drawn a striking sketch of him. He was a small, com- pactly built man, with an ugly face, and a sharp, sarcastic THE RULE OF NARVAEZ. 53 tongue, a gentleman by birth, an officer of the Guards in his youth, and at that time a Liberal. When he obtained power he called himself a Moderado, or moderate Conservative. From 1842, when Espartero was expelled, till 1851, when he was himself jockeyed out of power by palace intrigues, and the dissensions of his followers, Narvaez was the greatest influence in the Government of Spain. Morally, he may be compendiously, but not unfairly, described as a brigand of considerable intelli- gence. He, at least, knew that there are better things to do with a country than to eat it up. He kept order, he brought Spain quietly through the troubled years of 1848 and 1849, when the rest of Europe was upset by revolu- tion, and he did his country the inestimable service of organising the Guardia Civil, an admirable body of police, which may be fairly compared with our own Irish Con- stabulary. His colleagues, Senores Mon and Bravo Murillo, reorganised the taxation of the country on a system which has many defects, but is, at least, very much superior to the old confusion of " proprios and arbitrios," hereditary revenues and special taxes. The advance of Spain in material prosperity was great in these years. A stimulus was given to industry, by the throwing into the market of vast quantities of land, taken out of mortmain. Courageous investors, who bought while the ultimate victory of Don Carlos was still possible, and the title insecure, were able to acquire good land at four and five years' purchase. The change from the easy and slothful management of the monks, to the ownership of pro- prietors, who exploited the land for profit, did much to promote agriculture. There was a bad side to the picture, (S) DON EMILIO CASTE LAk. in the destruction of the forests, which were cut down by men in a hurry to make a profit. The demortization, too, extended from the Church to the communal lands, and the consequent loss to the peasantry of rights of pasture, and other advantages, has had a great influence in the late growth of agrarian socialism in Spain. Still, on the whole, the wealth of the nation increased, and the popula- tion with it, while vagabondage, against which the old Monarchy had struggled in vain, began to diminish. It may seem strange that the end of a period of peace and prosperity should have been the starting point for a new series of political convulsions. Yet it is intelligible enough when you come to look below the surface ; and it is first of all desirable to get an understanding of what these same political convulsions mean in practice. Having lived through a good half-dozen pronunciamienfos, I can affirm, from experience, that they are not nearly so dreadful in fact, as they sound in the newspapers. They rarely shut the theatres for many nights together, and they never prevent the Spanish housewife from doing her daily marketing. The business of life must go on, and institu- tions must conform themselves to that necessity. Pro- nunciamientos obey the common law, and so, when the cause of freedom, or any other, is being fought out, a compromise is made, by which a reasonable interval of quiet is left for needful shopping. It is not often the case that acts of cruelty are committed on individuals. No doubt such crimes are perpetrated, and it does happen that troops engaged in putting down barricades, sometimes shoot bystanders who have been enveloped in the fighting by no fault of their own. Yet extensive outrages against THE SOLDIERS, 55 property, life, or the honour of women, are uncommon. This last offence is one which the Spaniard of all parts of the Peninsula endures with the least patience, and is most disposed to revenge. The moment it begins, the country rises, and it is seldom long before Government is so far strengthened as to be able to restore order. It is one of many anomalies of this strange people that the Spanish soldier, though apparently the most turbulent in the world, is, in reality, a loyal, obedient, quiet fellow, who would be glad enough to do his term of service punctually, and return to his sunburnt village or rocky hillside, when the happy day comes on which his servi- tude is over, and he receives the discharge, which he carries conspicuously suspended round his neck in a tin cylinder. Patient as he is, he can be goaded into mutiny, by about three times the neglect and ill-usage that would set any other army on fire. He can also be tempted into breaking out by the lying promises of politicians. We shall see that Don Emilio helped to produce an explosion of this latter kind. But, as a rule, the Spanish conscript endures his lot cheerfully enough, and obeys orders without question. It is for this very reason, paradoxical as it may sound, that he has mutinied more than all the troops in Europe put together. He mutinies, in fact, in obedience to his officers. It is they, and not the soldiers, who make the pronunciamienios. The pronunciamienios^ again, have commonly been the work of political generals. Parliamentary party govern- ment is what Dr. Johnson called gratitude — a plant of high cultivation. It has hardly yet become rooted in Spain. Until 1873 it did not exist, even in show. There 56 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. were, indeed, parties and to spare, but they were not instruments of government. When they were in, they had the Cortes to themselves. When they were out, they seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth. There have been times when a Progresista Cortes contained but a single Moderado, and others when the harmony of a Moderado Cortes was only broken by a single Progresista. The elections, in fact, are made by the Government. That being so, how comes it about that a Government is ever out ? Since it can elect its own deputies, appoint its own generals, and has no sedition to fear from the ranks, why does its term of office ever come to an end at all ? Because the word partido does not really mean the same thing as party. Spanish politicians are not wholly destitute of principle. They are, in a general way, divided in the natural fashion into Conservative and liberal, and when in office, they, again, in a general way, apply their principles. But what we call a party — that is to say, a body of men with a common creed, prepared to act together with mutual loyalty, and persuaded that they must be prepared to sacrifice something of their personal opinions and interests, for the sake of securing some part of what they aim at — barely exists in Spain now, and did not exist at all till 1873. Everybody wanted everything, and every soldier wanted to be general, in political life. Hence, a party which had, apparently, just swept the board, disintegrated with startling rapidity. Then began the game of intriguing against the Minister of the day, with the " outs " and the Palace. The influence of the Palace may be left aside for the present. It is enough to say that intriguers were able, MILITARY POLITICIANS, $7 repeatedly, to get Ministers dismissed by the authority of the Crown. Something of the kind happened to Narvaez, in 1 85 1, between followers who were pushing their own fortunes, and Palace influences which were working for ends of their own. Narvaez, who had not served his country for nought, retired to lick his paws in his native town of l.oja, in Andalusia. Then followed three years of unstable ministries, which rose and fell from day to day. The country, indeed, was perfectly tranquil, while the political scum was agitating on the surface. But a crisis was approaching. Men who got office on such terms as were attainable, began to manifest a decided longing for the tranquillity which might presumably be enjoyed by means of a dictatorship. All who were not in office began to talk with anxiety of the dangers which menaced liberty. At no time was there a more dreadful consumption of ear-filling phrases about freedom, prin- ciples, and morality, for there were many ugly stories afloat of jobs perpetrated in connection with the sale of the confiscated Church lands. At last the crisis came, when the possession of military command happened to coincide, in the case of a particular patriot, with political ambition. The provi- dential man was General Dulce, the officer who had commanded the alabarderos who repulsed Diego de Leon's attack on the Palace. In 1854 he was Inspector- General of Cavalry. Some suspicion as to his intentions had been suggested to the ephemeral ministry of the day, and he had been summoned to dispel them by General Blaser, the Minister of War. Dulce protested his innocence with imprecations, and immediately afterwards SS DON EMILIO CASTELAR. rode out of Madrid, under pretext of trying a new mili- tary saddle, and at once pronounced at the head of all the cavalry belonging to the garrison of the capital. It was found that he was acting in combination with O'Donnell, who, having been rewarded for his services in expelling Espartero in 1842, by the Captain General- ship of Cuba — a very lucrative post — had returned with well-lined pockets to give his beloved country the benefit of his services. For a time it appeared as if the move- ment would collapse. The infantry and artillery of the garrison of Madrid remained loyal. When General Blaser marched out at the head of them, the town kept quiet. The " progresistas " in the population apparently made the calculation that it was better not to stir, because one of two things must happen. Either O'Donnell would be beaten, in which case they would certainly be made to smart for being too busy, or he would win, and then their exertions would be superfluous. A meeting between the hostile forces took place at Vicdlvaro, a village near Madrid, in circumstances probably unparalleled out of the political dissensions of Spain, or off the stage of the comic opera. The infantry and artillery, who continued loyal, could not reach the cavalry, who had joined Dulce and O'Donnell. The cavalry again could not charge the infantry and artillery, without imminent risk of extermination. A battle took place, in which next to nobody was killed or wounded. The Vicalvaristas, as the insurgents were called, went off to Andalusia. General Blaser re-entered Madrid in triumph. Decorations and promotions were conferred with a lavish hand. The Government soon found that it kkVOLUTIONS. 5^ was not to win. One cavalry regiment, sent in pursuit of the Vicalvaristas, joined them. Another disbanded. Then pronunciamientos began on all sides, and Espartero issuing from the retirement in which he had lived for some years on his wife's estate, near Lx)grono, put himself at the head of a rising at Saragossa. The reader must be referred to M. Charles de Mazade's Revolutions d^Espagne^ which records these events with admirable gravity, for a detailed account of the next two years. There was a happy interval during which there was no king in Israel, and every man did what seemed good in his own eyes. The Queen was compelled to call on Espartero to form a Ministry, and he found himself constrained to act with O'Donnell. For some time nobody did anything very serious. The Juntas which had been formed on all sides to assert the rights of the nation, endeavoured to earn its gratitude by suspending the collection of the consumos or octroi duties — a measure which, of course, disorganized the already em- barrassed finances of the country completely, but was accepted as a pleasant relief while it lasted. The Constituent Cortes met, and proceeded to revise the constitution, amid deluges of Parliamentary eloquence and a ferment of intrigues. All the officers of the army were promoted one step; generals were made by the dozen ; and the period of military service for the soldiers were reduced by two years. This pleasant interval of licence came to an end in 1856. Disorder had begun to spread from soldier to civilian. There were riots among the manufacturing population of Cataluna, and agrarian riots of a very serious order in the 6o DON EMILIO CASTELAR. neighbourhood of Valladolid. The country became really frightened, and began to cast about for a saviour of society. General O'Donnell presented himself for the part. He had taken the Ministry of War as his share of the spoil, and had really worked hard to restore disci- pline. Espartero had displayed his hesitating character, and did little more than repeat on all occasions his favourite phrase, " The will of the nation must be carried out." In 1856, O'Donnell undertook to interpret the will of the nation, in the sense that there must be an end of anarchy. The Queen was induced to dismiss Espartero from the premiership, and when the Progresistas of Madrid, who included all the city mihtia, rose in arms, they were suppressed after fighting, which on this occasion was really serious. Order once more reigned in Madrid. Then the Vicalvaristas, who had risen in 1854 to revise the constitution of 1845, and had spent two years in dis- cussing the revision, declared that it was a very good constitution, and would answer the purposes of the country well enough, with a few insignificant changes in detail. The disorders of the last two years had answered the purpose of the lucky ones among them very well, for it had brought them offices and promotion. It had, however, done .more than that. It had confirmed the Spanish army in its villainous taste for pronunciamientos. The wonder is, that any discipline remained at all, after all ranks had been taught so effectually that the surest road to reward lay through miUtary insubordination. A whole generation was to pass before the virus had worked out. The Vicalvarista movement differed from earlier military CORRUPTION OF THE ARMY. 6i disorders. Then it might be said that some cause, or appearance of a cause, was at stake. But, in 1854, discipline was thrown to the winds for no purpose, except to satisfy the ambition of office seekers. It was a very serious matter that in the general promotion carried out by O'Donnell and Espartero, the "primos sargentos" were all made lieutenants. The primo sargento was (for the rank is now abolished) an order peculiar to the Spanish army, and had descended from the sixteenth century. They were sergeants superior to the ordinary sergeants, and they had in their hands all the internal discipline of the regiments. From 1854 forward, they became the most dangerous element in the army. They were always on the outlook for promotion, as the reward of helping some barrack-room conspirator to arrange a pronunciamienio. The recent good conduct of the Spanish soldiers, is largely due to the abolition of the rank altogether by the government of Alfonso XII., and the transfer of their functions to the commissioned officers. CHAPTER III. BETWEEN TWO REVOLUTIONS. Don Emilio's first public appearance — Character of his eloquence — Spanish loquacity — French influence — His political doctrine — ' The politicians and the Palace— The disintegration of Govern- ment. IT was in the midst of the barren hurly-burly of these two years, that Don Emilio Castelar first began to make a name for himself. His share in them was, how- ever, not important, and it cannot be claimed for him that he affected the result in any way. What he did do was to show his countrymen that they possessed, in him, an orator more fluent, more gorgeous in colour, more in all respects to their taste, than the many they enjoyed already. A meeting at the Teatro del Oriente, in Madrid, supplied the opportunity, by the help of which he sprang into reputation. Castelar had attended, as it seems, more out of curiosity than any other motive. The date was September, and at that time the military movement in support of national " morality," which General Dulce had begun in the curious way briefly told in the previous chapter, was beginning to develop into a civilian agitation. The Progesistas were stirring, and were entering on the 62 DON EMIUO'S FIRST SPEECH. 63 course which finally constrained O'Donnell to shoot them down, again in the name of morality, in 1856. At the meeting in the Teatro del Oriente there was an abundant consumption of eloquence, and at last the audience thought it had enough. It was beginning to disperse. Castelar had sat silent while his elders were speaking, but now he could refrain from good words no longer. He sprang to his feet, and began to speak. The experiment, surely a very bold one, was justified by success. The audience was first arrested, and then drawn back. When Don Emilio sat down, he had taken his place as the most popular orator of the day. This is the story, and it is probably substantially true. On the day after the meeting at the Teatro del Oriente, Castelar awoke to find himself famous. Hitherto he had only been a journalist, writing articles, for the poor pay afforded by the Spanish press, and the author of a novel not much read either then or since. Henceforth his con- tributions were fought for, and his help eagerly asked at every public meeting. Like so many other Liberal politicians of the Continent, he was conspicuous as a defender of journalists accused of press offences. These trials afford an admirable opening for semi-political demonstrations in all countries. We have known them do something very like it here, and where advocates are not kept so tightly to the matter in hand as is the rule in English Courts, they are very little else. The line taken is usually one of two. The defendant's counsel either argues that the off'ence ought not to be considered an offence at all, and that therefore his client ought not to 64 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. be punished, or else he denounces the wickedness of the prosecutor, and draws more or less openly the deduction that it is a pious act to point him out to public vengeance, or threaten him with "the dagger of Brutus." The tendency of these trials to become mere attacks on the government, explains (I do not say it justifies) the marked preference of Conservative statesmen on the Continent for special tribunals for press offences. In Spain, where power was during so many years in the hands of soldiers, the tribunal preferred was a Court Martial. Indeed, as the newspaper riots in Madrid a few months ago prove, Spanish ofificers, who feel aggrieved by the tone of leading articles, have still a strong inclination to bring the indiscreet journalist before judges "in buckskin," sitting round a drum. It does not appear that Don Emilio Castelar took any part in the street fighting of '56. At a later period, he taunted Espartero for not appearing at the head of the Progresistas on that occasion, but then Don Baldomero was by trade a fighting man, and had shown his readiness to head an armed rising at Saragossa, in 1856. Castelar is a speaker and writer. During the two years of trouble, and the major part of the twelve which followed them, he confined himself to attempting to influence his country- men by the written and spoken word; nor can he be blamed for his preference for peaceful methods in a country which is only too ready to have recourse to very different instruments. When the writer and speaker provokes others to fight, the case is altered. The world has long considered that he who blows the trumpet shares the responsibility with him who draws HIS EARLY WRITINGS. 65 the sword. But Don Emilio hajs been no preacher of armed sedition. In politics he began as a Progresista, or Progressive, and, in the natural course of things, soon became some- thing more. No fault can be found with his choice of means for advocating his ideas. If he selected Lucan as the subject of his doctoral thesis, there was a good excuse for the choice. It was patriotic, for M. Annseus, of C6rdoba, was a Spaniard and an Andalusian. If he also wrote unfavourably of perpetual military dictators, and was put to death by Nero, these were no reasons why Narvaez or O'Donnell, supposing them ever to have heard about the Pharsalia, and the conspiracy of Piso, should find fault when a Spanish gentleman made him the subject of a thesis. The essay on Lucan was followed by a series of lectures on " Civilisation during the First Five Centuries of Christianity." Sir M. Grant Duff, the most ardent of Castelar's admirers in England, is con- strained to confess that " the merit of the work lies not in its learning, in which I doubt not that a competent critic would pick many holes, not in a maturity of thought, to which it has no pretensions, but in the rushing splendour of its rhetoric." There is, after all, some virtue in a name. What Sir M. Grant Duff politely calls a " rushing splendour of rhetoric " would have been dismissed by that bitter judge of the Spaniard, whom, for all that, and in a way of his own, he loved, Mr. Ford, as examples of "the Castilian vice of twaddle." Our object is not historical or literary criticism. Don Emilio is interesting to us as a politician, not as an historian or man of letters. We cannot turn aside from our proper E 66 DON EMILIO CASTE LA R. subject, to spend much time over the enormous mass of written matter which he has signed. Still his qualities and defects as a writer are so closely allied to his strength and his weakness as an orator, and his final object at all times, and in all kinds of his work, has always been so distinctly political, that a few pages may not unprofitably be spent in discussing as briefly as may be "what it all comes to," what the method is, and what the inspiration. To begin with, Don Emilio Castelar is a thorough Spaniard, and Spaniard of these times. In other words, he possesses that " flujo de palabras," the flux of words, which his own countrymen are perfectly prepared to confess is their national weakness, whenever they are speaking to you in confidence, and are not standing up in public for the national reputation. They are, however little their actions seem to justify the praise, a people of much natural sagacity, and sense of humour. It is, perhaps, the most hopeless trait of the national character, that it knows its own weaknesses, and laughs at them, without ever attaining to an effective effort to correct them. The loquacity of the "grave Spaniard" is, indeed, enormous. Nobody can realise what it is, nor how com- pletely it is divorced from real knowledge, thought, and conviction, without an experience, which is apt to become exasperating to the Englishman, who has not naturally as insatiable appetite for a windy diet of " words, words, words." Spanish literature, even in its great epoch, was most fluent. It produced masses of so-called poetry, in which there is no touch of passion, nor trace of thought, but SPANISH LOQUACITY. 67 only an inexhaustible torrent of images, and of stock images at that. No nation has written more plays in its time, and no plays contain such unending tirades. The recit de Teramlne^ in Phldre^ and the harangue of Charles V. to the tomb of Charlemagne, in Hernaniy are brief discourses beside the speeches of three, four, or even six hundred lines, which Lope and Calderon put in the mouths of their characters. An English audience would go to sleep, or fly the house, rather than stand such a downpour of eloquence. And this bulk is too frequently attained by mere repetition of images, by saying the same thing over and over again, with slight variations. But what to Englishmen would become pure tedium, is an unending delight to the Spaniard. He can sit for hours, with the complacency of an old Scotch congregation at a sermon, while the imaginary Don Felix on the stage, or the real Don Emilio on the platform, is exhausting the solar system, and the vegetable world, with drafts on the animal kingdom, in order to say the same thing fifty times over. The Spaniard, it is but justice to add, is provided with lungs of remarkable strength, and extraordinarily tough and elastic organs of speech. He can speak an incredible amount, in a marvellously short time, without becoming either breath- less or confused in his utterance. In these qualities, in which his countrymen are eminent, Don Emilio towers among them. As the Spaniard is the most fluent of men, so he is the most fluent of Spaniards. "II a plus que tout le monde I'esprit que tout le monde a." Sir M. Grant-Duff has translated two passages from the lectures, which I will 68 DON EMILIO CASTELAR, take the liberty of quoting here, in justification of these few remarks : — "As a wave passes over another wave, as a new leaf comes forth upon the naked branch, as new stars shine forth in the immensity of the heavens, so do new gener- ations awake to life, and change the scene of the world, and raise altars to the ideas for which their fathers raised scaffolds, and convert the victims of yesterday into priests, and open the fancy to the breath of new allusions, the sentiment to the love of new hopes, the spirit to the faith in new ideas ; and each age says to the previous age, 'Get thee gone, for that thou preventest me seeing the sun of truth.' 'Get thee gone,' said Christianity to Paganism, and Paganism disappeared. 'Get thee gone,' said the Barbarians to Rome, and Rome fell. ' Get you gone," said the feudal chivalry, armed with their lances, to the last shadows of empire on the broken walls of Rome, and they went with Theodoric, and Justinian, and Charles the Great. 'Get thee gone,' said the kings to feudalism, and the castles were blown up with gunpowder. ' Get thee gone,' Philosophy kept saying from the days of Abelard to the days of Descartes, and Faith returned to heaven. 'Get thee gone,' said the Renaissance to the Middle Age, and over the penitent virgins of Giotto and Fra Angelico rose the virgins of Raphael, with the smile of Greece upon their lips. 'Get thee gone,' said the jurisconsults from the royal Can Courts to the political power of the Pope, and that power fell into ruins. ' Get thee gone,' said the Middle Class to Absolute Monarchy, and the absolute kings passed away on the wings of the revolutionary hurricane." After this specimen of Senor Castelar's "youthful eloquence, when he has his Pegasus well in hand," Sir M. Grant Duif gives another, " as a specimen of it when the animal has fairly taken the bit in its teeth, and run away with the rider." THE TRICK OF IT. 69 " From each of the centuries through which humanity has lived, there rises an everlasting hymn, which like the echoes of the organ beneath the vaults of a Gothic cathedral, inspires a strong religious sentiment. Bless with me, gentlemen, bless with me all the ages. Just as in the great laboratory of Nature our body is formed out of all the substances of the earth, so in the great laboratory of history our intellect is formed out of all the centuries. Bless them then with me, gentlemen— bless all the centuries ; bless the pre-historic ages, for they are your cradle ; bless the tribes, for they were your mothers ; bless theocracy, in that it made secure the first religious sentiment in the human heart ; bless the heroic peoples, and the labouring peoples, in that the first made you lords of society, and the second, lords of nature; bless the philosophers, in that they opened your reason to the infinite, and made you hear in your spirit the voice of conscience ; bless the conquerors, in that they with their swords blotted out frontiers, and united races ; bless the the first century, because it was the century in which human unity cemented by war, and divine unity cemented by revelation, gave each other an immortal embrace in the bosom of your spirit; bless the second century, because it turned all ideas into that law which still guards the paradise of your hearth." The reader will, I think, see little difference between the paces of Don Emilio's Pegasus in these two passages. It is not either more eloquent or more absurd to call upon the audience at the Ateneo to bless the centuries, than to represent those centuries as giving one another notice to quit. Nor does it, I will venture to assert, argue much presumption to say that the trick of it is easily acquired. Many men, many women, many children could surely write passages like these by the hour if they had the good fortune to possess Maunder's Treasury^ and were endowed by Nature with indifference to the 70 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. discredit of redundancy and impropriety in the use of images. But in countries which possess a sound system of education, children are taught better, and where men and W9men are subject to the criticism of common sense, they are consumedly laughed at when they talk in such a fashion. The speaker's want of knowledge of the mere rudiments of the history he was blethering about (one is driven to Scotch for a satisfactory word), is glaring. There may be a rushing splendour of rhetoric in the description of feudal chivalry with its lances, saying, "Get you gone" to the shadows of empire, and of the said shadows as disappearing with Theodoric, Justinian, and Charles the Great, but unfortunately it is all arrant nonsense. If an Englishman were to talk like that, we should call him a windbag, and we would be right. Don Emilio Castelar, however, is a Spaniard. It is just to remember this, and also that he grew up in an ill- educated generation, which had a great desire to be as good as its neighbours, and a natural reluctance to recognise how much lost ground it had to make up before it could hope to stand on a level with them. If he took his knowledge from the most readable of them, to wit the French, and' then passed it on to his countrymen, diluted by vast quantities of the native eloquence which he has described as Oriental — with what propriety the Orientalist must judge — he was only doing as his whole generation did. That he did it with a more splendid rush of rhetoric than others, with more stars and waves, with a rather better knowledge of French books, with a more intrepid prodigality of historical examples all picked at random, and used with no kind of regard for accuracy. HIS IMITATION OF THE FRENCH. 71 only accounts for his rapid and extensive popularity. He was doing more than anybody else what everybody else was doing. As for his relations to his French masters, there can be no doubt about them in the mind of any reader to whom they are in the least familiar. This is a very tender point with the Spaniards. In private life, indeed, and the freedom of conversation, they can be very candid. They repeat the old story of the three essays written by the Englishman, the German, and the Frenchman, on the camel. How the first went for the facts to the desert; how the second evolved the beast from his inner con- sciousness; and the third wrote an eloquent paper after a visit to the Jardin des Plantes. Then they will add that the Spaniard imitated the Frenchman. It is not, and very naturally not, pleasant to them to be publicly reminded that they have been engaged during all this century in going to school to France, in politics, adminis- tration, literature, and art. Nevertheless, it is the fact. Where Don Emilio went for his camel, or to speak with a perhaps more becoming gravity, for the sources of his inspiration, is manifest. Sir M. Grant Duff says of the lectures that their author was "not far from the stand- point of Ozanam " when he began them, but that " when he came to the end, he was climbing the hurdles, and already halfway out of the orthodox fold." This is true, but it is not all the truth. It should be added that the voices which summoned him out of the fold were Michelet and Victor Hugo's. Their example helped to encourage his natural tendency to disquisitions at large, and in the air, which needed no encouragement. But 7^ DON EMILIO CASTELAR. it did more. It was from them that he acquired the emotional tendency of all his work. Whoever knows Chateaubriant will see what set Senor Castelar calling on his hearers, at the Ateneo, to bless the centuries. It was from Michelet and from Victor Hugo, who after passing through a Legitimist, Orleanist, and more or less Bonapartist stage, had been converted to his final democratic stage not long before 1856, that Senor Castelar learnt the sentimental democratic views which he was to advocate, till he was called upon to apply them, and was summarily converted to a conviction that they would not work. Before, and since, that date, he has written a great deal, of which we can only say that it is Victor Hugo turned into diffuse and grandiose Spanish. The method is easily defined. The first of the passages quoted already, is manifestly only a turgid Castilian amplification of the famous '' Ceci tuera cela " scene in Notre Dame de Paris. The Redencion del Esclavo (the "Redemption of the Slave") is, as far as I can see, for I confess a perfect inability to read a small shelf-full of books of which the part I have seen has no more visible meaning than the typical formula that " abracadabra is a second intention," an incontinently diffuse Castilian prose imitation of La Ltgende des Sihles. To abound in the sense of his model, to be ten times more lavish of stars, waves, buds, to quote Semiramis and Sardanapalus, Hildebrand and Barbarossa, to make two puddings smoke upon the board for Hugo's one — this is the method of Don Emilio Castelar. It can be applied to any subject at any moment, and at all lengths for he is, indeed. HIS POLITICAL CREED. 73 as Napier drily remarked of Jovellanos, "a very eloquent person." When Senor Castelar is not allowed to go to all lengths, he is, to an English reader, at least, incomparably more acceptable than in the am- bitious great books, of which he has written so many. The leading article supplies exactly that check upon a natural inclination to "expatiate on the fields of prolixity" which he requires. When rigid limita- tions of space are to be considered, he is forced to select and condense, by which, though he perhaps does not know it, his style gains notably. The English reader who wishes to know something of him, may most safely be recommended to begin with such a selection as the Recuerdos y Esperanzas (Memories and Hopes). He will find that in spite of an occasional tawdriness of ornament, they are excellent leaders, well written, enlivened by flashes which remind him that the writer is also an orator, and belonging to the higher order of journalism, which does not aim merely at saying something smart, because something must be said, but at fighting a cause, and enforcing a body of doctrine. The consideration of this body of doctrine brings us back to Senor Castelar, in his capacity of politician. As has been already said, he is a sentimental democrat of the school of Hugo. A very painful experience, from which he learnt his lesson as an honest man should, may have destroyed his confidence and his hopes, but not his behefs. Now he is content to wait for the realization of his Utopia, but in the period just before us he was fighting for it. We have been made abundantly familiar with it by the teachers who instructed him. All 74 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. through his writing and speeches, of the middle period of his life, there runs that conception of the "people," as something which remains when you have deducted from a nation its King and nobles, its capitalists and bourgeoisie, its clergy and soldiers, and not them only, but, when the inquiry is pushed well home, every class which has an interest of its own arising from property. The very peasant proprietor almost loses his right to be considered "people," when he is contrasted with the labourer who has no land. He loses it wholly, in the opinion of these apostles of freedom, when he makes such a deplorable use of liberty as to consider that his interests are in any way bound up with those of the noble and the churchman. To the residuum there is to be added, according to the doctrine of this school, the man of letters, or of science, and the artist, for all of whom the " people " is credited with entertaining a feeling of veneration. The almost touching fatuity of this belief on the part of literary gentlemen in the high value put upon themselves by the "people," is thoroughly consistent. They are, with very few exceptions, men of the middle class themselves, with no knowledge whatever of any class except their own. They have evolved a "people" out of their own inner consciousness, more entirely than ever German did a camel, and they have credited it with all the virtues which it ought to possess, in order to make Utopia possible on this earth. The "people" and its virtues, being, then, taken for granted, politicians of Don Emilio Castelar's school, proceed, naturally, to insist in endeavouring to set up the kind of policy in which they will have free scope. That Government is conducted by A CONFESSION OF FAITH. 75 first taking things as they are, and then doing the best with them, is a proposition which became credible, and even respectable, to Don Emilio, when he had had a few months very trying experience of the business, but in his earlier days he rejected it with contempt. In common with all his school, he was impatient of all talk of practical measures, palliatives, and moderate reforms, as mere attempts of the enemy to defraud the "people" of its rights, under pretence of redressing its grievances. No Scotch Covenanter who refused to condone right-hand defections, and left-hand backslidings, from the pure doctrine of the Covenant, was ever more intolerant of worldly compliances. Nothing was to be acceptable till the " people " had their rights. Don Emilio summed up what he meant by the term in his Formula del Progreso (Definition of Progress, as it may, perhaps, be best translated). Here is his confession of faith in twenty articles : — 1. Right as the basis of the sovereignty of the people. 2. Equality of political rights for all citizens. 3. Liberty of the press. 4. Liberty of association for all ends of human activity. 5. Universal suffrage. 6. The jury. 7. Inviolability of the domestic hearth and person. 8. Administrative decentralization. 9. Independence within their defined sphere of the municipality and the province. 10. Irremovability of public officers. 11. The impot unique. ^(> DON EMILIO CASTELAR. 12. Abolition of monopolies and of all indirect taxes. 13. Liberty of commerce. 14. Liberty of credit. 15. Equal consideration and respect for all manifesta- tions of the human spirit. 16. Elevation of all classes and of all citizens to public life. 1 7. Abolition of the punishment of death. 18. Abolition of the conscription, making the service of arms a true profession for the soldier as for the officer. 19. Abolition of all exceptional privileges and juris- dictions. 20. The consecration, in a word, of human responsi- bility, with all its rights and all its faculties. To ninety-nine sane Englishman out of a hundred, such a string of words as this is merely exasperating, when he feels called upon to consider them seriously, and at other times merely laughable. The meaningless pomposity of the first and last of these articles; the redundancy of some of the others, due apparently, to Don Emilio's incapacity to avoid repeating himself when he can enjoy the physical pleasure of rolling out an ear- filling word ', the sound and fury of much, and the utterly impractical character of the whole—makes it difficult for us to believe that a confession of faith, which looks fit only for a very young schoolboy using terms which he does not half understand, can be the work of a man of real ability, and can have been seriously taken by grown-up people for a programme of government. Again, however, it must be pointed out that the author is a PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, 77 Spaniard, a member, therefore, of a people to whom the fine sonorous word has an attraction quite independent of meaning, that he was very inexperienced, and that he was under the influence of the sentimental Jacobinism of the last century, conveyed to him through the heady medium of Victor Hugo's superb verse. The experience of a century would be wasted, if it were necessary to argue seriously with what meaning there is in this Spanish version of a French original. It would be all the more superfluous trouble, because a good part of the remainder of this book will have to be devoted to showing by what process, much more effectual and rapid than argument, Don Emilio was converted from a belief in the ninth, seven- teenth, and eighteenth articles of this " People's Charter." As a rewar^ for his lectures on civilization, Don Emilio became Professor of the Philosophy of History in the University of Madrid, which is the old University of Alcala de Henares, transferred to the capital. According to the most orthodox French practice, which Guizot and Villemain, Michelet and Quinet, had illustrated in their time, Castelar used his chair as a convenient tribune for the teaching of his doctrine. In the meantime, he con- tinued to be very busy in newspaper polemics. For nearly ten years, down in fact to 1866, he and his party appeared to be of exceedingly little practical im- portance in politics. Narvaez and O'Donnell alternated in office. The Vicdlvarist movement of 1854 had done its work, by throwing all power for the time into the hands of soldiers. The generals were Prime Ministers, and their real strength in every case was derived from the army. The interval was not an unprosperous one for the 78 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. nation. The advance of Spain in material prosperity was again great. The Ministry of the Union Liberal, a coalition of moderate Conservatives, headed by O'Donnell, contrived to hold office for some five years. It kept internal order, and satisfied the national pride by a very decently conducted war against Morocco in 1859. Yet through all this period Spain was drifting to a general overturn. The weakness of the Government did not lie in want of principle, as the democratic critics said it did, meaning thereby the want of some such screed of generalities as is quoted above. It lay in the qualities of the men who governed, and their entire inability to master the circum- stances in which they were placed. Either Narvaez or O'Donnell could have administered effectually, if they had once been sure of their places. But they never were sure. They were compelled to pass their time in first intriguing to reach office, and then in intriguing to keep it. O'Donnell was more successful than any of his rivals, but even he lived from hand to mouth. And his party ended by falling to pieces, through internal rivalries. It is a sufficient example of the breakdown of all intelli- gent administration that during a period of increasing national wealth, the Government contrived to run up a floating debt of the very respectable figure of ;^2 0,000, 000, or nearly twice the then revenue. It is as if the English Government were to fall some ;£"2oo,ooo,ooo behind in its payments. The main cause of this failure to do what it ought in the circumstances to have been so easy to effect, is to be found, where no Spanish critic with whom I am acquainted CORRUPTING INFLUENCES, 79 has looked for it, in the incapacity, namely, of the nation to produce any man capable of dominating all rivals, or any body of men capable of acting together in politics, in a loyal and disciplined manner. There was in the political world a perpetual scramble for office, and a perfect readiness to reach it by intrigue. The Spaniards have lamented the intervention of the army in politics, the meddling of foreign influences, and the corrupting influence of the Palace. All three were evils, most un- doubtedly; but nothing can be less dignified than the complaints made of them by the Spaniards. There never was a time when any party was reluctant to make use of a pronunciamiento^ or did not find it easy to soothe its conscience by promising that this, which had put them in office, should be the last. As regards foreign influence, it is not to be denied that every successive revolution and regime in France has had its echo in Spain, and that the Governments, both of Louis Philippe and of Napoleon, dipped into many intrigues at Madrid. But then nothing was more natural than imitation of the master by the pupil, and if French rulers have intrigued in Spain, it is because they have found Spaniards to serve as their instruments. There has been no time, since 18 15, when Spain might not have settled its own destiny in defiance of France, if there had been unity and spirit enough. As regards the intrigues of the Palace, much the same thing may be said. Here, also, it has been the dissensions — the incapacity to govern, or be governed — of the Spaniards, which have given the corrupting influence its power ; but the question is a little more complicated. 8o DON EMILIO CASTELAR. It is somewhat difficult to write of the errors of a lady who is still alive, of whom many ignoble lies have been told, and who was much sinned against. Yet it is an indisputable fact that Queen Isabel II. has a large share of responsibility in bringing about the sordid collapse of 1868. It must not be forgotten that this lady comes, on both sides, of that race of Spanish and Italian Bourbons, in whom, with few and honourable exceptions, there has been no governing faculty from the first. Again with few and honourable exceptions, their character has shown that unpleasant combination which was seen in our James IL, who was half a Bourbon — dissoluteness of life, combined with a zeal for religion and the cause of the Church, which had no influence whatever on moral conduct. No prince was ever worse educated than this lady. It would be indecent, and is unnecessary, to insist on the scandals of her mother's life. Very ardent Spanish royalists have been known to believe that she gave herself to an officer of her husband's guard, before Ferdinand's corpse was well cold. Except during the short period of Espartero's regency, when her "Aya," or governess — to give the proper original meaning of the word which the Portuguese took to the East Indies— was the widow of the famous guerrillero leader, Mina, the young Queen was surrounded by well-born persons of the moral stamp of Juliet's nurse. The story of her marriage is one of the ugliest scandals of European diplomacy. Our own share in the matter was mainly stupid and selfish; but it helped the sordid intriguing of Louis Philippe, the unctuous hypocrisy of Guizot, and the frank blackguardism THE PALACE. 8i of Narvaez, to drive the Queen into a mockery of marriage. The domestic life which followed, and its sordid details, became matters of common talk. All the world knew how the nominal husband left the Palace in a huff, and under what circumstances he came back. A story which went the round of Spain, at the time of the Revolution of 1868, may not represent the truth, but it shows what was thought. " If I were a man," said the Queen — and everybody believed her — ** I would put myself at the head of my troops." " And if I were a man, so would I," was the answer attributed to Don Francisco, but nobody believed him. The Spaniards are still a monarchical and loyal people. The restoration in 1874, and the devotion shown to the present Queen Regent, prove it, if proof were wanted. Neither, though a moral people, are they over and above squeamish about certain matters of which we, with our Puritan tradition, are intolerant. But, even in Spain, the Monarchy cannot be defiled and besmirched with im- punity. The old sentiment began to die, and as early as 1854 there were, for the first time, rumours of anti-dynastic movements in Madrid. But the mischief would only have been half done, if the scandals of the Palace had been all. Unfortunately, Queen Isabel was a complete Spanish Bourbon. She united, with other characteristics, their particularly disastrous form of zeal for the Church. It has never been maintained that she made any serious effort to obey its precepts; but she was always, as be- came its devoted daughter, very ready to help it to regain its confiscated lands, and its proper influence in the State. Hence she was at all times ready to intervene in F 82 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. ministerial conflicts, under clerical influence. The peculiar persons by whom that influence was exercised, could not have been more effectually chosen to oflend her Majesty's subjects. There was Don Cirilo de la Alameda, Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, formerly General of the Fran- ciscans, who was, more or less justly, considered a type of the intriguing priest. There was the Padre Claret, a debauched soldier turned to begging Friar, and promoted Bishop. Finally, there was the Sor (Sister) Patrocinio — Maria de los Dolores Patrocinio, Abbess of San Pascual de Aranjuez. This last person had, at least, very little reason to lament the days in which the Church was in the plenitude of its power. She had been proved guilty of simulating the stigmata, or wounds of Christ — an old and common fraud — and sentenced to imprisonment. She had been repeatedly exiled, even by Moderado Ministries, for meddling in political intrigue. Sor Patro- cinio was, in fact, a survival of those beataSy or holy women, with whom, with whose meddling in public matters, and tendency to fall into various forms of heresy, the Inquisition had been much busied in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In those days, when the Holy Office still exercised a fatherly protection over the faith of the flock, Maria de los Dolores would assuredly have ended in a very austere convent in the Guadarrama, on a diet of black bread and water, flavoured by periodical whippings. There were the persons whose names were mixed up in half the backstairs intrigues of the time, and to theirs must be added the names of the Queen Dowager Christina, and her husband, the Duke of Rianzares. In what proportion lies and exaggeration THE COLLAPSE. ^ 83 1^ were mingled with truth in the stories the world heard, no competent authority has yet told us, and it is doubtful whether anyone ever will. The truth might not be worth having, if it were supplied. The Government was visibly falling to pieces from the day that the Union Liberal was destroyed by its own dissensions, and it does not greatly matter what exact share Palace intrigues had in the collapse. In 1866 a crisis was manifestly at hand. The State was bankrupt. The finance ministers were engaged in one unbroken series of unsuccessful expedients to find money. The glory of the war of Morocco had been tarnished by a costly and unsuccessful adventure in San Domingo. Outside the Palace the monarchy was falling into discredit, and the country was growing very tired of unstable administrations. The theory that to the victor belong the spoils is carried out to the full in Spain, where every change of ministry brings about a complete change of staff in the government offices. The country suffers, in consequence, from an immense floating popu- lation of " cesantes," />., persons out of office, and eager to get back. There was no continuity of administration in anydepartment, and the most necessary business of the nation was neglected. In the midst of the general disintegration, schemes for the restoration of absolute government began to be drawn up in the Palace — schemes of the maddest kind, and worthy of plotters who included Padre Claret and the Sor Patrocinio, for they depended for their only chance of success on the blind obedience of an army, in which the very men who were responsible for discipline, had been hard at work sapping all military subordination and loyalty for years. CHAPTER IV. THE BEGINNING OF A REVOLUTION. The Democratic party — Narvaez and Castelar — The University riot — O'Donnell once more — The Mutiny in the San Gil barracks — Exile of Don Emilio Castelar — Conspiracy — Don Juan Prim — Last Ministry and Death of Narvaez — The Revolt at Cadiz. BY 1865, all this folly had begun to produce its effect. The State was bankrupt, and the machinery of government disorganised. The democratic party, of which Castelar was the leader and the spokesman, had begun to preach the need of a real revolution — not a mere change of men, and a little tinkering of the con- stitution — but a complete uprooting of the existing regime. The only possible alternative, in the opinion of the Democrats, was a republic. It would have been too dangerous to preach that doctrine openly; but there was no doubt what the Democrats meant. Intrinsically, the party was very weak. Its partisans were to be found only in the large towns, which contain a small proportion of the population of Spain, and even among them, only in the capital, in Catalonia, and the south. Its leaders were a few professors, who were, for the most part, mere dreamers and pedants. Yet this party had one great 84 THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, 85 advantage. It knew its own mind, and ' was prepared to apply its principles. Being fanatical, it was also self- confident. The history of all revolutions shows with what ease comparatively small handfuls of fanatical men can dominate the overwhelming majority of a dis- organised nation. The time of the Democrats was to come when all the parties had prepared the way for them. In the prevailing panic at headquarters, the Queen had recourse to Narvaez, as the most proper person to keep order. Narvaez was a very natural choice, in the circum- stances. He was the accomplished type of "the man with a stick," on whom the Spaniard relies, when things have got to the worst. The familiar story, that when he was on his death-bed, and the priest, who was about to administer to him the consolations of religion, called upon him to forgive his enemies, he answered, " I have none; I have shot them all," has, doubtless, only a mythical truth. Yet it is certain that under no circum- stances was Narvaez the man to hesitate to shoot. Therefore, whenever there was a visible necessity that society should be saved, it was to Narvaez that the Court had recourse. Don Emilio Castelar came across this very formidable person in 1865. In that year the Queen made an offer to assist the embarrassments of the treasury by resigning the property of the Crown, on consideration that she was to retain twenty-five per cent, of the prices realised at the sales. There was much to be said against the arrangement, and mainly on the ground that, in the prevailing corruption, it would have given a wide opening 86 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. to fraud. But it is hard to see what justification it afforded for the very violent attack which Don Emilio Castelar thought fit to make on the Queen, in his paper, La Deniocracia (Democracy). Under the title of El Rasgo, a word which means any sudden act of courage, generosity, or magnanimity, and was, it is needless to say, used ironically, he asserted that the so- called sacrifice of the Crown was, in fact, little better than a swindle. The most offensive feature of the article was that Castelar maintained that, in constitu- tional countries, the Sovereign is a paid servant of the nation, to which the Crown lands really belong. This opinion he supported by a characteristically inaccurate reference to the history of the hereditary revenue in England. Don Emilio was at once punished by forcible removal from his chair in the University of Madrid. For this act of tyranny the Government of Narvaez has been much rebuked by the Liberal critics. Yet, it must be allowed, that it falls far below the standard of Nero. A Spanish professor is a Government official, who is, indeed, appointed by the University, but is paid by the State. When he goes beyond his proper duty of preparing youth for examinations, and applies himself to political agitation, it does not appear grossly unjust that he should be removed from his place. But whatever an unpopular Government does, is apt to appear unreasonable. Don Emilio immediately became a hero, and when Sehor Montalvan, the Rector of the University, refused, on the demand of Narvaez, to proceed against him "academically," that is, to punish him qua Professor, THE UNIVERSITY QUESTION, 87 from acts done qua Journalist, he, too, was dismissed, and also became a hero. In the days of his full vigour and confidence, it is possible that Seiiores Castelar and Montalvan might have been added to the list of those enemies whom Narvaez had no occasion to forgive on his death-bed. If they had escaped a file of rifles they would, as likely as not, have made a compulsory voyage to the unwholesome climate of Fernando Po. But in 1865 Narvaez was no longer quite the man he had been, and he was not confident of his footing. He was content with dismissing the oflending Rector and Professor. If this had been all, it would have been well for the Minister and the country. But the Cabinet of Narvaez was guilty of an act of which we can only say that, if deliberate, it was wicked, and, if weak, it was not morally better, and was practically worse, than wickedness. A body of students prepared to give Senor Montalvan a serenade, to mark their approbation of his spirited defence of the franchises of the University. They applied for leave to make their little demonstration, as they were required to do by police regulations. It ought, of course, to have been refused, but, most un- wisely and unfortunately, the permission was given. The music was selected, the instruments were ready, the crowd was collected, when, at the last moment, came an order from the authorities, forbidding the serenade, and ordering the crowd to disperse. There was about this just the combination of arbitrariness, and the appearance of vacillation, which would provoke a " popular demonstra- tion" in any country in the world. Accordingly, the demonstration took place, and then the troops were 88 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. called in. Several unarmed people were killed, and Madrid was thrown into a state of mind made up of anger and fear. If the intention had been, as was, perhaps, the case, to provoke an opportunity for giving the Madrilenos of subversive opinions a lesson, the action of the Govern- ment was no less stupid than cruel. An impression was produced that the Narvaez Cabinet was at once willing to be tyrannical, and yet half afraid to strike. Seiior Montalvan was elected deputy for Madrid. Castelar continued to denounce despotism in the Democracia. Then a change of men was attempted, and Narvaez made way for O'Donnell, by whom the Rector and the Professor were allowed to resume their places. The new Prime Minister was a man of much the same stamp as the old. They were both political generals, and barrack-room conspirators. They had conspired and rebelled together against Espartero, and then again in 1854. But O'Donnell was the more phlegmatic man of the two, and was understood to be more reconciled to Liberal institu- tions. Not that Narvaez was in favour of permanent absolute government. He, too, agreed that the spirit of the age made constitutional government a necessity, but he had a theory of his own. In his opinion, the indis- pensable preliminary to the final and satisfactory establish- ment of government by representation, was the exercise of an absolute dictatorship during a minimum period of six months, by Don Jose Maria Narvaez. He never fully developed his ideas, but there was a pretty general and very plausible belief, that it was his wish to employ those six months in putting all such persons as would be likely LAST MINISTRY OF O' DON NELL. 89 to disturb the working of Parliamentary Government by a moderate Conservative Cortes, in a position in which it would be physically impossible for them to cause trouble. Whether he had ever read The Prince is highly doubtful, but he had, by one means or another, arrived at some of the results of Machiavelli. There is something to be said for his view. Provided that a solid, intelligent administra- tion had been thereby obtained, Spain would certainly have had no cause to lament the shooting, or the deporta- tion to Fernando Po, and the Phillipines, of four-fifths of its politicians, military or civil. He did once approximate to his own standard, when he kept his country quiet during the revolutionary disturbances of 1848-49. At other times he was not able to do more than show by his actions how despotic he would be, if he was allowed his way. O'Donnell did not find the post to which he had succeeded an easy one. He had to govern without a real party in the Cortes, without steady support from the Palace, and with the knowledge that insubordination was spreading in the Army. The first sign of the approaching outbreak was the pronunciamiento of the notorious Don Juan Prim, at Aranjuez, in January, 1866^ Don Juan Prim was the son of a butcher in the town of Reus, in Catalonia, and had risen in the army by dipping into every political intrigue of the last quarter of a century. He became colonel, as a reward of his share in the rising against Espartero, and he won his promotion to brigadier by military measures of extreme severity in his native town. He had been kept quiet in 1854, by a military mission to the camps of the allies in the East. French 90 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. and English officers who met him came to the conclusion that he was absolutely ignorant of the business of a soldier. But he undoubtedly possessed the essential military virtue of personal courage in an eminent degree, and proved it during the war with Morocco, in 1859. He exposed himself with the utmost intrepidity. His Catalan countrymen believed that he was charmed against death from sword or bullet of lead, by his mother, who enjoyed a considerable quiet local reputation as a witch. The man was, in every sense of the word, and in every relation of life, a gambler, and therefore all the better fitted to figure in a revolution which wound up a generation of political gaming. In 1866, his first venture was a failure. He attempted to head a rising in favour of the Progresista party, but was only joined by a mere handful of cavalry. Finding that the coup had failed, Prim fled in hot haste across the frontier of Portugal, and from thence to France, where he became the hero of the hour, and raree show of the Boulevards. A much more serious military rising followed a few months later. The Progresistas, taking some orders of the police against public meetings as a pretext, had announced their intention to retire from the political conflict, since they were forbidden to exercise their lawful freedom. This abstention, which Castelar compared to the retirement of the Plebeians to the Mons Sacer, was in fact, a clear warning to O'Donnell, that the Progresistas had taken refuge in intrigues for a military rising. From the date of Prim's abortive pronunciamiento at Aranjuez, the Prime Minister had been on the alert. He knew that intrigue was busy with the garrison of THE RISING OF iS66, 91 Madrid, and it is said that during the great part of June he never took his uniform off at night, or slept until day- light, so sure was he that he might be summoned to mount at a moment's notice. The expected explosion took place in June. It came from an unexpected quarter, and was extraordinarily violent. The scientific corps of the Spanish army — the engineers and artillery — had generally held themselves aloof from pronunciamientos. They were officered by pupils of the Military Schools, Madrid for the engineers, and Segovia for the artillery. There was no promotion from the ranks. At a time when the army was seldom adopted as a profession by men of good birth, these corps were officered by gentlemen. The impression produced in Spain was all the more profound, when a regiment of artillery, quartered at the San Gil barracks of Madrid, broke into mutiny. This movement, too, was not a pro- nunciamiento of the common type. It was not headed by the officers, but was a military mutiny, in the strict sense of the word, accompanied by the worst kind of military crime. One exception must be made to the statement that the officers took no part in the disorder. There was one exception, one "garbanzo negro," or black bean, to use the familiar slang of the Spanish army. This was a certain Hidalgo, who was afterwards still more notorious in Spain. He was among the leaders of the rising. Under the direction of this man, and of the sergeants, the mutineers murdered their colonel, and the other officers on whom they could lay hands. The artillery were joined by some squadrons of another regiment, 92 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. which had committed the same crime. They seized on the San Gil barracks, where thirty pieces of artillery fell into their possession. At the same time, the complicity of the Progresistas in the conspiracy was made manifest. There were signs of a popular rising, and barricades began to appear in many of the streets. The situation was an exceedingly dangerous one. The fact that the artillery had set the example, was enough to show how far insubordination in the Army must have spread. When, too, the men began by massacring their officers, the military politicians were not unnaturally shocked. They had never intended that their example should be followed to such a point as this. O'Donnell behaved with great energy. He knew — few men in Europe, indeed, had occasion to know better — that the time for putting down a mutiny is the beginning. The other generals supported him intrepidly. All ranks of the officers felt that their very lives were at stake. For an hour or two it was none the less very doubtful whether the disorder would not spread. Signs of mutiny had appeared in other regiments, and notably in the " Principe," the Prince's Own, as we should say. If this regiment had gone, its example would certainly have been followed, and it is eminently probable that the revolution of September, 1868, would have been antedated by two years, besides taking place in circumstances of a more atrocious character. Fortunately for the Queen, the colonel of the Principe, Chacon, was an officer who was not to be terrified. He not only stamped out the first signs of disobedience in his regiment, but led it under fire against the mutineers, and kept it there. The failure SUPPRESSION OF THE RISING. / 93 of the mutiny in the Principe, cowed the agitators in other corps, and O'Donnell was able to bring the whole garrison against the insurgents. A very short time sufficed to make an end of the disorder in the streets, but the fighting at the San Gil barracks was very serious. The mutineers knew that the rope was round their necks, and they accordingly fought with desperation. Six hundred men are said to have been killed before the barracks were stormed. The loss in officers, on the Government side, was great, for the nature of the action compelled them to expose themselves freely. They were stimulated, too, by every motive of interest and passion. When once he is thoroughly aroused by an appeal to his rage, fear, and pride, the Spaniard can fight with the most ruthless determination. On the side of the insur- gents the management was bad. The only officer of any note who took part in it was one Pierrad, an agent of Prim's, who was disqualified for leadership by total deaf- ness. He was wounded in the course of the day's fighting, but contrived to escape by hiding himself in a well, in the garden of the Duke of Alba, till he found an opportunity to smuggle himself out of the country, by the help of friends. By night the fighting was over. O'Donnell could boast that he had smashed down the Progresista rising with a thoroughness which would de- prive it of all inclination to raise its head again. His reward for his services was one which is pro- verbially not uncommon. At first, indeed, he was received at the Palace as a deliverer, and the Cortes authorised him to suspend the constitutional guarantees. Severe punishment was inflicted on the mutineers. The 94 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. non-commissioned ofificers who had fallen alive into the hands of the Government, were shot in batches. It is a curious proof of the extent to which public sentiment had been debauched in Spain, that a good deal of com- miseration was incited by the fate of these "unhappy men." Yet, if ever soldiers deserved to be punished with the utmost rigour of martial law, these men did, for not only had they been guilty of insubordination, and of the cruel murder of their officers, but the artillerymen among them had offended against the code of honour of their own corps. The one excuse for the disgust caused by these military executions, is to be found in the fact that there was something odious in the spectacle presented by such men as O'Donnell, who had them- selves risen by insubordination, when they posed as the defenders of military discipline. In a short time, his critics had the satisfaction of seeing him driven from office. No sooner was the danger well over, than he became the object of Parlia- mentary and Palace intrigues. The Conservatives, including not a few very foolish persons who were dreaming of a return to absolute government, began to insinuate that O'Donnell was only half-hearted in the good cause of order, and that he had dangerous hanker- ings after Liberal institutions. The folly of the dream in question did not lie in supposing that an absolute government was impossible in Spain. It was, on the contrary, very possible; and would have been accepted by the bulk of the nation with satisfaction, if there had been a King with a real faculty for government on the throne, or a Queen with the political qualities of ( HIS EXILE. V 95 Catherine II. The folly lay in supposing that a form of government which, when once it has been questioned, depends on the personal qualities of the ruler, could be worked by Dona Isabel II., and with the co-operation of Maria de los Dolores Patrocinio. It is hard for any- one — and the more he has been in Spain, so much the the harder — to credit a political general with much prin- ciple; but it is probable that O'Donnell did think it impossible to dispense with some show of parliamentary government He was, at any rate, credited with so much principle, and therefore dismissed by the Queen very soon after he had saved the Monarchy during the conflict of June. According to their well-established custom of alternating in place, he was succeeded by Narvaez, who entered on what was destined to be his last term of office. O'Donnell's career, too, was over. He retired quietly, and died in Ihe following year, at Biarritz. Don Emilio Castelar had preceded him to France. On the 22nd of June, he had taken a sufficiently active share in the rising to make it advisable for him to get beyond the reach of O'Donnell. The account of his exertions that day, given by his biographer and admirer, Don Joaquin Martin de Olias, is discreet, and a little vague. According to Senor Olias, Don Emilio, "who was correctly credited with a temperament which made him unwilling to witness scenes of violence, which are yet inevitable in a revolution," did, none the less, "descend into the streets" on this occasion. He appeared several times during the day at the barricades in the " barrio " (/.^., district) " de la Corredera." At the 96 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. close of the day, he was of much use to his friends in enabling them to avoid the "great dangers by which they found themselves surrounded." No doubt, if there had been fighting of the most serious order in the barrio de la Corredera, Don Emilio would have been equal to the occasion ; but, as a matter of fact, the real battle was at the San Gil Barracks; and when once the mutinous gunners had been suppressed, the barricades were everywhere evacuated with judicious promptitude. To remain any longer in a conspicuous position would have been, on the part of the Progresista leaders, a foolish risking of lives which might yet be valuable to their country. In spite of the ferocity which he can occasion- ally display, the Spanish party leader, whether he be in or out, is not habitually a bloodthirsty man. In fact, where everybody conspires, where the victor of to-day may be upset to-morrow, and the fugitive of to-day may come back in triumph next week, there has grown up an understanding, which has the force of a constitutional rule, that the rival chiefs treat one another with a certain consideration. The defeated party is allowed law when it is escaping. The victors do not scrutinize hiding- places too closely ; and when the leaders of the defeated side take a seat in the train for France, under the nose of the police, it would be thought ungentlemanly to peer too closely into their movements. This consider- ation they are expected to repay when their day comes. But, of course, they must not force themselves on the attention of the other side. If they do, then a com- pulsory journey to Fernando Po, or worse, may happen to them. POLITICAL GIVE AND TAKE. 97 It is impossible to say what exactly are the rules on which this game is played. Who can define poetry, or the manners of a gentleman? There are things which escape analysis, but which we yet know when we see them. A good natural faculty, perfected by much prac- tice, has taught Spanish gentlemen when to fight, and when to run away; when tt) hide, when to see the hidden, and when to look in another direction. It is one of the charms of this strange country, one of the elements which make up the Espanolismo of the things of Spain, that high comedy and farce, melodrama and tragedy, are so inextricably mixed in its public affairs, that it often requires careful critical consideration to discover the point at which they fade into one another; and then, again, they often stand side by side in striking contrast The mutiny of the artillery at the San Gil Barracks, the murder of the officers, and all that followed, were melodramatic; or if the higher term is preferred, as tragic as savage passion, desperate fighting, and stern punishment could make them. Beside all this blood and fury we see the rising of Progresista politicians and ardent professors, which was agreeable, if somewhat noisy, comedy, with touches here and there of pantomime rally. O'Donnell, it is clear, did not wish to catch the Progresista leaders. If he had really wanted to lay his hands on them, he could have caught them easily enough. Don Emilio Castelar afterwards answered one who called him a "platonic republican," by boasting that his name had been in the terrible lists of sentences to death, which appeared at that time. But it was only in the list of 6 98 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. sentences — not of orders for execution. De lo dicho a lo hecho va gran trecho. " It is a long way from said to done," says the Spanish proverb; and when he who has the power to decide does not choose to exert himself, the journey is little likely to be completed. Castelar and his friends took hiding with one Don Jimeno Agius; and then, a few days later, for greater security, and convenience of escaping, removed to the house of Dona Catalina Coronado,"poetisa eminente," an eminent poetess. From the friendly shelter of this lady's house, they took their departure for foreign parts. The exile of Don Emilio lasted for two years, from midsummer of 1866 till the autumn of 1868. During this period he was mainly resident in Paris, but he also paid a visit to Italy, and I think to Brussels. The foreign refugee, who about half a century ago was such a con- spicuous figure here in London, is no longer among us. His sole representatives are the Nihilists and Socialists, who are much less sympathetic and amusing persons than the curious world of French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and German heroes, real or sham; martyrs, genuine or imaginary; adventurers of the good order and of the bad ; who once were so well known to us. In 1866, the Pro gresista refugees from Spain found more congenial quarters in Paris and Brussels than in London. The Government of Napoleon III. could not well refuse to allow the friends of freedom to take up their quarters in Paris. It may even be that the kind of toleration afforded them was the best service the emperor could render to the Spanish Government. They were allowed to conspire, but they were watched, and it is a well-known fact that RESIDENCE ABROAD. 99 O'Donnell was largely enabled to keep the rising of 1866 within bounds, by the information forwarded to him by the French police. During his exile, Don Emilio Castelar was able to escape the extreme of poverty, which is the not un- common fate of the political exile, by literary labours. It was during this time that he contributed his portraits of contemporaries to American and Spanish-American papers. He paid a visit to Italy, where he was much feted by Liberal politicians, and collected the materials for his RecuerdoSy that is, Recollections of Italy ^ a book which has been translated into English, with, I imagine, very limited acceptance. Its peculiar emotional fluency is but little to our taste. We are told that in spite of his literary labours he found time to conspire. I cannot say exactly what amount of meaning is to attached to this phrase. Foreign refugees habitually conspire in one sense ; that is to say, they meet together, talk over their memories or hopes, and lay plans, frequently of the most impracticable kind, for bringing about their return to their country. The real conspirator of these years was, I' take it, always Don Juan Prim. Juanito, or Johnny, as his countrymen commonly called him, was very well fitted for the work. Remembering the wide difference between the eloquent professor and the gambling soldier-politician, between the democrat with advanced theories and the barrack-room plotter, who was, perhaps, as entirely free from all restraint of principle as any smuggler who ever ran a venture in tobacco, from the lines of Gibraltar to the Serrania de la Ronda, it is, I think, safe to conclude that there can have been very little real confidence loo DON EMILIO CASTELAR. between them. To Prim, Castelar must have appeared a mere "ideologue," a person with a theory, and his head in the clouds. To Castelar, Prim was equally certainly a mere sword to be used, because for the time being he was indispensable, but to be put back in the scabbard when he had once enabled the people to speak freely, and to bring about, as of course it would, that golden age of democracy, equality, and virtue, which would ensue when once "right was recognised as the basis of the sovereignty of the people"; whatever good thing that phrase may be understood to mean. Prim may have been to some extent influenced by Castelar in his final decision " to remove the Queen's name from his banners." For a time he had shrunk from appearing openly as a revolutionist of a more thorough-going order than the usual maker of pronunciamientos. At last he was convinced that a real revolution was possible. As it would, if successful under his guidance, make him master of Spain, Prim was finally persuaded that the time for half measures was over. He was possibly helped in arriving at that opinion by the arguments of Don Emilio, and was quite prepared to talk it over with his eloquent fellow-countryman, who has a universal reputation for pleasant social qualities and lively familiar conversation. Whether he ever told him anything about the real plots, which might not haVe been safely proclaimed from the housetops, is another story. There was, in fact, very little that Castelar, with the best will in the world, could do to forward a revolution. All depended on the disposition of the Army to join in a rising, and the Army was not likely to listen to an CONSPIRACY. idi ex-Professor of History of the university, though he spoke ever so eloquently. It was for a time very doubtful whether it would listen to Prim, who was not very popular with his brother generals, and had been a good deal dis- credited by his hasty flight from Aranjuez in the beginning of 1866, and his failure to put in an appearance in June. But Prim had an ally of a far more effectual kind than any of his brother exiles at Brussels and Paris, or even than the Progresistas who had remained to conspire in Spain. The way for his return and triumph was prepared by the Ministry. O'Donnell, as I have already said, had been succeeded in office by his old fellow conspirator and rival, Narvaez. The new Minister was entrusted with the task of saving the Monarchy, and if he had lived in the possession of his faculties, and unhampered by Palace intrigues, he might have kept the revolution at arm's length. M. C. de Mazade, whose Revolutions d'Espagne is the best account of the disturbances of that country through the troubled middle years of the century, is of opinion that Narvaez made a fatal mistake in not adopting a more Liberal line of policy on his accession to power. O'Donnell had so completely smashed the Progresistas, that in M. de Mazade's opinion the Government might safely have relaxed the severity of its rule. Criticism of this kind coming from a writer in the Revue des Deux Mondes in those years — for M. de Mazade's book is composed of articles written at the time in that magazine — must be received with caution. M. de Mazade was a very well-informed and sound writer on the politics of his time, but it is always difficult to be sure that any I02 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. Frenchman, who belonged to the Orleanist Opposition as he did, was not speaking to Napoleon III. when he appeared to be commenting on the conduct of foreign statesmen. In the present case the criticism seems to me to be somewhat beside the point. The ruin of Queen Isabel's Government may be said to have arisen far less from any want of liberality than from a total want of principle of any kind, of administrative faculty, of common sense, and common honesty, in the Court and the political world of Madrid. Such as it was that Government might have lasted longer than it did, if the Army had been kept steady. There was not the smallest probability of a national rising in the country districts, while the middle-class Liberals and workmen of the towns who formed the Progresista party could never have ventured on facing the troops alone. Narvaez was very competent to perform the duty of keeping the Army loyal. His short final tenure of office was marked by one measure, which in itself, and its results, was not without a considerable element of humour. Narvaez sent a circular to all the regiments in Spain, pointing out to them how ill it became the soldier to interfere in politics. The doctrine, excellent in itself, was never preached by a doctor of less moral authority. But the result of the sermon was more curious even than the preacher. Every regiment replied by declaring its adherence to the ministry of Captain-General Narvaez — so that he provoked a political manifesto from the Army in the very act of rebuking its intervention in politics. It is doubtful whether, in any case, Narvaez could have finally saved the Queen. Something more was wanted FOLLY AT MADRID. 103 than a man with a stick, and he was very little else. His death, about seven months after O'Donnell's, destroyed whatever hope there was to be based on his efforts. The leaders of his generation were passing away, or had re- tired. Narvaez and O'Donnell were dead, the Conchas and Dulce were old, and, having lined their pockets in lucrative captain-generalships, or by rich marriages, were disposed to enjoy the fruits of their labours. Serrano, who had still a future, was a man who, all his life, played second fiddle to somebody. He had personal courage, the " becoming confidence " of the Andalusian, which is a Spanish version of the quality which Queen Elizabeth noted in the gentlemen of Devon, and the good looks, which were universally believed to have, at one time, made him a persona grata at the Palace. But he was not the man to fill the vacant place of Narvaez and O'Donnell. Prim could have done so, and by far the wisest course the Queen could have followed would have been to open negotiations with him. With a little management, and some money, the bargain could unquestionably have been struck; and, once in office, he would have been as authoritative as the most ardent admirer of absolute government could desire. But Prim had removed the Queen's name from his banner, as the phrase went ; and to come to terms with him, possible as the arrangement would probably have been, might have appeared too much even for the cynical Spanish politics of the period. The Queen fell back on Gonsalez Bravo, who was not even a soldier, and this was the crowning mistake of her reign. She had generals who were devoted to her, notably Pavia, the Count of Novaliches, and Pezuela, I04 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. the Count of Cheste, but she preferred Gonsalez Bravo. This man was an ex-demagogue and factious journalist turned absolutist minister. If impudence and want, not so much of scruple, as of capacity for having any scruple, could have made a successful defender of the throne, he was the man for the place. He carried on the govern- ment on the model of a court-martial in a mutiny. Nobody, indeed, was actually shot, for by 1868 Spain had reached a point when the most brazen adventurer thought thrice for kiUing without some appearance of necessity. But exile was dealt out with a free hand. Serrano was packed off, under charge of a policeman, to the Balearic Islands. Rios Rosas was sent with fifty convicts to the Canaries; the Cortes was kept in a state of suspended animation. As he had been a journalist, it is needless to say that the dealings of Gonsalez Bravo with the Press would have secured the hearty approbation of the Czar Nicholas. To him belongs the credit of having first introduced the Spanish Press to the "intended offence." When the Censor had disapproved of an article, and it was published, the paper was sup- pressed at once for committing the offence. When it was not printed, this was an intended offence, and on the third repetition, the paper was suppressed for being dis- posed to offend, if it could. The method is sovereign for keeping newspapers in order. While Gonsalez Bravo and his colleagues were engaged in combating the party of disorder, the administration and finance were growing worse than ever, if worse was possible. In the meantime, coalition in conspiracy had been made by all parties. Prim's agents were busy in the THE REVOLUTION, 1868. 105 Army. The generals were offended at seeing a civilian at the head of affairs, and, indeed, there were few of them who could be sure that they would not soon be sent into exile with Serrano. The danger of the Ministry was so manifest, that its conduct can only be accounted for on the supposition that it was desperate. A mere push was all that was required to upset the throne, when once the Army had become unsafe. The end is an example of the truth of Carlyle's saying, that great is bankruptcy. Bad government produced want of money, and want of money ruined the Government. Casting about for something to economise, the Ministry of Gonsalez Bravo hit upon the idea of paring down the expenses of the fleet. The Navy had not, hitherto, been a " pronouncing " force ; but this brought it at once into line with the Army. It was the more easily induced to move, because the Catalan sailors, who form a large part of the crews, are as republican as the Catalan mountaineers are Carlist. The ships of the home squadron, under the command of Admiral Topete — an officer who had gained some reputation at the bombardment of Callao a few years before — rose in revolt, in September, 1868, and the move- ment spread over Spain with the utmost rapidity. Under the leadership of Prim, who had been in the plot, the troops in the South followed the example of the Navy, and pronounced against the dynasty. The Queen's Govern- ment went down like a house of cards. One action of some vigour was fought on her behalf at the bridge of Alcolea, near Seville, and Novaliches, her general, was, at least seriously wounded in her service. But, with this exception, the historic monarchy of Spain came to the io6 . DON EMILIO CASTELAR. ground, without anything deserving to be called resistance. The Queen had retired, with her children, to the North, so soon as the gravity of the rising was understood. After Alcolea, she fled into France, and the butcher's son, from Reus, remained master of Spain. As far as Queen Isabel was concerned, the game was up. There were many proposals made in coming years for the settlement of the nation, but it was never seriously proposed to recall the Queen. Pity might be, and was, felt for her, and among her immediate servants there was not a little real loyalty, but it was everywhere taken for granted that on the throne she was impossible. CHAPTER V. UNDER THE GOVERNMENT OF PRIM. Prim and the Nation — The Partido de la Ponra — Divisions of Parties — Debates on Monarchy — The Constitution voted — The search for a King— The HohenzoUem candidature — The choice of Don Amadeo — The death of Prim. ** T T ^^ piensa el bayo, y otro el quo lo ensilla," says ^^ the Spanish proverb, the bay intends one thing, the man who saddles him another. It is a saying which may have been often in the mind of observers at Madrid at the end of 1868. A revolution had been made. That was, however, but a preliminary step, and, in the circum- stances, it had been a very easy one. What now remained to be done was to settle the state of the nation, and this was destined to prove a much longer, and much more complicated, business, than the expulsion of the Queen. There can be no doubt as to the division of the parts in Spain in, and for two years after, the "glorious revolu- tion," of September, 1868. It was Don Juan Prim to whom it fell to put on the saddle, and the nation which was to bear it. Castelar might declare that soldiers made revolutions, but that peoples turned them to their own 107 io8 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. ends. This must, however, be understood to apply to Spain in a limited sense only. No doubt, in Spain, as in other countries, the most powerful ruler for the time being must keep within certain bounds. The Czar Peter himself would not have lived for twenty-four hours, if he had endeavoured to force his subjects to become Lutherans. There are certain things which a Spaniard who wishes to rule his countrymen must not do. He must obviously not become a Mahomedan or a heretic, but there are also acts he must abstain from, which fall far short of these extremes. He must not be a Carlist, and attempt to set up the Inquisition, and give back the confiscated lands of the Church. He must not attempt to govern despotically, after the manner of Gonsalez Bravo, without a definite plan, or administrative ability, and by means of mere erratic violence. There are also certain definite obligations which he must fulfil. He must take care not to bring the country to the verge of disintegration, by destroying the authority of the Central Government, and he must provide a certain necessary minimum of security for life and property. Finally, and this is a very necessary condition indeed, he must be able to keep the Army steady. But when there is a man at the head of affairs who will abstain from these negative and positive extremes of folly, and who has the Army well in hand, then the course likely to be followed will be settled very much more by the intentions of the rider, than by any wish of the horse — and for a very simple reason, namely, that within the limits indicated above, the wishes of the beast are vague, and frequently contradictory. THE INTERREGNUM. 109 The first steps to be taken towards making a settlement, were naturally the setting up of a Provisional Government, and the summoning of a Constituent Cortes. Serrano was made Protector, an ornamental post which he was well qualified to fill. Prim took the substance of power, in the shape of the War Office and the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. Castelar had returned to Spain after the military revolution of September, and had been received with enthusiasm. He sat in the Constituent Cortes, as member for Sarragossa, and became at once the recognised leader of one section of that body. The division of parties in the Constituent Cortes must be indicated, at least, in general lines, but with the proviso that the word party, as used in Spanish politics, is a misleading expression. It does not mean a section of the nation which has, at least, a certain definite set of wishes, headed by a body of men with, at least, a reason- able working substitute for principles. If the nation in general were consulted, if every man voted, and his vote was free, it is hard to say what would happen. Probably a vast majority would vote for "a good government," without further defining what particular form it preferred. But nothing approaching to this ever happens. The Cortes is returned by the persons in office, and the Constituent of 1869 was no exception. It may be interesting to the English reader to get some idea how the thing is done, and he can be told in a few words. The country districts and the small towns of Spain, which contain the bulk of the population, are almost always behindhand in paying their taxes. This is partly due to genuine poverty, and partly it is the result of that Oriental no DON EMILIO CASTELAR. strain in the Spaniard, which makes him, like the Fellah and the Ryot of the East— withold his money, even when quite able to pay, till it is forced out of him. He has a suspicion — a far from unreasonable suspicion — that a too great alacrity in payment would encourage his enemy, the Treasury, to increase the taxes. Whenever a general election is at hand, the Gobernador Civil, the Spanish equivalent of the French Prefect, lets it be generally understood that unless the Government nominee is returned, every " real " of arrears will be extorted at once. The orthodox candidate has a thumping majority. There are districts such as the Carlist country, in the north, which are not so easily " brought to heel," and the larger towns, particularly on the Mediterranean seaboard and the south, are not manageable to the same extent. In these cases the Government generally allows the Opposi- tion a free hand, but not always, or to all lengths. When the opponents of the Ministry seem likely to get too much, recourse is had to fraud, or to that very Spanish institu- tion, the " Partido de la Porra." The Partido de la Porra, which is, being interpreted, the Bludgeon Party, is very important in Spain, and was never more to the fore than during the reign of liberty, in 1869, and the following years. There were those who attributed the invention to that apostle of freedom, Don Juan Prim. This was excessive, but there is no doubt that he gave it a perfection of organization, and a definite- ness of aim, not attained to before his times. The uses of the party are obvious. When you have freedom of the press, and it is so free as to advocate your removal from office, a substitute for the censorship is very naturally THE PARTIDO DE LA PORRA. in desired by a patriotic soldier, who sees the importance of avoiding all excitement of public feeling, but to whom it is not convenient to apply the customary measures of despotism. At such times, it happens that outraged patriots, coming from nobody knows where, and obeying nobody knows whom, break into newspaper offices, and do damage to the furniture, and cases. The editor and staff do not always escape. At a general election, again, it may happen that the return of an Opposition candidate is to be feared, just when it is vitally important that nothing should occur to disturb the unanimous expression of the nation's will. At such times, riots are wont to break out in the neighbourhood of the polling places. Cudgels walk, heads are broken, there are excursions and alarums, and the Partido de la Porra is as busy as the devil in a gale of wind. The police, intent on maintaining public order, arrest the whole street, and, oddly enough, it generally happens to be full of the supporters of the Opposition candidate. The police magistrate, conscious of the necessity of proceeding with caution in the dis- turbed state of public feeling, refuses to take the cases till the maximum period of seventy-two hours has elapsed. Then it is found that the prisoners are quite innocent of riotous behaviour, and they are let out, to learn, of course, that the Government candidate has been found to be duly elected, by a comfortable majority. In short, so little does Spain deserve Mr. Buckle's reproach, that it is a torpid mediaeval mass, that it has no reason to confess itself inferior to the model of republics in the art of managing an election. No Southern State of the American Union, resolved to emancipate itself from the 112 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. negro vote, ever saw the useful arts of bull-dosing and blood-tubbing, carried to a higher degree of perfection than they reached in Spain, under the direction of Don Juan Prim. The Constituent Cortes elected in these circumstances contained, of course, a majority for Don Juan. The old name of Progresista had disappeared. It was too closely associated with loyalty to Dona Isabel, and was given up for Radical. It had not been in Prim's power — or it had not been his wish — to secure a Constituent in which all the . members had no other policy than to " say ditto to Don Juan." The real division of wish, hope, and character which existed in the nation, were, more or less, repre- sented in the Chamber. The Carlists had begun to stir. The expulsion of Doiia Isabel had strengthened their hands to some extent, by drawing to their side some of the monarchical sentiment of the nation. The clergy, too, were frightened at the prospect of Radical rule, and had begun to exert themselves for Don Carlos. They had their representatives in the Cortes. Dona Isabel herself had no effectual friends, and the time was not come for the party which, in the long run, was destined to prove to be that one which divided Spain the least. The Alfonsists, or partisans of a restoration of the Monarchy, in the person of the Queen's eldest son, Alfonso, were, indeed, already a party. Their leader, Don Antonio Canovas del Castillo was, as he has amply proved since, a party leader of great ability, and a states- man, but in 1869 he had not acquired his full authority. The Queen could not then have been induced to abdi- cate, and the future king was as yet a mere boy. A DIVISIONS OF PARTIES. 113 minority in the existing condition of Spain would have been an impossibility, except with Prim as Regent, and the mere proposal of such an arrangement would have been an insult. Prim knew this himself, and feeling that there was nothing for it, as far as he was concerned, but to go on, he answered all talk of a Bourbon restoration, at least in public, by his emphatic " Jamas, jamas, jamas.*' " Never, never, never." His obedient Radicals said ditto so far, and for a time, at least, the cry of "Abajo los Borbones," "Down with the Bourbons," drowned every other. Since, then, there was to be no restoration of the Bourbons, the choice had to be made between a Monarchy, with some other family, and a Republic On this point there came a division in the Radical ranks. Don Emilio Castelar, and his friends, Salmeron, Figueroa, Piy Margall, and others, were Republicans. They were, even in the French phrase, all that is most Republican. Federalists, favourers of universal suffrage, of the utmost development of local government, opponents of the con- scription and of capital punishments, friends of free trade, and of religious liberty. They were, in fact, for the abolition of every restraint upon everybody, and for a Republic, in which each division of the country should have its local chamber, and there should be a Cortes of one chamber to preside over all. This was by no means the ideal of Don Juan Prim. He was admirably fitted by Nature, and would, if circum- stances had made it convenient, have been well disposed, to play the part of President of a South American Republic. But he liked something else better, and H 114 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. although it would be absurd in the extreme to credit him with intellect, he was not without a certain practical sense, and a power of recognising facts which were under his nose. He knew, to begin with, that the establishment of a Republic in Spain would give grave offence to Napoleon III., and that it was in the emperor's power to at least cause him great embarrassment, if not to ruin him altogether. Prim, it must be remembered, was one of the many schemers and adventurers who had plotted with, and who had more or less influenced, that dreamer. As there was a considerable fund of vanity in Prim, he probably believed in his own capacity to lead Napoleon by the nose; but he had played the part of Captain Rook, both in private and political gambling, too long, not to be aware that it is unwise to go too far at once, and to pluck the pigeon too roughly. His common sense must have told him that the Federal Republic, which looked so desirable and so feasible to Castelar, and the handful of professors, schoolmasters, translators from the German, and writers in democratic papers, with their heads full of formulas taken at second hand from the French, and their utter want of practical experience, who as yet formed the Democratic party, would mean anarchy in Spain. Time was when he would have been ready enough to bring anarchy about, in order that he might fish promotion, decorations, offices, and money to gamble with, out of the troubled waters. But circumstances alter cases, and there had been a great change since September, 1868. The old rhyme records of a certain smuggler that " now his pockets are lined, his morals are mended ; the laws that he broke, he will never break more." Don DON JUAN PRIM, IIS Juan Prim now lived in a palace, rode the Queen's horses, and shot over her preserves. Most of my readers must have seen the admirable portrait of the man which was painted by Henri Regnault, or at least one of the many reproductions of it. Prim is reining in a showy black charger, "bloody, with spurring; fiery hot, with haste," and sits bare-headed in front of a hurly-burly of shouting revolutionists, among whom his faithful Frenchman, Milans del Bosch, of the portentous white moustaches, is conspicuous. There is an air of triumphant circus rider, doing brigand chief in an equestrian show, over the whole thing. Prim refused to take it when done, on the ground that no Spanish general would be so lost to all sense of dignity as to appear without a hat. The fact which this absurd excuse very thinly covers, is that he disliked it for much the reason which caused Dr. Johnson to assert that he would not be "blinking Sam," even on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds. But however little he liked to figure in the part in a picture, he played it in life. The trappings and laced uniforms had a real attraction for him, and he would have them in tinsel and pinchbeck if he could not have them in gold and silver. There would be none of them in the squalid confusion of a Federal Republic, and for that, among other reasons, he turned elsewhere. Moreover, since he was to profit by them, Don Juan was now prepared to exert himself for law and order, and for the conduct of the Government, with some approach to dignity. His object became now to set up a King, in order to be Viceroy over him. In this he had the steady support, throughout 1869 and 1870, of the Radicals in the Cortes. Ii6 DON EM I LI CASTE LAR. The few Carlists, the few Alfonsists, the minute handful of deputies who were in favour of naming old Espartero king, were not prevented from talking. It was not Prim's wish that the Constituent Cortes should be too manifestly a sham, so opponents were left free to denounce and to argue. The Democrats enjoyed the same liberty as others. Castelar spoke much, and argued the case of his party at great length. He opposed the nomination of Serrano as the temporary head of the State, on the ground that it was not the place for a soldier. " Societies," he said, "which are ruled by soldiers, make me think of Bertrand de Born, who in the depth of Dante's Hell carried his head in his hand, instead of having it upon his shoulders." The quotation was surely double edged, for Bertrand de Born was condemned to "la pena molesta" in the sixth circle of the Inferno, for the sin of fomenting rebellion. If that justice had been meted out in Spain in 1869, there were few members of the Cortes who would not have been shorter by the head. But Don Emilio was not particularly happy in his quotations at that period, as may be seen from this following passage of a speech against the conscription : " The Constituent Cortes should note one thing — they should note that we men of the pen or of the spoken word, attach much importance to the right of public meeting, to the right of association, to the right of the liberty of the Press, because we use these rights, but the peasantry understand nothing of the revolution but the material advantages which it brings them. The people of the fields is eternally like the great type of our immortal novelist — the people is like Sancho Panza. The people seeks the ideal, follows it everywhere, but follows it seeking at the same time for its Island of AN UNLUCKY QUOTATION, 117 Barataria. Well, then, the Island of Barataria, which the people seeks in the revolution of September, is the abolition of the conscription, and the abolition of the taxes on articles of consumption, and if you keep up the conscription, and keep up the taxes on articles of con- sumption, you will have drowned in the abyss of reaction the poor island, Barataria, of the poor people, and that people will ask you, *For what have I sacrificed myself.'" In the mouth of a Conservative, jeering at the Revolu- tion, this would have been very well. The Island of Barataria was promised by a madman, and the pretence of keeping the promise was made by a practical joker for his own amusement. Sir M. Grant Duff, from whose translation I take this passage, does not seem to have been struck by the surely very obvious fact that it contains a sufficiently severe sarcasm on Don Emilio himself. It tempts us to remember more of the story of the Island of Barataria — that most kindly, but also most melancholy picture of the fate which waits on human illusions. Among the other persons who figure in the episode is the Dr. Recio de Tirteafuera, whose function it is to order the removal from the table of Governor Sancho of the succulent dishes put before him, on the ground that they are not good for His Excellency's health. When at a later period the Republica Federal, of which Don Emilio was one of the founders, did offer Sancho those succulent meats, the abohtion of the con- scription and of the "consumo," or taxes on articles of consumption, it fell to Don Emilio to order the boon away as injurious to his constitution. The experience enlightened Sancho for one generation at least, as to Ii8 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. the value of the Island of Barataria, promised him by Republican Quixotes. In 1869 the political knights of La Mancha were, as yet, riding free through the world to redress wrongs, and we forestall events by referring to the disappointments of 1873. We shall have occasion to remember, not only the island of Barataria, but the release of the galley slaves, and much else, when we come to them. The articles of the new constitution, which provided for the establishment of a monarchy, gave Senor Castelar an admirable oppor- tunity, of which he did not fail to take advantage. In a series of speeches, full of his own rather Corinthian, not to say gaudy, eloquence, he proved to demonstration that no monarchy other than the ancient and historical royalty, had a chance of life in Spain. These speeches are full of those digressions into very dubious history, and of those perpetual references to universal literature, common in Senor Castelar's eloquence, which leave us with an uneasy sense that the speaker had not always read the books he quotes. Still, they are good speeches of their kind, and in the Spanish taste. The central argument is unanswerable, and there are passages which show that Castelar had a sound conception of what the royalty had been to Spain. The answer to the speaker was, however, sufficiently easy. If there was no possibility that a second-hand monarchy vamped up by Don Juan Prim, and his obedient Radicals, could live, what chance was there for a thing still more alien from Spanish feeling, namely, a Republic, made out of French books, and on a French model, to be directed with men without experience, or THE MONARCHY VOTED. 119 proved governing faculty. Both impossibilities were to be tried — Don Juan's first, and then Don Emilio's. To use a phrase with which we are abundantly acquainted, the principle of the monarchy was affirmed. It was not done without much debating in the Cortes, and some fighting without. The Carlist bands had began to appear early in Catalonia, but they disappeared rapidly. All who were captured were shot. In some of the Catalan towns, the Federal Republicans betook them- selves to their favourite argument — the barricades — but they were helpless against the troops, whose discipline continued, as yet, steady. Armed resistance failed to shake Prim as fully as Pariiamentary eloquence. He answered the first with volleys of musketry, and the second he met with what was yet more exasperating, namely, dead silence. Prim, in fact, brought his followers in the Chamber into something like the order which Mr. Pamell established among the Irish Nationalists. They not only voted, and spoke on the word of command, but, what is more, they abstained from speaking. They kept silence, even from good words, though it was pain and grief to them. It was in vain that Castelar thundered, and strove to draw the Radicals by taunts. They answered never a word. The untitled dictator, to coin a name for Prim in a well-known model of our own, came often to the Cortes, and, when necessary, he spoke. His Castilian hearers were maliciously fond of detecting the accents of his native province, and certain Catalan solecisms in the use of the prepositions, in his speeches. But he was generally to the point, and he had the good sense to abstain from endeavouring to rival the eloquence 120 DON EMILIO CASTE LA R. of Neo-Catholic, or democratic orators. Perhaps he was warned by a little misfortune which befell Narvaez. That soldier politician once gave huge delight to his critics, by telling a hostile orator that eloquence was of little value in public affairs, since the orations of Cicero had not availed to avert the defeat of the Roman army at Cannae. Prim never spoke of the battle of Cannae, nor of any remote historical transactions with which he was un- acquainted. He took the much more effectual course of listening in silence, except when he applauded the " virtuoso in words," as he might have done some dancer on the stage, or espada in the bull-ring, and then going on as if nothing had happened. Castelar was driven to confess his oppressive discovery, that nowhere is the human word of so little effect as in the Legislative Chamber, where, in theory, it ought to rule. In the Constituent Cortes, as in most parliaments, the speaker either preached to the converted, or wasted his eloquence on opponents who might be influenced by a variety of motives, but not by persuasion. It had taken some time to settle that there was to be a king. It took longer to find one. There was, indeed, no lack of possible candidates. The difficulty was to find one who was acceptable, and who would also accept. Espartero had his partisans, but his candidature, which was the work of his friends, rather than his own, was a mere curiosity, a proof that, in spite of his weakness, and the general failure of his life — his honesty had secured him a body of faithful partisans. Then there was Don Carlos, but he was hardly a parliamentary candidate, and his cause was to be fought elsewhere than in the Cortes. THE SEARCH FOR A KING. 121 The Duke of Montpensier, whose marriage to Dona Isabel's younger sister had been a large part of the great Spanish marriage scandal, had a following. It was mainly among the commercial classes, who thought that the care he had taken in managing his wife's estates, near Seville, gave evidence that he would be a business-like king. The Duke did not openly appear as candidate, but it was understood that he was not unwilling to play the Orleanist part of King, by the invitation of the nation, and that he would have endeavoured to establish a regime of " juste- milieu " in Spain, to which it was as little fitted as was the Federal Republic itself. But the Duke of Montpensier had no friends in the army, and was unpopular in the country. That rather bourgeois care in the management of his estates, for which some men of business so much respected him, appeared small and undignified, in the eyes of the majority of Spaniards, who think that a gentleman should show a certain indifference in money matters. He was nicknamed the ** naranjero," or orange seller, and generally caricatured as a costermonger. Besides, it struck the Spaniards that there was something not " muy caballero," not quite gentlemanly, in a disposi- tion to profit by the misfortunes of his sister-in-law. To that feeling his cousin Henry, Duke of Seville, gave expression in such outrageous violence, that Montpensier was driven to challenge him. The duel ended in the death of the Duke of Seville, who was shot dead at the second or third fire. The particular expression which was understood to have provoked Montpensier, was *' pastelero," or pastrycook, a name commonly given, in Spain, to politicians who are prepared to change their 122 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. principles whenever they are not pleasing to those who confer office. "Los pasteleros," the pastrycooks, was a term much in use, in conversation, for the Cortes at large. When the Duke of Seville fell, Montpensier, it is said, held up his hand, and said, with emotion, " That it had never injured man before." The comment of the Spaniard was that he could not have said his hand had never injured woman, for it was beheved, justly or un- justly, that he had taken an active part in the intrigues which brought about the Revolution of September, 1868. To these must be added the candidature of Ferdinand of Coburg, husband of Queen Maria, the last of the house of Braganza who reigned in Portugal, and father of the ruling king. There has always been a party in Spain in favour of union with the neighbouring country. Un- fortunately, however, there has been no corresponding party in Portugal. In Portuguese opinion, the Spanish idea of a union has been too much like the coalescence of the lion and the lamb in Sydney Smith's jest. Spain was always to lie down with Portugal inside. In this case, also, there were rather partisans of a candidate, than an actual formal candidature. Don Ferdinand might possibly have been taken as king by the Radicals, if he had been willing to come on their terms. But he was not. He had contracted a happy morganatic marriage, and was living a life of ease, which he was unwiUing to exchange for a thorny and unstable throne, in what the Portuguese were in the habit of describing as the " mad- house over the border." It became necessary to go further afield for a king. STILL LOOKING FOR A KING. 123 Prim looked to Italy, but here another difficulty pre- sented itself. Victor Emmanuel was fully aware that Napoleon III., to whom the formation of the kingdom of Italy had been a diplomatic defeat, would never tolerate an Italian king on the throne of Spain. A sovereign of that nationality would be taken by the touchy patriotism of Paris, as the outward and visible sign of the loss of French influence. Victor Emmanuel therefore declined the offer for that time, and Prim's agents had to go once more in search of a king. 1869 had run out, and 1870 was well advanced, but as yet no king had been found. The failure was not a little irritating to the pride of the Spaniards. They felt rebuked when they saw their throne going a-begging. For Prim and the Radicals the situation was not without danger. Every day the interregnum was prolonged gave increased plausibility to the contention of the Democrats — that the only choice for Spain lay between the Republic and a restoration of the Bourbons. The Carlists, too, were gaining spirit and confidence. Many wild schemes were propounded, " for it was the heyday of folly." There were those who firmly believed that Prim did not want to find a king, but intended to "box it about" till he wearied the country into allowing him to crown himself. I heard a Spaniard of the lower orders ask, with genuine indigna- tion, why, since they must have a king, they did not take the Duke of Medina Celi, who was, at least, a Spanish gentleman. This, of course, was but one example of the wild notions which were floating about; but it was a curious instance of the way in which a certain traditional knowledge of their history lingers among the people. 124 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. The house of La Cerda — Dukes of Medina Cell — do un- doubtedly descend, through women, from the eldest son of Alfonso the Wise, who died in his father's life, and whose young children were forcibly set aside by their usurping uncle, Sancho the Brave. They long cherished a claim to the crown, which was formally renewed at the accession of each successive monarch of the usurping younger line. In the summer a plan suggested itself to a certain Senor Salazar y Mazarredo, a gentleman who had some- thing like a genius for setting the world on fire. He had already entangled his country in a war with Peru, whither he had been sent on a diplomatic mission, to arrange a trumpery quarrel about money. Now he was to do a much greater thing, namely, to make the Spanish succession a European question, to bring the smouldering rivalry of France and Prussia to an explosion, and to precipitate the war which swept the Second Empire out of existence, and perfected the unity of Germany. Carlyle's performing canary, who can fire off parks of artillery, was a prophetic image of Senor Salazar y Mazarredo, who, in himself, was a fussy little man of in- calculable insignificance, when compared to the magni- tude of the crash which he was to be the direct means of causing. We are in the habit of occasionally talking of our times as dull in comparison with the great dramatic periods of the past, and yet it may be doubted whether all European history contains anything more sudden and terrible than the great Revolution of 1870-71, which happened when it did, and as it did, because a handful of feather-headed Spaniards, confabulating at Madrid in the THE HOHENZOLLERN CANDIDATURE. 125 early summer of 1870, hit upon a scheme for providing themselves with a king. Sefior Salazar y Mazarredo had cherished a scheme for seating a Prince of the family of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen on the Spanish throne. There was a faint air of absurdity about the plan to the mind of the nation at large. The Spaniards found a certain difficulty in pronouncing the name. Sigmaringen they commonly did not attempt at all, and Hohenzollern was abbreviated and softened for con- venience into Ole-Ole. It was generally felt that the dynasty of Ole-Ole was not serious. Yet the plan had a superficial appearance of plausibility. The Sigmaringen family had already produced one successful adventurer in search of a crown — Prince, now King, Charles of Roumania. A younger brother of such a stock might well be supposed capable of setting out in the old mediaeval style to seek his fortunes, with his sword by his side, and his hawk on his wrist. Besides, the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen line is Roman Catholic, and connected by marriage with the Bonapartes — a very important consideration, indeed, as things then stood. Prim had probably not much expectation of immediate success, and must have known well that a Prussian King of Spain would be even more offensive to France than an Italian. But, shrewd man as he was in his vulgar way, Don Juan was still an adventurer. He was prepared to play with this intrigue as with others. The interregnum suited him very well; and he probably thought that the new candidature would serve to keep the gallery in good humour, till it was convenient to ring up the curtain. It seems likely, too, that they are right who say that 126 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. he trusted to his own power of wheedling Napoleon III. into consenting to the Hohenzollern candidature, by playing on the family connection. From whatever motive he acted, he did finally give his consent to the sending of Senor Salazar y Mazarredo on a mission to Germany. The consequences are known to all. Senor Salazar obtained his candidate's consent to stand with unexpected facility, and telegraphed the good news to Madrid in the joy of his heart, at this his second diplomatic triumph. The first, the cession of the Chincha Islands, in the Pacific, had saddled Spain with a naval war. The second was to produce an incomparably greater catastrophe. Senor Salazar's friends in Madrid were, in their haste, exceed- ingly pleased. "Ya tenemos Rey" — "Now we have a King " — was their only comment on the news, and they rushed off with the telegram to tell Prim. He had been hunting all the morning in the Royal preserves, and it was at the railway station that his jubilant followers told him of his envoy's success. Prim had sense enough to know what the supposed good news really meant. He wrung the hunting-glove, which he held in his hands, in an outburst of nervous irritation, saying, "You have mined your candidature; God grant it is not all." It was not all. It was a very trifling part of the whole. The French protest, the withdrawal of the Hohenzollern candidature, the clumsy persistence of the French, the inept obstinacy of the Duke de Grammont, the Ems interview, and Prince Bismarck's editing of the report of it, followed; and then war, and the disappearance of the French Empire, and the creation of the German. A KING FOUND. 127 While this great tragedy lasted, the farce-melodrama of Spanish politics was completely hidden. Among the dreams and insanities of the siege of Paris, there was some idle talk of the despatch of a Spanish army to help the French. Idler talk there can hardly have been anywhere, or at any time. Having now, for the second time in a hundred years, performed their function in the politics of Western Europe, which is to help to bring a French Empire to destruction, the Spaniards turned to their internal affairs. When the war had clearly gone against France, when Napoleon III. was down, and Rome had become the capital of Italy, Prim again attempted to find a king in the house of Savoy, and this time with success. Victor Emmanuel gave his consent when his son, Don Amadeo, was invited to take the Spanish crown. Now Don Juan seemed to have carried his plans into effect. He had found a king who came, at least, from a great family, and could be accepted without loss of dignity. The new sovereign, too, from the necessities of the case, would be wholly dependent on the Radicals, and Prim would rule over him, as Viceroy, through a term which might not unreasonably be expected to last for years. That night his soul was required of him. When the Duke of Aosta reached Carthagena, after a stormy passage from Italy, the first news he received was the report of the murder of Prim. The adventurer had died, so to speak, in his vocation. The plotter was murdered by other plotters whom he had disappointed, or was removed by fellow-conspirators, whom his success ofiended. There are, no doubt, still several persons in Spain who could 128 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. tell the truth as to his death, but they have every motive for holding their tongues. It was a not uncommon saying at the time, that Prim would kill Serrano, or Serrano kill Prim. ■ There is no evidence that it was the Duke de la Torre who hired bravoes to dispose of the Count of Reus, to give them their respective titles, but the saying may be quoted as showing the estimate pretty generally made of the moral character of the men who were disposing of the fate of Spain. The undoubted fact is that a gang of men, who were never identified, and who, in the opinion of most, were not seriously pursued, fired into Prim's carriage, and mortally wounded him. It is said that one of them cried out, " Do you know us ? That is what we promised you ! " and the story may be true, or may be false. When a man has passed his life in conspiracy, he is very sure to have associated with desperate fanatical men, or to have found it neces- sary to make use of scoundrels, and to give them promises which it is not convenient to keep later on. Either class is very likely to take its revenge, and both would be open to the offers of a rival conspirator. All we know for certain is that somewhere in the subterranean world of scoundrelism, in which Prim had dipped to attain his own ends, there were found men to kill him. It is but justice to allow that he played his part to the end. He died game — a more dignified phrase could not, I think, be appropriately used. A gamester who has lost, a plotter who is forestalled, cannot justly ask to be called a hero, because he meets his end with the courage which has not infrequently been shown at Tyburn, or Execution Dock, by land and sea adventurers of a lower line. THE END OF PRIM. 129 Still, the courage was there, and even a certain touch of Captain Macheath magnanimity. Though terribly wounded. Prim struggled up the staircase of his house without help, in order, as far as possible, to spare his wife the shock of suddenly learning the full extent of what had happened. He made light of his wound at first. When the truth could no longer be concealed, he met death with all the fatalistic courage of the Spaniard, and with a decent respect for the consolations of religion. CHAPTER VI. THE LAST STAGE BEFORE THE REPUBLIC. The adventure of Don Amadeo — His mistake — The Cortes — The CarHst revival — Growing difficuUies of the Government — The Spanish Artillery — The Hidalgo question— Resignation of the officers — and of the King. THE so-called reign of Amadeo, in Spain, lasted from the very end of 1870 till the first days of 1873. It was a deplorable adventure, and would, indeed, have been wholly contemptible, if the manifest honesty of the Duke of Aosta, and the lamentable fate of his beautiful wife, had not given it a touch of dignity. King Victor Emmanuel was certainly a very able man. As our knowledge of the events of his time increases, it be- comes steadily clearer that his share in the direction of the policy which brought about the unification of Italy was much greater, and Cavour's was less, than was once commonly supposed. His consent to his son's accept- ance of Prim's offer must, therefore, be classed among the follies of the wise; but a folly it certainly was. There is a well-known, and well-founded story, which makes the action, both of the father and the son, the more unintelligible. It is said that when Don Amadeo gave his first "besamanos," i.e., hand-kissing, as the DON AMADEO'S FRIENDS. 131 Spaniards call what we name a " drawing room," or levee, he had with him an Italian diplomatist, who in his youth had been a soldier, and had served with other officers of his nation in the Liberal Spanish armies, in the early years of Queen Isabel's reign. As the various notabilities defiled before the King, he noticed that they all recog- nised the diplomatist, and exchanged very friendly greetings with him. "You seem," said Don Amadeo, when the besamanos was over, "to have a good many acquaintances here." "Your Majesty," was the answer, "that is not surprising. When I served here before, I had a command in the police, and most of these gentle- men passed through my hands, at one time or another." They were, in fact, conspirators to a man. But if it was not surprising that they knew the diplomatist, we may wonder that use had not been made of his experience, when the question, whether Prince Amadeo should try the Spanish adventure, was being debated at Rome. So sagacious a man as Victor Emmanuel might surely have known that a foreign sovereign in Spain, whose supporters were to be found only among adventurers, would be in a most hopeless position. We can only explain the mystery by supposing that personal feeling overcame the good sense both of the King of Italy, and of the Duke of Aosta. Spain had been the last of the western Powers to recognise the Kingdom of Italy, and its insulting delay was accounted for by the influence of Queen Isabel, who had taken up the quarrel of her cousins, the Neapolitan Bourbons, and of Pius IX. Victor Emmanuel may have wished to enjoy a further triumph over the rival house. The son's motive was, we must presume, an unwise 132 D^N EMILIO CASTELAR. ambition. The report, that he was egged on by his wife's longing to wear a crown, may be safely dismissed. It is precisely what would be said, and is supported by no respectable evidence. The adventure, in fact, was hopeless from the first. Don Anmdeo had been elected by only 291 Radical votes, as against d^ for the Republic, 27 for the Duke of Mont- pensier, i for the Duchess, 8 for Espartero, and 2 for Don Alfonso, the son of Queen Isabel. Nineteen members of the Cortes had deposited blank tickets in the urn. Don Amadeo, then, was the king of a party, and of such a party. The Radicals were the mere tail of Don Juan Prim. He had a plan of his own for securing his chosen sovereign a peaceful reign. " When," he had said a few days before his death, "the King has come, there must be an end of all this (meaning the Parlia- mentary eloquence of the Cortes). We will send all these madmen, who confound progress with disorder, and liberty with license, back to their cells. Viva el Rey, and from the moment he comes here, let all who allow them- selves to misbehave to him, look out." Prim, in fact, meant to be Narvaez to a sovereign less whimsical, and more staple of intention, than Queen Isabel — to intro- duce a period of progress under the direction of an absolutely ignorant barrack-room conspirator, and to restrain licence by the help of the Partido de la Porra. His death knocked that scheme on the head, but it is doubtful whether in any case it would have succeeded. It took for granted that Don Amadeo would be content to be the accomplice of this new Narvaez. But it is one of the most extraordinary features of this wonderful busi- DON AMADEO'S MISTAKE. 133 ness, that the Italian prince really did come to Spain with a fixed intention of being a constitutional king. He really meant to play this part in a country in which the Army had just made a revolution — in which there were no parties, in the proper sense of the word, but only groups composed of the followers of this or the other notability ; in which none of these sections would combine loyally with another, but all wanted, in the French phrase, to have the whole blanket to themselves ; in which his family connections were an offence to the religious, and an insult to the monarchical feeling of the nations ; and in which his Ministers must needs be chosen from a mob of adventurers, without soul or honour. If you cannot tell the history of a ball, still less can you tell the story of a welter. For two years all authority and administration in Spain went on settling down towards the collapse which, at last, left the country at the mercy of the Republicans. Don Amadeo had hardly reached Madrid before he must have begun to discover the real character of the persons among whom, and by whose help, he was to play the part of constitutional king. The stories which flew about had all an element of rather grimy farce. Don Amadeo found that one wing of the Palace was assigned for his use, and another very dis- tant one for the Queen. When he objected to this arrangement, on the ground that he had hitherto been accustomed to live with his wife, he was told that no king of Spain had ever been known to do such a thing, and that it would have a deplorable effect, if he departed from a well-established social custom. It is said that among the friends of progress, who had now descended in a swarm 134 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. on the State, there were found some to put temptations in the new King's way, and that poHtical ladies of the party helped the good cause. I know of nothing in the moral character of the persons concerned to throw the smallest doubt on the report. When Don Amadeo found that the Palace was a hotbed of jobbery, and that his civil Hst was pilfered on all sides, he endeavoured to institute an inquiry, and to introduce some order. He was told at once that no King of Spain had ever sunk to such peddHng shopkeeper economy, and that as the persons who were stealing were one and all nominees of the Radical party, he could not, without offending his best friends, disturb them while they were "licking their fingers." Spanish society shunned the Palace, which had to stand empty or be filled by rabble. The ladies of the upper class treated the Duchess of iVosta, to whom they never gave the title of Queen, with a studied and venomous insolence. PoHticians of the more honourable stamp — Don Antonio Canovas, for instance — may have pitied the Duchess of Aosta, and even her husband, but they refused to have any concern with a discredited adventure, and even they were hard towards a gentleman, who had put himself into a position which, in their opinion, no gentleman ought to have consented to occupy. The experience of these two years is known to have broken the heart of the Duchess of Aosta, whose health, too, was ruined by the cruel climate of Madrid. While Don Amadeo and his wife were learning to what it was they had committed themselves, a mob of persons, of the moral and intellectual level of the American boss, or machine politician, mingled with no contemptible THE NEW CORTES. 135 proportion of common swindlers, were scrambling and tumbling over one another in the Cortes, and Government offices. The Cortes of Amadeo had, as a matter of course, been elected by the old methods — administrative pressure and the Partido de la Porra. It contained equally, of course, a majority of partizans of the new Monarchy, but the Republicans were represented. Cas- telar had given up his seat for Sarragossa, and had found another at Tremp, in Catalonia. A large part — indeed, the larger part — of his speeches during the reign of Amadeo was devoted to attacking the electoral misdeeds of the successive ministers. It was, and would at all times have been, an easy task. At this date it is hardly worth while to delay over debates, which only proved that Don Mateo Sagasta or Senor Ruiz Zorilla, of whom the first has since been a minister under the Bourbon restora- tion, and the second spent his last years abroad as an implacable Republican conspirator, did as other Spanish ministers had done. If the nation had voted freely, it would have pronounced against the Monarchy they were then serving altogether. Naturally, they took care that the nation did not speak freely, and as the Republicans were less docile than other sections of the Spanish free and independent, they came, more than others, in the way of the "Porra." When the day of the Republicans came, they were not under the necessity of falsifying returns, or of hiring a Partido de la Porra, because the Federal clubs in the towns made it quite clear that they would massacre the Conservatives, who were so blindly devoted to reaction as to put them in a minority. In the meantime the way was being prepared for the 136 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. Republican victory. The Radicals subdivided more and more every day. Each notability was more and more convinced that he, and he alone, was fit to be Prime Minister. Each group was steadily more convinced that it, alone, could supply its country with a satisfactory Government. There was an even more lively conviction that it was wise to make haste to enjoy. All would combine against the "ins"; nobody would help another to keep in. The Treasury became more embarrassed from quarter to quarter, while the demands upon it grew constantly more severe. The Creole insurrection had broken out in Cuba, and continued, in spite of the efforts of the Spanish Government. Here it may be observed that on one point Spanish parties are agreed, and will act together. They will have nothing to say, not only to the independence of Cuba, but even to the concession of such a measure of local government as will cause the Island to cease to be a milch cow to Spanish place- hunters. Whatever else may suffer, it is certain that means will be found to send recruits out to the island whenever the Creole, and the Negro endeavour to shake off the yoke. The loss of life is horrible, for the soldiers are sent out very young. The most elementary sanitary precautions are habitually neglected, and the yellow fever, or the cholera, carries off tens of thousands. But, in the long run, Spain gets the upper hand, and the island has to pay the bill. The Carlist rising at home was even more serious, because it was so much nearer. In this, as in the previous war, there was little or no real chance that Don Carlos could win. If the Central Government had acted THE CARLIST REVIVAL, 137 with intelligence and vigour, the Carlists would never have made head at all. But it was in their power to cause immense loss to the rest of Spain. The Basque Provinces, Navarre, Upper Aragon, and the hill countries of Cata- lonia and Valencia, are admirably adapted for a guerrilla warfare. The population is hardy and courageous, much under the influence of the priests, and proud of its old feats in the same cause, or in the war of independence against France. Not a few of the " caudillos " of the old war were still alive, and they were joined by some Army officers of strong royalist sympathies. The bands which actually took the field were supported by allies who never appeared in arms, but were none the less exceedingly efficacious. Carlist committees existed in every part of Spain. The more active members were the clergy, and " honourable women " not a few, who were often wealthy in their own right, and had, in any case, influence on the men of their families. By these Committees, or Juntas, the Carlists were regularly supplied with money, arms, clothes, and, what was not less important, informa- tion. It is believed by some that if Don Carlos had published a manifesto, promising not to endeavour to recover the confiscated Church lands, and to govern with a Cortes, he would have rallied so many Conservatives to his side that he might have won. Ramon Cabrera, the very able and ruthless Carlist general of the old war, who was alive here in England, where he had made a fortunate marriage, is understood to have given this advice, and to have made it the one condition on which he would consent to take the command. The presence of Ramon Cabrera at the head of Carlist armies would, in a military 138 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. sense, have quadrupled their force at any time. Yet it is doubtful whether his advice was politically sound. A concession of this kind to modern ideas might very well have cost Don Carlos much of the loyalty of his old partisans, without winning him any considerable new support. However that may be, Cabrera consistently declined to move till after the restoration of the Bourbons. He then took the oath of allegiance to King Alfonso XH., and it is believed that his adhesion gave a final disastrous blow to the Carlist cause. During the so-called reign of Don Amadeo, the Carlists did not reach the height which they attained during the anarchy of the Republic. They were once rather badly beaten by General Domingo Moriones, a Navarrese officer of some capacity, and constrained to submit to an agree- ment which, for a day or two, was supposed to have restored peace. But the insurrection never really ended. The bands soon reformed, and began their old warfare of raids and surprises. As they were composed of stout mountaineers who had never hampered themselves with knapsacks, and who had the advantage of operating in their own country, they had an immense superiority over the troops. The Spanish soldier is an indefatigable marcher, and is amazingly patient of every kind of hardship, but he had to deal here with those of his own countrymen, who possess these useful military qualities in the most eminent degree. Moreover, while the bands were sure of a welcome in every village, and were kept well supplied by the Juntas, the army was scandalously neglected by the Madrid politicians, and its leaders were too frequently incapable political adventurers. THE DIFFICULTIES OF DON AMADEO. 139 Thus the war dragged miserably on, and the failure to stop it was made one of the many grievances against Don Amadeo. The poor Constitutional King was much to be pitied, for there was some reason for his reluctance to take an active personal part in a civil war among his subjects. It would certainly have been made matter of reproach against him if he had helped to shed the blood of Spaniards. On the other hand, it must be confessed that a King, with the training of a soldier, who makes it a matter of conscience not to take an active part in freeing his realm from civil war, goes far to justify those who said he was useless. What Spain wanted was somebody to save her from civil war, not only a well-meaning gentle- man, who would punctiliously fulfil the mainly ornamental functions of a Constitutional Sovereign, if the country would first give itself peace and stability. If Spain had been such a country, there would have been no revolution of 1868, and no vacant throne for Don Amadeo to fill. The situation, in fact, was hopeless, and the Duke of Aosta gave a proof of tenacity of purpose in not throwing the cards up before he actually did. By the end of 1872 it had become clear that things could go on no longer as they were. About the middle of the year, Serrano had offered to help the King, on condition that he would agree to rally the Conservative elements. This was a euphemistic Castilian way of saying, " If he would govern by the methods of Narvaez and Prim, with Serrano as Premier." Don Amadeo's constitutional orthodoxy would not permit him to take this course, and Serrano retired saying, "That, in this case, his Majesty had six months more to reign." The unlucky King was right in one I40 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. sense. It was more honourable to play his impossible game out, and to retire, like a gentleman, than to make himself the associate of such a second-rate military plotter as the showy, purposeless, and brainless, ex-favourite of Doiia Isabel. But retirement was the inevitable end. His own health was breaking down, his wife's was ruined, and it can well be believed that she had become passionately eager to escape from the insults of society, and the populace, and from the killing winds of the Guadarrama, which make Madrid one of the most unhealthy cities in the world. At last the cup was filled by the famous question of the Artillery officers — a cosa de Espafia, if ever there was one. Mention has been made already of one Hidalgo, an Artillery officer, who took a share in bringing about the mutiny, and the murders, at the San Gil barracks, in June, 1866. This man had escaped, and had joined Prim in exile. He returned, with the other apostles of freedom, in 1868, and had been restored to the lists of the army. He had even been made a general. Prim knew the officers of the Artillery too well to suppose that they would consent to be commanded by a man whom they regarded with loathing, as a traitor to his own corps. He gave Hidalgo something in the colonies, but kept him well out of the way of his fellow gunners. The Radicals were less wise. They employed him in commands at home, and at once raised difficulties with the whole corps of officers of the Artillery. As has been said before, this body is, in some sense, a privileged corps. All its members come from the military school of Segovia, they rise in the body itself by seniority, and there is no promotion from the ranks. The THE QUESTION OF THE ARTILLERY. 141 officers of the Artillery, together with those of the engineers to whom the same rules apply, were the only officers of the Spanish Army, who, as a class, were what we should call gentlemen. Things are said to have improved now, but twenty years ago, there was as great a social distinction between the officers of the scientific corps in the Spanish army and all others, as between the officers of Her Majesty's navy, and the masters and mates of our smaller merchant ships. It was something much more than the difference between the Guards and the least smart of "marching regiments" in our army, for there never was any question of mere money superiority. The Spanish scientific officers were the visible superiors of every other in personal appearance, manners, intelligence, and know- ledge. They treated all others with that exact politeness which keeps a man at his distance. To their own soldiers they were good, and the discipline of the Artillery was far superior to that of the other corps. This body of gentlemen was exceedingly punctilious. It had forced Queen Isabel's Government to withdraw a scheme for establishing promotion from the ranks in the Artillery, by threatening to resign in a body if it was carried out They twice cowed the Ministers of Don Amadeo by the same threat, and twice coerced them into removing Hidalgo from command. At last, at the very end of 1872, the Radicals decided on what they called asserting the rights of discipline — that strange discipline which punished a high-minded body of gentlemen for refusing to serve under the orders of a mutineer, who had not shrunk from the murder of comrades and fellow- collegians of Segovia. It was decided that Hidalgo 142 DON EMILIO CASTELAR, must be maintained in command, and that the officers of the Artillery must obey him. Hereupon a committee meeting was held by the officers of " the royal regiment " present at Madrid, telegrams were sent all over the country, and one day every gentleman in the corps, from the most senior man on the list, down to the lad fresh from Segovia, sent in his papers. The Government took them at their word. The resignations were accepted, and measures were taken to replace the retiring officers by men promoted from the ranks. All who were resident in a Spanish garrison town at that time, must remember the striking consequences of this decision. The mere disappearance of the well- dressed and "well-groomed" Artillery officers made a visible change. Their successors, the promoted sergeants, looked awkward in their new uniforms, and carried them- selves like men who were conscious of occupying a false position. It was manifest, too, that they were not saluted by their soldiers with the respect which had always been shown to their predecessors. In every branch of the Army, and in nearly every class of the civil population, it was felt that a disaster had happened. Such a corps as as this would, in most European countries, have been regarded with envy, and its fall would have been seen with malignant pleasure. This was not to any appreciable extent the case in Spain. Even those officers of other corps who had risen from the ranks were proud of the Artillery which, as they knew, was highly thought of by foreigners. They felt that the whole Spanish Army would be the poorer if it sank from its old level. That it would sink was only too obvious. The Artillery soldier from ITS CONSEQUENCES. 143 being the best tended rapidly to became the worst and the most slovenly in the Army. Some foreign critics, both French and English, while acknowledging that the Artillery officers were excusable, have talked of their act as one of indiscipline. This opinion is one which I find it impossible to share. The gentlemen of the Spanish Artillery were not asked to do an ordinary thing, or make a painful sacrifice for a patriotic purpose. They were asked to give obedience, and the forms at least of respect to a traitor and a murderer, who happened to be a political intriguer in favour. In every army in the world an officer who is called upon to do something dishonour- able is entitled to "break his sword." If he draws it against the authority which gives the order, then he commits an act of indiscipline, but he is guiltless if he merely gives up his quality of officer. To say that individual officers of the Artillery had taken to political soldiering is beside the point. Those who had done so had left the corps, and, moreover, none of them had promoted the murder of brother officers. To say that in an army so given to prominciamientos as the Spanish, this touchiness on a point of discipline was inconsequent, and that the difference between what Hidalgo had done, and what had been done by other men, was a mere question of degree, shows, surely, an insufficient knowledge of human nature. Men are not always pleased at seeing the inevitable consequences of their acts, and are not un- commonly shocked by them into endeavouring to retrace their course. A very little too has been known to make all the difference between the tolerable and the in- tolerable. In the present case, the action of the officers 144 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. of the Artillery did startle Spaniards -into realising as they never had done before, what the inevitable end of pro- nunciamienios was. It inspired a feeling of repulsion and disgust for what had once been taken as a matter of course. There certainly was from that time forward a marked growth of respect for those generals who like Quesada, Castillo, and a few others, had at all times made it a point of honour to abstain from taking part in pronunciamientos. A feeling of disgust for those mihtary interventions in politics grew up, and increased as the events of the following year rubbed in the lesson. The officers of all arms became affected by the sentiment of their countrymen, and it unquestionably had a profound influence in inducing the generals who restored Don Alphonso at the close of 1874, to stand aside when the work was done, and submit to the leadership of Don Antonio Canovas. i I have dwelt at some length on the question of the artillery, not only because it was so characteristic of Spain, but because of its important consequence direct and indirect. Its immediate effect was to bring Don Amadeo to a decision to be done with his crown of thorns. He had hesitated long before agreeing to sign the decree which destroyed the Artillery corps for a time. His own feelings were entirely with the officers, but at last, true to his rule of playing the Constitutional King with the rigour of the game, he accepted the advice of his ministers. Then he resigned the Crown, and left for Portugal with his dying wife. His letter of resignation was worded with dignity, and was answered in the same tone by Don Emjlio Castelar in the name of the Cortes. FINE WORDS, AND POOR DEEDS. 145 The fine words of both covered somewhat sordid realities. If Don Aniadeo had not been prepared to accept an offer which ought never to have tempted a man of sense, made by intriguers whose character was notorious, he would never have come to Spain at all. When he was there, he found himself in the atmosphere of a gambling hell, but he might have known that this was what he was going to. The sonorous politeness of the answer from the Cortes corresponded to no effectual courtesy in action. The Duke and his wife went almost unaccompanied to the railway station. But for the kindness of a poor station-master on the frontier, who brought her a bowl of soup, the Duchess would have had nothing to eat on her journey to Lisbon. The date of this final collapse of the most impossible of known political ventures was the nth February, 1873. The Englishman who wishes to understand the con- dition of things which now existed in Spain, must begin by getting rid of all he usually takes for granted as meant by the words government in general, and Parlia- mentary government in particular. The interval between the death of Oliver Cromwell, and the Restoration of Charles II., was something like it. There was, to begin with, no recognised authority accepted by all, or even by an effective majority of the nation. There was a Cortes which, by no stretch of language, can be said to have represented the nation in other than the technical sense. Yet, since no body of human beings living in a com- munity which buys and sells, marries and gives in marriage, can possibly get on for a week without some kind of machinery for discharging the ordinary duties of 146 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. police, this Cortes was for a time the recognised authority, since it alone had even a pretence of a quahty to speak. Outside this body was an army, much shaken in its disci- pline, and divided against itself. Among the officers were many who were already eager to restore Don Alfonso. Others were attached to the Revolution, as the phrase went. These, again, were divided into sections. Some of them, with Serrano at their head, were nursing schemes for rallying the Conservative elements of the nation, another consecrated phrase for a Revolutionary govern- ment, which was to give the blessings of Progress and stability in some wonderful, but not clearly defined way. In plain words, this meant a military administration, with Serrano at its head, and his followers in all the places. Other officers were for more revolution which, again, meant for some overturn likely to carry them higher. Meanwhile the army, on which all three classes of military politicians relied, was being brought under influences equally hostile to all of them. Throughout the Duke of Aosta's stay in Spain, Castelar, and his friends in the Chamber, had been openly and busily at work preaching their doctrines. What they were has been already said. There was to be no coercion for anybody, no octroi duties, no pain of death, no conscription. A Federal Republic was to be established. Don Emilio and his party argued, with some appearance of plausibility on paper and in speeches, from perfectly sound premises to what was shown in practice to be a most absurd conclusion. They had started out from the fact that there are profound differences of character, and interest, in the various PEDANTRY AND ANARCHY. 147 historical divisions of Spain. They arrived at the con- clusion that it would be well for all if they were no longer bound together by a strongly centralised government, but if each enjoyed as large a measure of self-government as was consistent with national unity. On paper there was some force in this speculation. In practice it meant an attempt to undo centuries of history, and it took no notice of other, and not less vital, facts. For instance, it forgot that only a strong central government could restrain the conflicting interests of these various sub-nationalities from coming to open battle. It is characteristic of the Spanish Republicans that they kept to sonorous generalities. No attempt was made to define what the limits of subdivisions were to be. If the Catalans were to have self-government, why not the Maragatos, who occupy sixty villages round Astorga, and have a well-marked race character, and a dialect of their own ? Again, the surely rather important question of the limits of self-government had never been even partly thought out. Andalusia, for instance, is a corn, wine, and oil producing country, with some mining industry. Its tendency was, and is, to free trade, which it does in some measure secure by wholesale smuggling. Was it to be allowed to have its wish, regardless of Catalonia, whose interests are bound up in protection? The Federal Republicans of the Cortes never descended from the heights of eloquence, on which they preferred to dwell, to consider these practical questions. They never asked themselves with whom the last word was to rest, if one of the provinces happened to want more self- government than was convenient in the opinion of others. With the fatal fatuity of pedants, they calmly took it for 148 DON EMILIO C A STELA R. granted that all the jarring mass of Spanish humanity, with its tendencies to a little jealous local patriotism, and its disastrous facility in drifting into adventurous vagabondage, would allow itself tamely to be cut and carved about by them. A great part of all this talk had passed unheeded by nineteen-twentieths of the nation to which the eloquence of its Cortes is a tale of little meaning, but as much of it as referred to the abolition of the conscription had found very favourable and attentive hearers in the ranks of the army. In that quarter it had been zealously spread, by agents who were able to interpret the platitudes and generalities of Parliamentary eloquence into terms easily understood of the people. While the Republican deputies were up in their balloon eloquently perorating, a different body of persons were busy down below in cafes, bodegas, and streets, helping on the good cause. This was the time of Federal clubs which, as Don Emilio Castelar might have said, were engaged in kindling Sancho's love of the ideal by offering him his island of Barataria. The modern name of that island was the Commune. It is a univer- sally recognised truth, that great crimes which strike the imagination, and have some appearance of novelty, have a tendency to produce imitation. Something of the same kind happens in the case of public crimes. The Com- mune had its admirers in Spain, who made the not wholly foolish calculation, that as the central government was weaker in Spain than in France, and as it would be a case with them, not of one, but of many communes, their chance of success was very good. These agitators were aware, however, that much must depend on the army. CORRUPTION OF THE ARMY. 149 So they were very busy with the common soldiers. Their favourite argument was, that as the Federal Republicans had condemned the conscription, they would not, of course, retain in the ranks soldiers who had been levied by former governments. The establishment of the Republic would be followed by the release from service of all men who did not choose to stay and fight the Carlists of their own free will. This was the chief bait offered to the soldiers. But there was also much of the usual socialistic common-places, the preaching of class hatred, and of the gospel of plunder, which found hearers among the workmen of the towns, and the labourers in a few of the poor country districts. Some of the men engaged in this agitation were mere fanatics, some were only following the modern Spanish practice of repeating French originals at second-hand. There was, however, no small element of downright scoundrelism. Among the members of the Federal clubs were the sinister ruffians, with whom we afterwards became acquainted as the Federal Volunteers of Liberty, cut-throats who swaggered about in red caps, who terrorized decent people in the towns, who oppressed Carlist villages in which there were only women and old men, but who were never known by any chance to face an armed Carlist band. The Cortes, to which it fell to endeavour to make ropes out of all this sand, had been elected by King Amadeo's Ministers by the usual means — fraud and the Partido de la Porra. It therefore contained a majority of Monarchists, or, as they preferred to say. Constitu- tionalists; but this party, besides being split into in- ISO DON EMILIO CASTELAR. numerable sections by personal rivalries, was decapitated by the resignation of the king, whom they had found with so much difficulty, and after so many delays. Human folly could not go the length of supposing that another younger son would be found to take the place which Don Amadeo had discovered to be unendurable. The choice lay between a Republic, and a restoration of the Bour- bons, for which the Constitutionalists were not prepared. Indeed, the partisans of Don Alfonso were not them- selves willing to bring him back at once. Queen Isabel, it must be remembered, had no partisans. Her son was as yet a mere boy of fourteen, who was in the middle of an education of which part was received in the Theresianum, in Austria, and part among ourselves at Sandhurst. His friends, with Don Antonio Canovas at their head, were by no means anxious that he should come back too soon. A choice which lay between a king who could not be found and a Republic was, in fact, of the kind called Hobson's. It was that or nothing. So the Republic was proclaimed on the 14th February, and, not for the first time in the history of legislative chambers elected theoretically to give effect to the wishes of a majority, it was the minority which had its way. It at least wanted something which had not yet been proved to be impossible. So from the 14th February, 1873, Spain became a Republic. So much was settled, and what remained to be done now was to fix upon the particular kind of Republic Spain was to be. The first step was to get a new Ministry, and one was formed in which Sefior Castelar became Foreign Minister. His Re- TPVO REPUBLICS. 151 publican friends, Senores Salmeron, Figueras, and Pi y Margall, held other offices, and the remainder were filled by Constitutionalists. The avowed object of this arrangement was to provide a Government of com- promise, which would tide over the crisis till a new Cortes was elected, and the state of the nation settled once more. The real object was to make those pre- liminary changes in the governorships of provinces, the mayoralties of towns, and the military commands, which are always found necessary in Spain by a new Ministry before it consults the wishes of the nation. This Ministry was peculiar among Spanish Cabinets, since one-half of it was appointed to watch the other half. The Constitutionalists, in accepting the Republic, had made a mental reservation. They meant their Republic to be only the monarchy writ with another name — some- thing, as near as might-be, like M. Thiers' Conservative Republic in France. They naturally were to supply the M. Thiers if they could, and were at any rate to have the places. Very different was the intention of the Federals. They meant to make a Republic ac- cording to their own ideas, and being the more active, determined party of the two, with the clearer, immediate object before them, they soon began to get the upper hand. Federalists were pushed into places everywhere. The machinery of local government was got under their control on all sides, and it soon became clear that the Constitutionalists were being pushed aside. This dis- covery led, within two months, to a conflict between the parties which diversified the brief history of the Federal Republic with its first coup d' etat. But before 152 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. that date the effects of the estabhshment of the Re- public had been made manifest in several parts of Spain. Nothing had been considered more pressing by the new Governors of the nation than the duty of putting the military commands into safe hands. Don Domingo Moriones, who commanded the best of the Spanish troops then collected in the North against the Carlists, was suspected of Alfonsist leanings. It was decided to replace him by Don Manuel Pavia y Rodriguez de Albuquerque, a gentleman of whom more will be heard later on. Pavia was understood to be attached to the Revolution. He undertook the mission, and discharged it with complete success, for Moriones offered no oppo- sition. Pavia took the command against the Carlists, and set about his duty of maintaining order and disci- pline, which he did with vigour during the few weeks which intervened between his appointment and his recall to Madrid, to assume other duties. He was succeeded in the North by Nouvilas, one of the most despicable of the political soldiers who belonged to the Republican party. Under the management of this man the work of reducing the army to the condition of a mob went on briskly, and the Carlists gained ground and strength at an amazing rate. The peril from the North had been tided over fairly well, but things took a very different course in the second considerable Spanish army — that of Catalonia. One Ga- minde, an undoubted Alfonsist, was in command in that province, and the Republican Ministry was hardly in office before it was warned that danger was to be expected from him. It was relieved, but by an event which was A FLASH IN THE PAN. 153 the first warning of the anarchy destined to overspread nearly half of Spain in the next few months. What happened was this. So soon as Gaminde heard of the abdication of Don Amadeo, he decided to pro- claim Don Alfonso. For this purpose he concentrated more than twenty thousand men, the whole of his field force, and many of the smaller garrisons, in the neigh- bourhood of Barcelona. But no sooner were the regiments collected, than General Gaminde was made to understand that he could not rely on the obedience of his soldiers. The fact was that the army of Catalonia, having been much quartered in manufacturing towns, had come greatly under the influence of the Federalist agitators. The soldiers had been taught that the new Republic would abolish the conscription, and that no man would be compelled to serve. To the great majority of them this meant that they would be allowed to take their discharge, and go home. They had no wish to fight the Catalan Carlists, whose device of God, Country, and King (Dios, Patria, y Rey) enjoyed a good deal of their sympathy. Being drawn from all parts of Spain, they had no local patriotism ; they did not feel called upon to defend the Catalan Liberal from the Catalan Carlist. If they thought on the matter at all, it was to the effect that the task might be left to their heroic friends, the Federals of the Clubs, who were already organizing themselves into the Volunteers of Liberty, and made a very fire-eating appearance, with their red caps. The sergeants— always a bad element in the old Spanish army — were burning to share the luck of their colleagues of the Artillery. With an army 154 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. in such a disposition as this, there was no pronuncia- miento for Don Alfonso to be attempted. Gaminde went on board a small steamer early in the morning, and ran away to France. When the men were called under arms by the second in command, and an attempt was made to induce them to " pronounce," the sergeants raised the cry of "Viva la Repiiblica Social!" and it was enthusiastically taken up. Nearly two-thirds of the officers, who were known for their Alfonsist opinions, took themselves off as quickly as they could. Then the whole twenty thousand were defiled through the town, past the Casas Consistoriales (the Town Hall), taking the oath to the new Republic. Nobody who saw it will forget the spectacle presented by these twenty thousand men, infantry, cavalry, artillery, with their guns and tumbrels, as they marched up the long steep street leading to the Square in front of the Casas Consistoriales, and poured out of the shadow of the tall houses into the sunlight. They went in no order, with their hats put on backside foremost — the outward and visible sign with the Spanish soldier that discipline is suspended for the time being — shouting, singing, frantically cheering as they passed the Town Hall, where, on a balcony and in front of a great gimcrack glaring French print of a half- naked model, with a Phrygian cap, which did duty for the Republic, stood a group of vulgar - looking fellows, the local lights of Federalism, who gesticulated till the perspiration ran down their coarse faces, and bawled speeches, of which not one syllable could be heard in the din. Then the soldiers poured down the hill on the other side. TWENTY THOUSAND MUTINEERS. 155 It was a rather terrible sight too, for, after all, one of the richest towns on the shore of the Mediterranean lay at the mercy of twenty thousand ignorant men, broken loose from all control. But not a shop window was broken, or man or woman insulted. The men were misled ; they were not criminal. Drink, which would have turned English soldiers, in such a case, into devils before midnight, is happily no danger in Spain. The end was pathetic, or ludicrous, rather than tragic. The men having acclaimed the government which was to bring in the millennium, asked for their island of Barataria — their discharge ; and were told that patriotism required them to stay till the Carlists were conquered. This was of the nature of a douse of cold water, but the soldiers consented, on condition that the Federal volunteers would march with them. To this, however, the fire-eating defenders of enlightened principles replied that their sacred duty required them to stay in the town, and watch the reaction- aries who were plotting against the Republic. Hereupon the soldiers reduced the reign of liberty and the right of freemen, to practice for themselves, by marching off home by the thousand, after stacking their arms in the barracks. The army of Catalonia ceased to exist, the Carlists were masters of the open country, and the Republic was established. CHAPTER VIL THE FIRST STAGE OF THE REPUBLIC. The Bill presented to the Republicans —Anarchy in the army, the towns, and the country districts — General Pavia — The 23rd April — Senor Castelar a reactionary — The panic of Senor Figueras — The delusions of Senor Pi y Margall — A prize fighter in a crowd. DON EMILIO CASTELAR has made the naive confession that a political doctrine is subjected to a severe test when its partisans are suddenly called upon to put it into practice. Our own Mr. Morley has spoken of the Nemesis which overtakes a party which has been too lavish of promises in opposition. The history of the Federal Republic in Spain is an illustration of the truth of both sayings. The Federal Republicans had been prodigally lavish of promises, and those, too, of a kind which is particularly difficult to fulfil. Most Spanish parties had been, it is true, ready to make great offers when in opposition ; but, then, what they offered were commonly promotions, and places which could, more or less, be given when the turn of the wheel carried the outs into office. Thanks to the methods of Spanish politics, the Spanish army could boast of a staff of general officers capable of supplying all Europe, while 156 THE CHICKENS RETURN TO ROOST. 157 the number of its ex-ministers would probably have been sufficient to fill all the Cabinets of the constitutionally- govemed countries of the Old World, and the South American republics into the bargain. But the Federalistas had done more than merely promise places — they had undertaken to make a new heaven, and a new earth, and they had done this, not merely by general promises, but by preaching a doctrine. Now they had to keep their word, and the process was likely to lead to painful disappointments, for two reasons. One was that many of the promises could not be kept while Spain remained Spain ; the other was this, that many of those to whom a new heaven and earth had been promised had interpreted the words of the Federalistas in a sense of their own, and were thoroughly prepared to insist upon the fulfilment of the engagements entered into by the politicians in ways which those gentlemen had never contemplated. The traditional bad quarter of an hour in which the bill is presented began, for the Federals, with the estab- lishment of the Republic. It has been shown how the teaching of the doctrines of the Federalistas had destroyed the army of Catalonia, and had left the Carlists unopposed in one of the two main seats of their power. A large proportion of the troops in that district had disbanded. It might have been better if all had followed their example. A remnant, however, remained ; some restrained by loyalty, or a sense of shame, others by mere habit, but many because they were tempted by the prospect of a life of license at free quarters among the Carlist villages, now that dis- cipline was relaxed, and authority had passed, as they 158 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. were told, to "the people" — that convenient expression which, in revolutionary times, means any knot of persons who happen to have a common object for the moment. These men were guilty of horrible excesses. The colonel of the Carzadores de Madrid, who endeavoured to keep order in his regiment, was murdered by muti- neers. One column of troops, under the nominal command of an officer of Italian descent, named Cabrinetti, became a mere horde of brigands. Cabri- netti did his best to restrain them by persuasion, but to no purpose. They amused themselves by pelting him with fruit stolen from the orchards as they straggled through the country. Then they did worse, for they betook themselves to the military excesses for which the French armies were so severely punished by the Spaniards in the War of Independence. In one village they amused themselves by tying the men to the iron "rejas," that is, bars of the windows, and then violating their wives and daughters before their faces. The Spanish peasantry never would stand this sort of thing tamely. The country rose on the ruffians, and called in the Carlist bands to protect them. With that instinctive knowledge of the arts of partisan warfare which is peculiarly Spanish, the Catalan countrymen laid a trap for the mutineers. They enticed them into a carefully- prepared ambush in one of the villages, and cut them to pieces. Cabrinetti himself was killed, and most of the officers, who had remained with the column at the risk of their lives, perished with him. The Carlists, as might be supposed, gained ground rapidly, and in a short time were masters of everything except the EL CANTONALISMO. 159 Liberal towns, and a few forts which they had no means of besieging. The mischief did not reach quite the same height in other provinces; but it was notorious that in the South the Federalistas had done much to corrupt the troops, and were preaching the most subversive doctrines. They had taken up the notion of a Federal Republic, and had developed it into something which they were pleased to call "el cantonalismo." There was much talk in Spain, at that time, of the Swiss canton, and the word struck the imagination of the caf^ politicians. Working in their empty heads, it produced "el cantonalismo." Not that this was in any sense original, for it was only, after all, an imitation of the French Communism. The modern Spaniard is singularly incapable of originating anything for himself. The great days of " el cantonalismo " came a little later. For the present it was only a very serious threat. Even in the sober and loyal atmosphere of Castile there was danger, and the troops in the very capital began to show signs of the working of those doctrines which had plunged Catalonia, and were about to plunge the South, into anarchy. The sight of this monster of their own creating was a painful shock to some, at least, though not to all, of the Federalistas. " It is sad," says M. Taine, " to go to sleep in what you think is a sheep-cot, and to wake in the middle of a pack of wolves." The experience usually works on sentimental persons who have committed this error in one of two ways. Some persist in asserting that the wolves are really sheep, and that this will be seen so soon as they have been allowed to eat a sufficient number i6o DON EMTLIO CASTELAR. of reactionaries. Others see that a wolf is a wolf, and set about treating him accordingly. Don Emilio Castelar belonged to the more teachable class. Hitherto he had been little more, to put the simple fact into plain words, than an echo of French Republican and humanitarian platitudes. He had no real experience of affairs, and had passed his life talking and dreaming. Nobody, to quote one of Lord Macaulay's slashing phrases, "but an idiot or a biographer," can deny that he had a larger share than any living man in producing the anarchy with which he was now called upon to deal. He had worked hard, and, from the day that Prim was removed by assassina- tion, with increasing effect, to make any form of govern- ment other than his ideal Federal Republic impossible. He had, as he afterwards confessed, poured out floods of persuasive eloquence in support of doctrines of which he did not, in the least, foresee the practical effect. So far he had only been one dreamer and agitator among many, differing from others in the amazing volume of his fecundity, but not by any means original in method or ideas. Contact with realities had, however, the more wholesome of the two possible eifects on him. He did not wrap himself tighter in his own illusions, and persist in asserting that the wolves' den was a sheep-cot. He set about killing the wolves. This also has been seen before ; and if Don Emilio had done no more than pass, even with extraordinary rapidity, from the extreme of sentimental Republicanism to an ardent zeal for authority, he might be classed with those persons who began as Jacobins and ended as Prefects of the Empire. The interesting thing about him is, that he contrived to perform FEDERALISTS AND RADICALS. i6i this evolution with, indeed, remarkable rapidity, and not without justly incurring a certain amount of ridicule in the opinion of sober spectators, but yet in such a way as to convince all fair observers of his perfect honesty and absolute disinterestedness. If he stultified the whole of his previous life, it was not for pelf; if he turned his coat, it was because he had become honestly convinced that the garment was not only absurd, but was the cause of mischief to others ; and, having it in his power to protect them, he resolved to do so, even by the sacrifice of his own repu- tation for consistency and good sense. During the first two months of 1873, while anarchy was mounting east and west, north and south, but before it had reached its height, there was a preliminary piece of work to be done. Before any Federalista could show that he had been converted by the sight of anarchy of his own making, he had first to guard against the danger of being snufied out of political existence, by those whom the approach of that anarchy filled with intelligible fears. It was for some days a real peril. The majority of the Cortes in existence when Don Amadeo abdicated, consisted of Radicals, or Constitutionalists, who had accepted the Republic as* a disagreeable necessity. They looked upon the conse- quences of an attempt to apply the Federal doctrines with well-grounded terror. It would seem that nothing was easier for them than to protect themselves, and their country. They had only to sink their personal rivalries, to act together with a little common sense and vigour, and it was in their power to keep the control of affairs in their own hands. But, if any Spanish party could have acted L 1 62 DON EMILIO CASTE LAR, in this way, the country would not have reached the shameful pass in which it found itself in the early days of 1873. The Radicals only wrangled, and squabbled among themselves, and were busy in throwing the blame upon one another. So the Federalistas, who as yet remained united, gained the upper hand in the Cortes. The Radical members of the Cabinet retired, and a homogeneous Federal Ministry was formed. The Presi- dency of the Cortes was given to Don Nicolas Salmeron, and a rough-and-ready compact was made. The Radicals agreed to prorogue the Cortes, on condition that a perma- nent committee should be appointed, in which they would possess a majority, in order to watch the Federal Cabinet. It was their hope that the Federalistas would quarrel among themselves. They were also, to no small extent, under the influence of bodily fear. The lower orders of Madrid had been seized with an astonishing zeal for the Federal Republic. Bands of them were formed into Volunteers of Liberty, who found it much more amusing to parade the streets in Phrygian caps, shouting the " Marseillaise," and the " Hymn of Riego," than to work. For these important services they received pay. The troops were far from thoroughly trustworthy, so that the Radicals were in some doubt whether a premature display of anti-Federal zeal might not entail unpleasant conse- quences. Being now in possession of power, the Federals were able to protect their own existence, and prepare for the coming appeal to the country. In order to do the first, they recalled General Pavia from the north. This gentle- man was an ex-artillery officer, who had early attached THE FIRST ENTRY OF PAVIA. 163 himself to the fortune of Prim. He was known to be a great admirer of the " Revolution," which gave a certain guarantee that he would not use his command for the purpose of making an anti-Republican pronundamiento. Moreover, he was a disciplinarian, and a man of known determination of character. Pavia was not best pleased at his sudden recall, and made considerable difficulties before accepting the Post of Captain-General of New Castile. He was prepared to accept a Republic on the model of M. Thiers, but not the ideas of the Federalistas. After a certain amount of hesitation, he however took the command, partly because he said (and, no doubt, believed) that his duty to his country required him to do his best to preserve the army in Castile from falling into the condition of the troops in Catalonia, partly because it was his well-formed intention to help the Radicals to get the Federalistas under lock and key. General Pavia carried out the first of his two intentions rapidly and well ; but some ten months were to pass, and many adventures were to be endured, before he had an opportunity of effecting the second. The Radicals, indeed, were the kind of persons whom it is impossible to help. They were not a little disgusted when they saw that their clever manoeuvre for embarrassing the Federalistas had, in fact, thrown all real power into their hands. Senor Castelar and his friends were, in fact, putting their own agents in office right and left, and were getting the control of the machinery of municipal govern- ment. This, as the Radicals well knew, meant that there would be no seats for them in the new Cortes. Clearly, therefore, it was their interest to prolong the existing i64 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. body, and to use their majority in it for the purpose of disposing of the Federals, But in order to pursue this apparently simple course, it was necessary first that they should get the Cortes called together again, and then that they should know what they meant to do when they were together. The Cortes could not legally meet unless summoned by the President. Sefior Salmeron was not likely to issue the summons, which, as he well knew, would be the signal for the expulsion of his friends from office, if he could help it. The Permanent Commission might have forced his hand, but then it was in two minds. It was very much afraid of the Federalistas, and of their anarchical following in the provinces. This fear was, however, counterbalanced by another. The Radicals and Constitutionalists had naturally looked about for a chief, and, according to the established Spanish custom, had chosen a soldier, viz., Don Francisco Serrano, Duque de la Torre. He was quite ready to play his favourite part of rallying point for the Conservative elements. The members of the Permanent Committee were by no means all equally ready to rally round Don Francisco, not being sure what he would do for them afterwards : so they hesitated. Meanwhile, Don Manuel Pavia was, with some simplicity, assuring Don Nicolas Salmeron that if he, Don Nicolas, would only summon the Cortes, he. General Pavia, would answer for protecting them against the excesses of Seiior Salmeron's own friends, the Federalistas. All parties remained at gaze till after the middle of April. The Permanent Committee wigged the Ministry, which pooh-poohed the Permanent Conpimittee. The ANOTHER FLASH IN THE PAN 165 Cortes was waiting to be summoned. Serrano was waiting for the call, so was Pavia. So were the Urban Militia, a body of bourgeois national guard, which was very Liberal in its sentiment, after the manner of middle- class Liberalism on the Continent. They had been prepared to level down, but not to level up ; and, when they saw the rabble organized into Volunteers of Liberty, with no very favourable sentiments towards the shop- keepers, they were seized with an almost violent access of Conservative feeling. A crisis was in the air. Every- body in Madrid knew that something was going to happen, but nobody knew quite what. As usual, it was the Party which could act with unity and decision which won. The Federals as yet hung together, had a plan, and acted on it. The most necessary thing to do was to get rid of their one dangerous antagonist — Don Manuel Pavia. This was done by means of a very smart, and very Spanish trick. Don Manuel had issued a summons to his colonels, intending to tell them that it was his intention to support the Cortes if any attempt was made by the Federals to prevent them from meeting. On the morning of the same day General Acosta, the Minister of War, summoned all the officers of the garrison, including Don Manuel, and made fchem the identical same declaration. Of course, this cut the ground from beneath Pavia's feet. He told the officers that he had nothing further to say to them. The dust having been duly thrown into Pavia's eyes, the Ministers were at leisure to prepare for the crisis, which they did largely by collecting and arming their Federal volunteers in increased numbers. However i66 DON EMILIO CASTE LAR. empty the treasury might be, money was found for this purpose. At last the crisis came, on the 23rd April, The Permanent Committee summoned the Ministers, with the intention of insisting on the immediate meet- ing of the Cortes. The Cabinet was resolved that the Cortes should not meet. The Urban Militia met in the Plaza de Toros, in order to support the Committee. The Volunteers of Liberty mustered in their thousands, in order to support the Federalista Ministers. Don Francisco Serrano was ready in his house, which faced the Plaza de Toros. He had a brilliant staff about him, for it was the nature of the Duque de la Torre that he could do nothing without a brilliant staff, a fine uniform, a bright sword, and a long-tailed prancer. " Lord Chatham, with his sword undrawn, Kept waiting for Sir Richard Strachan ; Sir Richard, eager to be at 'em, Kept waiting too — for whom ? Lord Chatham." At the critical moment General Acosta announced that he intended to support the Ministry. Pavia saw that he had been jockeyed, and, in a fit of rage, threw up his command. Then Ministers appointed Generals Hidalgo and Pierrad to lead the troops against the disturbers of public order in the Plaza de Toros. The duty was discharged by the Civil Guard, and a battery of Artillery, to whom the Volunteers of Liberty modestly left the task. It was not a perilous one. It is said that the Urban Militia shed tears of manly emotion on being called upon to lay down their arms, but they fired no cartridges. " Que faire ils ont des cannons," said the A FEDERALIST COUP D' tTAT. 167 Elector of Brandenbourg when he saw the guns of Gustavus Adolphus, and the Urban Militia were equally puzzled. As for the Duque de La Torre, he took his uniform off, and paid a visit to the English Minister, from whose house he went on a few days later to the pleasant seashore of Biarritz, under the protection of Lady I^yard. Then the Cortes was declared dissolved by the Ministers. It may be noted that no further back than the previous February, Don Emilio Castelar, in acknowledging the abdication of Don Amadeo, had spoken of " the Sovereign Cortes " as being the sole legitimate depositaries of authority in Spain. This was the body which he and his friends sent packing on the 23rd April, by means of the bayonets of the Civil Guard and the guns of the artillery. For a party which had been most eloquent in denouncing pronunciamientos^ and had a particular fondness for dwelling on the beauties of legality, and the wickedness of the use of force to defeat opponents, it must be acknowledged that some of the Federalistas had an open mind. Their conversion to a thorough agreement with the principles on which alone Spain can be governed began early, and made rapid progress. The duty which came next, after sending the elect of the people packing, was to appeal to the nation. This was done, and a new Cortes was elected at once by universal suffrage. Is it necessary to add that it consisted, with some half dozen exceptions, not only of Republicans, but of Federal Republicans? Is it necessary to say that they were returned by less than a third of the nation? These elections, we are informed i68 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. in a pleasant phrase, were "relatively free." Having been myself an eye-witness of them, I should say that they were transacted under the very present threat of mob violence. Except in a very few small towns where individual politicians had property and personal influence enough, to overawe Federalist threats, the Clubs dis- charged the functions of the Partido de la Porra with zeal and efificiency. At one place in Catalonia a very stalwart woman turned up in the poll, with a meek husband, and insisted that he should be allowed to vote for Don Carlos. The incident appealed to the Federalistas' enjoyment of a simple joke, and was the cause of much innocent merriment ; but this was, I believe, the only Conservative vote given in the Princi- pality, and it was irregular. Rather less than a third of the nation voted at all; and if some pressure had not been exercised, it is highly doubtful whether there would have been nearly so many. The Cortes, which was to establish the reign of free- dom in these circumstances, began its sittings on the I St June. It was already divided into Right, Centre, and Left, in the orthodox style. Don Emilio Castelar sat on the right — for it is the nature of a revolutionary time in full swing, that the advanced Liberal of to-day is the reactionary Conservative of to-morrow. During the election he had lavished good advice on his country- men. He had implored them not to risk the conquests of the Revolution by giving way to follies, but to keep cool, and preserve a judicious. moderation. But he spoke to little purpose, nor is that altogether to be wondered at, for it must be acknowledged that the advice was of CASTELAR A CONSERVATIVE, 169 the latest. The mass of Republicans were not prepared to think that enough was done when the name of Republic was fixed on the State, and that they could be content with a moderate Liberalism, with something, in fact, like an improved version of the old union Liberal. The usual fate of Spanish parties overtook the Federal Republicans so soon as they were in power. They had the Cortes practically to themselves, and then they split into factions. There was indeed a minute handful of partisans of some form of monarchical government — Senor Rios Rosas, Senor Esteban Collantes, and a few others. There was a partisan of a centralized unitarian Republic, Senor Garcia Diaz, but he was in a minority of one. All the others were Federal Republicans, by which, as it soon appeared, they did not in the least know what they meant. Senor Castelar had a'following which formed a respect- able minority in the Cortes. He and they had been shocked into sobriety by the dangers which menaced the Republic. They began at once to earnestly implore their fellow deputies to be men of sense. Their fellow deputies had views of their own as to what patriotism and common sense required of them in the circumstances. Don Nicolas Salmeron, and his friends who formed the centre, were the "doctrinaires." They held much by the teaching of the illustrious Krause, and his Theory of Humanity. Some Spaniards must, no doubt, have read Krause over and above the one who translated him, but for ten who had read him there were certainly a thousand who talked about him. The name Krausista was much bandied about as representing something I70 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. mysterious, profound, and full of hope, till it became generally a synonym for long-winded bore, and was hooted out of use. Don Nicolas Salmeron and his friends, though differing, as they assured you, in point of view and principles from Don Emilio Castelar and his party, were still more widely divided from the allies of Senores Figueras and Pi y Margall, who formed the left of the chamber. These were the Federals still pure and undiluted. If they did not know the vulgar, practical details of what they wanted, they were at least sure that they wanted it to be very Federal. They were the cream of all the dreamers and fanatics in Spain, who had taken to politics, — all the briefless barristers, professors without chairs, and with them, schoolmasters, cafe oracles, and so forth, mingled with no small proportion of sheer adventurers, hysterical maniacs, and hypocritical scamps, who wisely thought that a Federal Republic would present unparalleled opportunities for fishing in troubled waters. They formed the majority of the chamber, and therefore, on all sound principles, undertook the task of governing Spain. They soon taught their country what it had to hope from being governed by a mob of imitators of all the dreams, and all the rascaUty of the French Revolution. It must, in justice, be acknowledged that there was nothing among them of the bloodthirsty ferocity of the Jacobins. The beginnings were rather of the comic than the tragic or3er. Unanimity lasted while the Cortes voted the name of a Federal Republic, and a constitution was drafted in a gallop, mainly by Don Emilio Castelar himself, who is reported to have achieved this feat in THE ECLIPSE OF FIGUERAS. 171 the ridiculously short space of twenty -four hours. A constitution, more or less, was a very small matter. The business of government presented more difficulties. At first Don Nicolas Salmeron was elected President of the Cortes, and Senor Figueras President of the Executive Government This arrangement did not last. Senor Figueras was a perfect specimen of the vague, half- educated, speculative person, with a puzzle head, let loose in politics. He had gone about promising, not the millennium, but a score of incompatible millenniums to different people. Experience soon taught him that talking on platforms, and perorating about Krause in caf^s, were very different things from dealing with the hard realities of governing fifteen millions of Spaniards. Poor Senor Figueras promptly lost his head, and, in fair desperation, betook himself to a resource which may possibly have presented itself to embarrassed Premiers in more commonplace countries as desirable, but not feasible. He packed up his portmanteau, and took the morning train for France, without telling anybody what he was going to do. In these embarrassing circum- stances, the Federal Republic fell back on Seiior Pi y Margall. This gentleman was of tougher make than his colleague, and he had a marked advantage in that he was by nature absolutely incapable of recognising facts. Nothing was visible to Senor Pi y Margall except his own imaginings ; therefore, with a clear conscience, and a sharp, pragmatical, schoolmasterly manner, he set to work to deal with the Cantonalismo, which was now rapidly overspreading the south, on homoepathic principles. Malaga declared itself 172 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. a canton, so did Granada and Seville and Cadiz, so did numbers of much smaller places. They were not all at one with themselves. In Malaga, for instance, Can- tonalista Solier and Cantonalista Carvajal came to blows, and the latter was expelled by force in the name of freedom, and the rights of self-government. In some places the large towns set about coercing the neigh- bouring villages, which, whenever they were able, resented this attempt to deprive them of their inherent rights to be cantons. At Alcoy the workmen perpetrated an abomin- able massacre of their employers, and a few policemen. As a rule, however, there was but little actual crime, in spite of the efforts of foreign revolutionary adventurers, fugitives, many of them, from the French Commune. The towns were generally content with expelling their garrisons, when they could not persuade them to join the movement. This happened at Malaga and at Seville. In Cadiz, on the other hand, the troops joined the Cantonalists, the Artillery, under the command of their new officers, the promoted sergeants, setting the example. But whatever minor differences there might be, all the cantons agreed on one point — they would not pay any taxes. The country seemed on the very verge of disso- lution. All the old particularism of Spain had broken out in its crudest form, and the embarrassed treasury was threatened with absolute unqualified emptiness. Seiior Pi y Margall .bore himself, in the presence of this storm, with all the imperturbable self-possession of the double-dyed pedant for whom facts do not exist. The Englishman who has read Mr. Midshipman Easy will remember how Mr. Nicodemus Easy proposed to deal MR. EASY IN OFFICE. 173 with the criminal butler. He suggested taking another look at his bumps, and talking to him about the rights of man. Senor Pi y Margall sent agents to look at the bumps of the Cantonalists, and to talk to them about " el federalismo." In the meantime, he kept on assuring the Cortes that all would be well if only a little more eloquence were poured on the troubled waters. Several of his agents joined the Cantonalists, who became possessed of the great naval arsenal of Carthagena, and with it of a squadron of warships, including three iron- clads. Even the chattering folly of a Spanish Federal Re- publican Cortes must draw the line somewhere. It drew it at the point where the disorganization of the country was suspending the payment of taxes, and, of course, drying up the salaries of enlightened deputies. This point was at hand in the first days of July, 1873. No money was coming in from the South, nor from the round dozen of districts in the hands of the Carlists. In other parts people of means were flying to France and Portugal, while the peasantry would not part with ready money. They preferred to allow their goods, for which the Government could find no purchasers, to be seized. At last the Right and Centre of the Cortes coalesced, and a sufficient force was recruited from the Left to form a majority against Senor Pi y Margall. The meddlesome pedant was sent back, for the present, to his place as Deputy, and a Ministry in which Senor Castelar was again Foreign Minister was formed, with Don Nicolas Salmeron as President of the Executive Government. The Federal Republic, be it observed 174 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. had no regular President to stand outside the Cortes and control the wisdom of the elect of the people. The mission of the new Ministry was to bring the South to heel — to teach it that although it was to be Federal, it was not to be Federal too soon or too much. Within six months of its foundation, in fact, the Re- public had to set about coercing a large part of the country. The task was not so very difficult if it could rely on the loyalty of even a moderate force of soldiers, and find a resolute officer to lead them. "El cantona- lismo" was really only a temporary victory of the mob, due to the want of sufficient garrisons in the South, to the connivance of the local authorities, to the cor- ruption of a part of the few soldiers there were on the spot, and to the fact that the upper class of the population, having at all times relied on the Govern- ment to do everything for it, was taken by surprise and cowed. In some places men of spirit belonging to the " governing classes " had proved their right to the name by organizing resistance to anarchy. General RipoU, after weakly allowing himself to be turned out of Seville, had concentrated his troops at C6rdova, and was keeping them in some order. General Velarde had occupied Alcoy, though with orders from the un- speakable Pi y Margall not to do anything harsh with the poor misguided murderers. In judging the conduct of Don Nicolas Salmeron and Don Emilio Castelar at this crisis, it must be allowed that they deserve the praise of having endeavoured man- fully to undo the consequences of their own acts. No men were more directly responsible for the anarchy which had THE SECOND ENTRY OF PA VIA. 175 come upon Spain. The late Czar of Russia is reported to have told a Minister who, after making a mess of the finances, showed a wish to retire, that he had cooked the dish, and must eat it. There was a rough justice in the decision of the Czar to make him who had done the wrong undo it. Don Nicolas and Don Emilio executed themselves spontaneously, and though they stood convicted by their own confession of being two very mischievous politicians, they were at least infinitely better than such an unteachable pedant as Pi y Margall. Since, then, the Federal Republic had let loose a criminal lunatic asylum to people its new heaven and earth, there was nothing for it but to find a strong summary person to apply a strait - waistcoat. Nobody knew better than Salmeron that, no further back than last April, Don Manuel Pavia had nothing more at heart than to put the Federal Republic under lock and key. Nor can Don Emilio Castelar have been ignorant of so notorious a fact. Yet it was to this officer that they appealed, for the need was great; and it was better to run the risk of falling into the hands of a soldier, than to allow all Spain to collapse in anarchy. "If you can persuade a single soldier to fire on a Cantonalist, order is saved," are said to have been Salmeron's words to Don Manuel. "Do not hesitate to shoot" was what the humanitarian Federal Republic, founded in February, was saying before the middle of July. No man in Spain was less likely to boggle over the use of that particular means of prevailing upon Cantonalism to stop. Pavia took about twelve hundred men of the garrison of Madrid, including two 176 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. companies of engineers — steady men, commanded by educated officers — some guns, a handful of horse, and a battaUon of the regiment named Zamora, on which he felt he could rely. He had a very large proportion of officers, since he might be compelled to detach men, and it was, in view of the corrupting efforts of the agitators, very desirable to stiffen his force as much as possible. Then he packed his men, horses, and guns into two trains, and started for the South. From about the later middle of July, till the early days of September, Don Manuel Pavia was engaged in playing the part of prizefighter in a crowd. He may not have been a considerable general, but he did thoroughly understand that when you have a great dis- orderly mob in front, there is no more sovereign way of disposing of it than to hit it hard on the flank, to get it on the run, and to keep it on the run. The Cantonalists were offensive to him politically, and odious to him as an officer and a gentleman. Therefore, he was disposed to go roundly to work. Besides, he knew that the best way of preserving his soldiers from con- tagion by the agitators was to keep them busy. In the main, the spirit of the men was good. The lower kind of Federalists had taken to a species of blatant impiety, which was almost as offensive to the Spanish peasant as to the Spanish gentlemen. The bluster of the red-capped Volunteers was also hard to bear, and many fingers were itching to give them a lesson. The direct route from Madrid to Andalusia lies through the pass of Despenaperros, but the Cantonalists had torn it up. Pavia therefore took the line which branches THE PRIZE FIGHTER IN A CROWD. 177 westward to Ciudad Real, and from there skirts the western end of the Sierra Morena at Cabeza del Buey, and turns eastward again to C6rdova by Hinojosa. He detrained at Ciudad Real, and from thence made a forced night march over the Sierra Morena by the pass of Monasterio, so often mentioned by Sir William Napier. Then he pushed on to C6rdova without letting the grass grow under his feet, and took up the command of the force which Ripoll had kept together. There was a certain amount of trouble with some of RipoU's men, but not more than a verbal court-martial and a few summary sentences were sufficient to remove. Having braced the morale of his command, Pavia proceeded to act. It would be pleasing to follow his movements in detail. To those living in Spain at the time, the daily reports of his movement regularly lightened the weight of fear which had rested upon all to whom anarchy was terrible. But it is only possible to give a rapid summary of his move- ments here. Taking over all of RipoU's men who were not required at C6rdova, he took train to the last station before Seville. Then he fell upon this town, which was the head centre of the Cantonalist agitation. In the course of three days' street fighting Pavia lost about three hundred men and a large proportion of officers, out of a force which numbered some two thousand five hundred. The Cantonalists were very strong, for their volunteers had been armed through the folly of the Government, and they had possession of the great cannon foundry. Pavia smashed them completely, and disarmed the volun- teers. Then he pushed on to Cadiz. Here occurred an incident which was full of 'instruction. The garrison had M 178 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. joined the Cantonalists, and no part of it had behaved worse than the Artillery under the command of the pro- moted sergeants. It happened that two young gentlemen, who belonged to the old corps of officers, were at that time living with their families in the town. So soon as it was known that Seville was occupied by the Govern- ment forces, and that Pavia was at hand, these gentlemen put on their uniforms, went to the Artillery quarters, and took command of the men. Their authority was recog- nised at once by the soldiers, who, at their command, put the new officers under arrest. The Federalists collapsed abjectly when Pavia's column advanced at the double along the narrow strip of land which connects the penin- sula on which Cadiz stands to the mainland. In fact, the example made of Seville had shaken the nerve of the party of disorder. Although the total force at Pavia's disposal was small, it was enough to overawe the rabble of all Andalusia. The Cantonalists of Granada surrendered, and so did those of all the smaller places. Everywhere the Federalist volunteers were disarmed, and the governor, appointed by the general, was left to maintain order with a few of the Civil Guard, and the carabineers, a force of military police, which in ordinary times is employed on the work of the custom house. Pavia announced his intention of keeping his own column well in hand, and of falling at once upon any town in which the Cantonalists dared to raise their heads. The most implicit confidence was placed on his promises, and if he had not been stopped in his career, there can be no doubt that he would have quieted all the South. Whether it was fortunate or not for Spain that he was stopped is, perhaps, an open THE SORROWS OF SALMERON. 179 question. Perhaps it was better that the country should be thoroughly sickened of the P'ederal Republic, and should be prepared to welcome the restoration of the monarchy. The lesson was certainly taught, though at the expense of much further loss, and not a little dis- honour to Spain. When, at about the end of August, Pavia was preparing to push on to Malaga, he was suddenly arrested by orders from Don Nicolas Salmeron. His summary methods, and a certain preference he displayed for "verbal courts-martial" — in other words, for shooting disorderly persons out of hand — had begun to frighten the Professor whom the accidents of Revolution had carried for a day to the head of affairs in Spain. Don Nicolas Salmeron was an opponent of capital punish- ment. Although he was willing to assist in the restoration of order and the suppression of the Cantonalists, he would have been much happier if the work could have been done with rose water. He therefore began to fidget when telegram after telegram brought news that it was being done with bayonets, and other methods not in the least distinguishable from those of a monarchy. So he stopped his general when within a day's march of Malaga, where Solier was still in full feather, and was sending very insolent messages to Pavia. Don Manuel obeyed, but he expostulated strongly, and sent in his resignation. There was an interval of pause, for Salmeron was sorely puzzled. To accept Pavia's resignation, and allow Malaga to escape unpunished, would have been to permit the revival of Cantonalism. Therefore the President of the Executive Government would have preferred to let him go on ; yet his methods were neither Federal rror Republican in i8o DON EMILIO CASTELAR. Salmeron's eyes, and for that reason the President would have preferred to stop him. A way out of the dilemma was found by the President's resignation, and the appoint- ment of Don Emilio Castelar to a dictatorship. Before dealing with that event, and what followed, it will be as well to dispose of Don Manuel Pavia's campaign in the South. At first Castelar seemed infected by Salmeron's doubts, but the vehement expostulations of the general at last forced a hearing. He received orders to advance. Malaga has, of all Spanish towns, been the most ready to pronounce and to stand out by itself. It has never, however, been famous for the obstinacy of its resistances. Barcelona has fought often, and Valencia sometimes, but Malaga never. The present occasion was no exception. Solier talked as stoutly as the immortal Tartarin, but he and his followers had no more stomach for the fight than the heroes of Tarascon. Indeed, one of the incidents of Don Manuel's occupation of the town might well have figured in M. Daudet's malicious history. Malaga had raised a body of volunteers to fight the Carlists, and had actually sent them as far as Madrid. They did not come any nearer to the Navarrese and Biscayan enemy, because they were found to be so disorderly, to show such a marked preference for prating in wine shops on the beauties of liberty over mounting guard within danger of a Carlist bullet, and to be, withal, so obstreperous in their cups, that the Government packed them all back home. The train bearing these returning warriors came along just as Pavia was about to start for Malaga. He at once not only disarmed the whole body. ILL JUDGED INTERVENTION. i8i but took away their beautiful uniforms. When he marched into Malaga, which, in spite of Cantonalist bluster, he did without opposition, a part of the procession consisted of these volunteers, plucked of their fine feathers, and walking along in a very ludicrous condition of eclipse. Pavia's own earnest wish was to be allowed to go on to Carthagena, where the Cantonalists were still in their earlier stage, and might have been crushed without much trouble. But by an error of judgment, which must be set off against his other and better actions, Castelar withdrew Don Manuel's special commission, and decided to re- establish the usual Captain-Generalships at once. The general then demanded his recall, and returned to Madrid in a state of dudgeon, which he did not attempt in the least to conceal. Spain had to pay for that act of weak- ness by the prolonged occupation of the great arsenal of Carthagena by Cantonalist ruffians, by the immense loss which was caused by the cruises of her ships, in the possession of galley slaves, up and down the coast, and by the dishonour of seeing them seized by the English Mediterranean squadron as a common pest. CHAPTER VIII. THE DICTATORSHIP OF CASTELAR AND THE COUP D':^TAT OF PAVIA. Senor Castelar Dictator — The task before him — The deputies puzzled — Settling the question of the Artillery officers — Refilling the Army — The Recantation of Don Emilio — Progress of the Carlists — The Cantonalist ships and the intervention of the British Squadron — Revolt of the Federalistas against Castelar — The trap-door through which pronunciamientos arise in Spain — The end of La Federal. WHAT has been with propriety called the dictator- ship of Don Emilio Castelar lasted for some four months, from early in September, 1873, to the 2nd January. It is not only the most remarkable passage in his life, but is, in itself, a very curious episode in the history of the revolutionary agitations of the Continent. On the supposition that the majority of the Cortes knew what it wanted, or was capable of estimating the conse- quences of its acts, the decision to leave Castelar master of the situation cannot be accounted for at all. This is what the Cortes did. It named him Chief of the Executive Government, and then prorogued itself till the 2nd January of the following year. If the majority had been converted to a sense of the folly of its ideas by recent experience, the act would have been not only 182 THE CORTES THROW UP THE REINS. 183 intelligible, but wise. The one chance the Federal Republic had of prolonging its existence, was that it should prove its capacity to give the country a tolerable administration, and to free it from civil war. Now it had been shown to demonstration by September, 1873, that the Republic could only do this by ceasing to be Federal. But their conduct, when they did reassemble, in January, 1874, made it very clear that the majority of the deputies had not parted with one of their delusions. Why, then, did they entrust Seiior Castelar with power ? They must, by this time, have known that he at least had wandered very far from his old creed. He was, indeed, still a Republican, but of quite another order. The Republic for which he was now striving would, if it had been possible to establish it, have given Spain much such a government as it would have enjoyed under a real constitutional Monarchy. This was not what they wanted. Again, there can have been no reasonable doubt as to the methods which Castelar must in the main adopt. Disorder had to be suppressed, and the means of fighting the Carlists provided. These objects could only be effected by reconstructing the army. When once that had been done, it was as certain as anything well could be in Spanish politics that the generals would never again allow the country to fall back into the Federal anarchy. Even those officers who were known to be friendly to the "Revolution," and to be prepared to accept a Republic — Don Domingo Moriones, for instance, and Don Manuel Pavia — were heartily opposed to the Federalistas. That party was, in fact, in a cruel dilemma. Disorder must be suppressed i84 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. under pain of destruction for themselves, and the work could only be done by forming a force, which was certain to be hostile to a Federal Republic. One way of escape was open to them. They might have recognised that their ideal form of government was impossible in Spain. Don Emilio Castelar and a few others had made this discovery. Not so the majority. Why then did they give unchecked power to Don Emilio? The most plausible explanation of their decision, perhaps, is that they were very foolish, hysterical men, who, in September, 1873, were in a great fright, and were woefully puzzled amid the difficulties of their own creating. They threw power into the hands of a dictator for very much the reason which caused Senor Figueras to take the train to France — because they had neither the courage nor the sense to do better than run away. The use which Senor Castelar made of his opportu- nity gained him the gratitude of the majority of Spaniards, and not a little respect among foreigners. He threw most part of what he had advocated for twenty years to the winds, and set himself down to save Spain. It was a very creditable decision, and quite explains the wide difference which Spaniards make between him and his brother Republicans. At the same time, it also explains why he has since been generally regarded as a man whose proper place is any- where except in office. M. Victor Cherbuliez, who is not the least sincere of Castelar's admirers, has pointed out that he could not well complain when he was ultimately thrown aside by his countrymen. It is honest to confess that you have been mistaken, and it A DICTATOR BY NECESSITY. 185 is honourable to endeavour to undo the consequences of your errors; but a statesman who has been com- pelled to recant the teaching of twenty years of his life lays himself open to the question, "Since you confess you were wrong, then how can we be sure you are right now?" It is a very awkward query indeed, which many Parliamentary politicians have had to face, and have more or less tamely answered. The time came when Castelar, after confessing that "La Federal" was impossible, implored his countrymen to still adhere to the Republic. Then they asked him how he knew he was right now, and were not convinced by the answer. In September, 1873, "o questions were asked. The country was too pressed to escape from the immediate danger, and there was on all hands a ready disposition to support the one Republican leader who offered some guarantees for order. Nobody, in public, cared to com- plain of the rapidity of Don Emilio's conversion, or to point out how deeply it condemned his own judgment in past years. Even those army officers who were Alfonsist in opinion, and the still larger number who had begun to realise that the restoration of the Bourbons was the only possible solution for Spain, were prepared to support the dictator. The first thing to be done was to restore the army. It would be time to use it when it was again in hand. One of the first measures of Sefior Castelar's Adminis- tration was a guarantee to the "Conservative classes" of the spirit in which he meant to rule. He restored the officers of the Artillery to their commands. In order to do this he had to dispense with the services of i86 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. General Hidalgo. It was a complete surrender to the army, or, rather, to the most powerful military corpora- tion in Spain. To the Federalistas it was an unmistak- able warning of what must follow. It was none the less an extremely wise step. At the point at which things had arrived in Spain, it was cant to talk of main- taining the authority of the civil government. All that stood between the country and sheer anarchy was the organized military force. On one side was the army, on the other were the Carlist bands, with the Federal Volunteers and the Cantonalists. The Federal Republic had in reality been founded by bayonets in April, and was as much the work of military violence as any of the successive Cabinets of Narvaez or O'Donnell. Spain had to choose between the government of the sabre in the hands of drilled soldiers, drawn from the best classes of the population, or the rule of the pike, wielded by the rabble of the townsy and the galley-slaves of Car- thagena. Military rule may be an evil, but it is fre- quently the least of two, and that was emphatically the case in Spain in 1873. The recall of the Artillery officers was a first step towards the full restoration of discipline in the army. At the same time, it was a wise measure, in view of the stability of Senor Castelar's own Ad- ministration. It secured the gratitude of a very powerful corporation of the officers, and, through them, of the upper classes of society to which they belonged. The news that the famous question of the Artillery had been settled to the satisfaction of the officers, was received all through Spain as a sign that better times were be- ginning. The measure was accompanied by others which RESTORING ORDER. 187 pointed in the same direction. Commands were given to generals without regard to their political opinions. Moriones was sent to the army of the North. The command in Catalonia was given to General Turon, a rigid old officer, who was a soldier and nothing else. General Lopez Dominguez, who was a nephew of Serrano, was put at the head of the troops collected to retake Carthagena. Men of the stamp of Nouvilas, a disgracefully incompetent person, were placed on half- pay, in spite of their blatant Republicanism. An even more significant appointment was made when Pavia was again chosen to be Captain-General of Castile. Castelar must have been perfectly well aware of his opinions and character, of the part he had been pre- pared to play in April, and of the very outspoken language he had used when forbidden to push on to Carthagena. The choice of Don Manuel for the most important Captain-Generalship in Spain, was a proof that in the opinion of the Chief of the Executive Government the only indispensable qualities for mili- tary command were the capacity and the determination to maintain discipline. These appointments, significant as they were, formed only a part of Castelar's military policy, and not, perhaps, the most important. His great measure was the levying of what may, I believe, be called the heaviest conscription ever raised in Spain. The figure was fixed at no less than 120,000 men, and less would not have sufficed to meet the calls from the Carlist provinces, from Cuba, and from the still disturbed South. The ranks of the army were depleted, and must be filled at all costs. But wise and i88 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. indispensable as the measure was, it killed the last lingering chance that the Republic would be accepted by the mass of the Spanish people. The one thing which had attracted them to a form of government naturally alien to their feelings was what Castelar, with unconscious irony, had called their island of Barataria, the promised abolition of the conscription. When they found that they were ordered by this very government to pay a heavier tribute of blood than had ever been called for in one year by the crown, the last faint glimmer of belief in the Republic died everywhere outside a few cafes and clubs. The fact that the conscription, which, be it remembered, fell with all the more severity on the loyal provinces, because it could not be enforced within the Carlist lines, was quietly raised, was an astonishing example of the real docility of the Spanish people. It must be allowed, too, that in deciding to raise it, Don Emilio Castelar gave an unan- swerable proof of the sincerity of his conversion from the errors of his youth, and of his indifference to ridicule. The famous island of Barataria passage in his speech on the conscription was not forgotten, and there were not wanting those to point out that he had himself had the odd fortune to play in succession the parts of Don Quixote, of the Duke, and of Dr. Recio de Tirteafuera. To the taunts of critics, then and afterwards, Don Emilio gave steadily the same answer — the words which Sir Grant Duff has quoted and translated, or a variation of them : " Charge me with inconsistency, if you please. I will not defend myself. Have I the right to prefer my repu- tation to the safety of my country ? Let my name perish, THE PROGRESS OF THE CARLISTS. 189 let posterity pronounce its anathema against me, let my contemporaries send me into exile, Little care I. I have lived long enough ; but let not the Republic perish by my weaknesses, and, above all, let no one say that Spain has perished in our hands." There is something theatrical in these words, and perhaps a touch of imitation of a French Revolutionary model. Yet they were essentially manly, and the subse- quent life of the speaker shows that they were sincere. The need for the 120,000 new soldiers was very great. During the general paralysis of government in the previous months, the Carlists being entirely unopposed, had made rapid progress. Their bands of guerrilleros had been solidified into a real army, which was largely commanded by regular officers, who had taken refuge with the Carlists when there were no other representatives of monarchy in the field. Some of the chiefs — Elio, Dorregaray, and Lizarraga, in the North, for instance — were men of abihty and energy. Don Carlos himself, after spending some months in the Legitimatist chateaux of the South of France, had finally crossed the frontier. It is true that he showed no real faculty as a ruler, and the Spaniards of Liberal opinions asserted that he developed an excessive thirst for the very fair cyder of the Basque Provinces. But his mere presence was a proof of the increasing strength of his cause. In Catalonia he was represented by his brother, Don Alfonso, who came accompanied by his wife, a lady of the exiled branch of the Braganzas. She gained a bad reputation for cruelty, which was, let us hope, much exaggerated. Carlist bands swarmed in Lower Aragon, and from thence, in conjunction with the I90 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. Catalans, made their way into the hill country of Valencia, which had been the haunt of Ramon Cabrera in the earlier tour. It was no small addition to the difficulties of the Spaniards, that Marshal Macmahon's government in France showed the Carlists a degree of toleration which amounted to open support. Their agents were allowed to come and go freely by M. de Nadaillac, the Prefect of Les Bas Pyrenees. Their uniform was familiar at Biarritz, and the stores they purchased, or received as gifts from Legitimist sympathisers, were carried over the frontier without question. Weapons and stores were also sent largely from England in steamers, which transferred them at sea to the large half-decked fishing-boats of the Basques. The ports Bilboa, San Sebastian, and others, were Liberal in opinion, or occupied by garrisons, and therefore of no use to the Carlists. Although the conscripts were drafted to the front as fast as they could be taught the rudiments of drill, months necessarily passed before the army was in a condition to take the field. During the winter months of 1873 the Government could hope to do little more than hold the line of the Ebro, and occasionally relieve a hard-pressed garrison. In Catalonia the city of Barcelona was as good as beleaguered. The railways were cut, and all communi- cation was by sea. Of offensive operations, the only one it could even attempt was the recovery of Carthagena. The difficulty he found in doing even this was a sign of the shameful condition of weakness to which the State had been reduced in Spain. The Cantonalists had made good use of the time so unwisely allowed them by Salmeron and Castelar. It was a great advantage to them, THE REVIVAL OF THE CANTONALISTS. 191 that they had possession of a fortified town, and they were in no want of men. They were joined by many of the sailors, and what else they wanted was supplied by the convict prison which they opened. When at last Don Emilio did decide to act, it was too late. The town could not be taken without regular siege operations, and for them the army was very ill-provided. It was long before an attack in form could be made, and, in the meantime, the Cantonalists gave Her Majesty's squadron in the Mediterranean a curious opportunity of showing what miscellaneous duties it is occasionally called upon to perform. The Cantonalists manned some of the warships they found in the harbour with convicts and mutineers. Then they began cruising up and down the coast to levy contributions on the trading towns, under threats of bombardment. Admiral Yelverton, who was in command in the Mediterranean, was compelled to shepherd them up and down the coast, to "protect British interests." He was assisted by a German man-of-war, the Friedrich Carl. The end of the story had, as was so often the case in Spain, a large element of the absurd. The German officer finally lost his temper, and seized one of these semi-piratical nuisances. One of the English captains thought he could not do better than follow such an excellent example. The two Cantonalist ships were carried into Carthagena, when the men were turned ashore, and the vessels were retained in possession of prize crews, who found them inexpressibly filthy. It was said that the Germans annexed a set of brass instruments they found in one of these vessels. The less musical English were content to convey select articles of cabin 192 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. furniture, and fancy weapons. If there was any truth in the gossip of the squadron, one member of it, and he not a foremast hand, found himself at the end of these transactions the richer for a remarkably handsome Dollonds' sextant, while one midshipman's mess was adorned by a mirror which had not been paid for. Then the German officer was informed by his superiors that he had exceeded his powers : thereupon he handed his prize over to the English captain, and steamed off. As usual, John Bull was left to take the responsibiHty and the abuse. As usual, too — one may be permitted to record the honourable fact — he did not shirk the first, and was placidly indifferent to the second. To hand the ships back to the Cantonalists would have been an outrage, and, from the point of view of our own interests, a gross folly. We might have had no right to the ships, but then, the Cantonalists had no right to them either. Admiral Yelverton decided to send the captured ships down to Gibraltar, and told the Cantonalists in the shore batteries that this was his intention, and that if they offered any opposition he would open fire. The warning caused no small anger and bluster, as may be supposed, but it was not neglected. On the day fixed for taking the vessels out, they were sent away in charge of prize crews, and under convoy of the Swiftsure and Triumph^ which had orders to come back if there was any sound of fire from the harbour. Admiral Yelverton proposed to take the batteries single-handed, with his flagship, the Lord Warden, in the meantime. But there was no sound of fire. The Cantonalists had made a parade of hauling out another ironclad, the Numanda, and had anchored her in BRITISH MEN-OF-WAR AND BLUSTER. 193 a position to overawe the English ships, as they supposed, but where she would infallibly have been exposed to be rammed and sent to the bottom, within ten minutes, if a shot had been fired at the English flag. When they found that a brag countenance would not do, they tamely allowed their ships to be carried off. These vessels were after- wards handed over to Spanish naval officers in Gibraltar, and formed the naval force by which Carthagena was attacked on the sea face. This, however, was much later. There are few better examples than this story of the truth of the jocular saying, that whenever a disturbance takes place on the sea coast, anywhere in the world, a British man-of-war turns up within twenty-four hours, squares her yards (and there were nice yards in warships in 1873), and looks about as much as to say, "Is there anybody here who wants bringing to order ? " Even if the Spaniards were a people with a much less good conceit of themselves than they naturally have, these transactions might well have filled them with disgust and shame. They began to feel that they were falling into the condition of an anarchical South American Republic, and would cease to be regarded by their neighbours in Europe as a civilised, or even as tolerable. Spanish Newspapers of the more serious order began to indulge in gloomy reminiscences of the history of Poland. An event which happened in the West Indies about this time did not tend to improve their spirits. It was the once notorious, and now pretty well forgotten affair of the Virginius, This vessel was an undoubted filibuster, which was carrying stores and recruits to the Cuban rebels. She was captured by a Spanish cruiser. By the orders of N 194 I^ON EMILIO CASTELAR. General Burriel, her crew and several of her passengers, including some English and Americans, were immediately shot as pirates. The incident brought on Spain a storm of hectoring and abuse, which was really quite undeserved. General Burriel had, in truth, done nothing which would not have been done by any French, Russian, or American, and in many times by any English, officer in the same circumstances. Yet Spain had to make apologies which would never have been called for from a strong govern- ment. The settlement of the Virgmius question with the United States put Senor Castelar's diplomacy to a severe test, and he was compelled to make apologies and excuses. The Spaniards felt that they were treated with harshness because they were weak and anarchical ; what was worse, they were secretly half persuaded that they deserved to be so treated. The longing for a stable Government, for an end of the perpetual unrest which had now gone on for five years, became stronger every day. For the time being Castelar profited by this desire of Spaniards for the elementary conditions of good Govern- ment. The Conservative classes were ready to support him, even though they were as far as ever from a disposition to accept the Republic permanently. It was no trifling condition in his fa\four that the " solution of the Alfonsists" was still at school. Nobody, probably, not even her devoted household servants, dreamt of bringing back Queen Isabel. Don Alfonso was still only a boy, who was receiving his education at an English military college. The Alfonsists, who had now been well organized by Don Antonio Canovas, had no wish to recall him too young. Until he was of CONSERVATIVE SUPPORT OF CASTELAR. 195 age to return, they were prepared to support any Government which was tolerable. Seiior Castelar's was the best they could hope for, and therefore they helped it. Though his time was short, and there was little which he could end, the work he did was of the greatest importance. A new and a trustworthy army was brought into existence. To that everything else was sacrificed, not only the payment of interest on the national debt, which indeed is generally first thrown over in Spain, and the budget of the Church, which was not then in good odour among those who were fighting the Carlists, but the Civil Service. There was no other course open to the Government. It was certain that if no army could be created, nothing else could be attended to, and that anarchy would return. If the one thing necessary were first accomplished, the rest could come in its turn. Castelar applied himself to this with might and main. In the meantime he did his best to conciliate those members of the Church who were not too hopelessly attached to Carlism. He afterwards recorded with pride, that he had filled one archepiscopal and two episcopal sees, which had long been vacant, and that he had chosen churchmen of learning and character. Unhappily, the Chief of the Executive Government was only free as long he was out of the immediate control of his masters, the Federalist majority of the Chamber. Unless his action during the recess was to be approved by the Cortes when it met again, he had, in so far as the interests of the Republic were concerned, laboured in vain. Long before his brief 196 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. interval of power was over, it had become nearly certain that he would not secure the approval of most of the deputies. The conduct of these persons cannot be accounted for, once more, except by the supposition already mentioned — that they were wanting in intelli- gence. If they were capable of observing facts, and of reasoning at all, they would have seen that they would not be allowed to revive the anarchy which had already terrified Spain, yet numbers of them made not the least disguise of their intention to turn Castelar out, so soon as they had the opportunity. It appears that some at least among them were afraid that the Chief of the Executive Government would be beforehand with them, would dissolve the Cortes, and select another. Given the manners and customs of Spanish politicians, the fear was not wholly absurd. But, if this was the intention of Don EmiHo, there was nothing to prevent him carrying it out. The fact that he did decide to meet the existing Cortes, when it would have been so easy for him to get a new and docile one for himself, was proof enough of his loyalty. But the Federalist deputies were incapable of reasoning. It is probable that mere envy, mere love of change, a mere foolish desire to exert their power, had great influence with some, others were under the influence of fanatical pedantry, and ineradicable delusions. It may be doubted whether the whole bulky history of human folly contains anything to surpass the stupidity of the Spanish Federa- list deputies at this period. They had first, under the influence of a very pressing fear, armed Castelar with power to suppress anarchy. When he did the A MASTERPIECE OF FOLL Y. 197 work he was appointed to do in the only possible way in which it could be done, they were seized with another fear. It struck them that the newly created army would be dangerous to their Federal Republic By way of averting this peril, they decided to remove the one man among them whom the army was disposed to trust. In other words, they decided to bring the army upon them at once. They had no other plan of action, they had fixed upon nobody to succeed Castelar, they did not in the least know what they would do next. Incredible as it may seem, they had no plan, except to turn out the Chief of the Executive Govern- ment. They were Spaniards, and cannot have been wholly ignorant of recent events in the history of their country. Thew knew that the very Cortes to which they belonged came into existence through the illegal disso- lution of its predecessor by force. It was within their knowledge that they themselves had been elected by less than a third of the nation, that abstention was the regular resource of Spanish oppositions, and the pre- liminary to pronunciamentos^ that the army was hostile to them, but they absolutely acted as if they were so secure of being considered sacred that when they did what was sure to offend the generals, no officer would be found capable of the " illegality " of taking a battalion of infantry, and turning them into the streets. It is, perhaps, beneath the dignity of history to account for events by supposing that the persons concerned in them were "mostly fools"; and yet there are so many transactions which cannot be explained adequately in any other way. 198 DON EMILIO CASTELAR What was hidden from the FederaHsta deputies was clear enough to others. It might be said that everybody in Madrid outside the Cortes, and some at least in it, foresaw what must happen. Don Emilio Castelar, indeed, has since asserted that he did not. I should be loth to disbelieve his word, but his candour would assuredly be astonishing in anybody else. It can only be made credible on the supposition that contact with realities had not cured him of the habit of dreaming with his eyes open. If Don Emilio Castelar believed that all armed attacks on Governments, which end in the estabhshment of a Federal Republic, are just and legitimate, but that they become so illegal that human depravity can hardly be expected to contemplate them when once it is set up — if, holding this rather odd creed, he jumped to the stupendous conclusion that Spanish generals would think as he did, then his want of fore- sight can indeed be accounted for, but at what cost to his sagacity the reader need hardly be told. The chief of the Executive Government was not without intelligible warnings. It has been said that Don Manuel Pavia had been appointed Captain-General of New Castile, a command which put it in his power to make himself master of the capital. The character of this officer puzzled his countrymen a good deal, but mainly because they were so accustomed to political generals of a very different stamp. Intrinsically he was a simple-minded man enough, as the ample apologies he published show, not only by what they say, but by what they do not say — a much more trustworthy test. He was a " Liberal " in a slightly puzzle-headed way, A COMING CRISIS. 199 with a strong desire to see " modem institutions " at work in Spain, and a pieference for a sober, orderly Republic as the form of government. He wanted — and here the French influence so universal in Spain comes in once more — a Republic on the model of M. Thiers. Personal ambition had little influence with him. He did not want to be M. Thiers himself. He was quite ready to help somebody else to the place. But with this he had an intense sense of the value of order, and of his duty as a soldier to secure it for his country when it was manifestly in peril. This creed has somewhat scandalized critics who have a reasonable dread of the interpretations which the soldier may be tempted to put on the doctrine. Yet surely there are times when civil government is in a state of anarchy, when all legality has been destroyed by revolution, and when the soldier alone represents a coherent force. At such times the soldier may well ask whether his duty to "the magistrate" requires him to stand by while his country goes to ruin. There was such a crisis when General Monk marched south from Scotland. There was another in Spain in 1872, and happily there was also a good deal of General Monk in Don Manuel Pavia. He was, at least, the man to go straight to his point when he saw his way clear. So soon as Don Manuel became convinced that the Federalistas would turn Castelar out of office when the Cortes met, he made his mind up to act. According to his own account, which is not denied, he first had a long conversation with the chief of the Executive Government. He pointed out the extreme probability 200 DON EMILIO CASTELAR, of a hostile vote when the Cortes met, and the disasters which must follow. In terms which certainly seem to have been sufficiently clear, though Don Manuel did not apparently put the case totidem verbis^ he told Castelar that if he chose to turn the Cortes into the streets the army would support him. Don Emilio answered that he would observe a strict legality, and would do his best to persuade the Cortes to renew its confidence in him, but that if he failed he would have no resource but to return to his house, and " bewail the mis- fortunes of his country." To Don Manuel this resignation did not seem consistent with his duty as a soldier in such a crisis. He began at once to prepare for coming events. He communicated with the chiefs of all the parties which were opposed to the Federal anarchists — with the Radicals, Constitutionalists, and Alfonsists. It does not seem that he asked for co-operation, or even for advice. He only asked whether, if he did turn the Cortes into the streets, they would be prepared to join in forming a more tolerable Government. Most of them had heard talk of this kind before, and their experience is their sufficient excuse for their general incapacity to grasp the fact that, wondrous to relate, it, in this case, was honest. Of course, they all gave the necessary assurances, and then waited to see what would happen, with a conviction that it would not be a change for the worse, and probably with some amusement. Pavia was sure of his garrison. The late mutinies and desertions had had one good effect. Many turbulent characters had been removed by their own flight, or by "verbal court martial." The ranks were full of fresh THE CRISIS AT HAND. 201 men, and the sergeants were to be trusted. True, he took certain precautions. His main trust was in the Artillery, which had now returned to order, or the Engineers, who had never failed, and on that admirable body of men, the Civil Guard — the Irish constabulary of Spain. A battalion of the infanteria de la marina, or marines, was brought into Madrid, and a selection was made among the infantry battalions. In all, Pavia had some 3500 men on whom he could thoroughly rely to discharge the double duty of clearing the Cortes and crushing any attempt of the Federal volunteers to create a disturbance. At the last moment, just before the meeting of the Cortes on the 2nd January, Pavia had a final interview with the chief of the Executive Govern- ment. It went over the same ground as the former one — rather, it seems, to the disappointment of Pavia, who had cherished a hope that even at the last moment Castelar would join him. At a later period, when he was accused by some of his brother Republicans of having co-operated with Pavia, Don Emilio denied the charge vehemently. He asserted that he had no idea of what was going to happen. Pavia bore him out so far, but he added the rather cutting rider that he had found Senor Castelar one of the few men in Spain who had no sense of the reality of the situation. He had, therefore, told him nothing, because he did not think it right to jeopardise his chance of serving his country by incurring the risk of dismissal from his post, by a foolish candour. The Cortes met on the 2nd January, and Castelar was at once attacked. He defended himself at great length, 202 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. and by arguments which would have been allowed to possess much force by any men except the thoughtless revolutionists whom he was addressing. But his efforts were inevitably condemned to be barren. In substance, what he had to say to the Federalistas was that if they wished their republic to survive, they must be prepared to allow it to become all that they had never meant it to be. For some months past, in fact ever since he had come in contact with the real business of government, Castelar had been imploring his fellow-republicans to take example from Deak in Hungary, and from M. Thiers in France, to remember how little the extreme parties had ever been able to do, and to give up their exaggerated dreams. It was very good and sober advice, but the giver was surely open to the embarrassing questions, "Why did you not tell us all this before? If what you say now is sound, why have you been preaching something so very different for the last twenty years?" The men to whom he spoke when — as in the case, for instance, of Pi y Margall, and some others — they were honest, were deaf to his appeal, because they still held to beliefs which he had discovered to be delusions. When they were agitators and adven- turers, as was the case with not a few, they were beyond the reach of all argument. To them, Castelar's conversion was simply one more example of the rule that a successful revolutionist is very apt to be fascinated by Conservative machinery. They may, perhaps, have been well aware of a secret leaning to imitate his conversion, but not till they were in his place. To such an audience it was hopeless to speak, even with the tongue of angels, and Castelar spoke in vain. THE THIRD ENTRY OF PAVIA. 203 They listened, and then passed a vote of want of confidence. Whereupon, to again quote M. Victor Cherbuliez, a trap-door opened, the trap-door through which pronunciamientos rise in Spain. From the moment that the Cortes was in session, Don Manuel Pavia had confined his troops to the barracks, and held them in readiness to act. He had a few friends among the deputies, by whom he was kept well informed of what was passing. The sitting was long and stormy. Don Emilio Castelar is seldom a brief speaker, and this night he surpassed himself in length. Others, too, spoke amply, and the night was well on before it got to a vote. The result was reported to Don Manuel Pavia, who had most appropriately stationed himself, with a detachment of troops, in a little square called the Plaza del Soldado ("of the soldier"), in the immediate neighbourhood of the Palace of the Cortes. He immediately sent off aides-de- camp to the barracks, with orders to the troops to take up the positions assigned them for the purpose of over- awing the Federal Volunteers. The Cortes was in a state of wild commotion, for the majority had not the least notion what it meant to do next. The lobbies were full of deputies, gesticulating, shouting, wrangling over the assignment of the portfolios in the new cabinet which was to follow Castelar's. Among the other persons present were the buglers of the Federal Volunteers, for it was characteristic of this chamber, which thought so highly of its own legality, that the more advanced Federalista deputies had decided to provoke a disturb- ance in the streets, for the purpose of overawing their colleagues, if, by any chance, Don Emilio had secured a 204 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. majority. It is said that one member of the Cortes, a known Republican, whose name, however, is not reported, declared that this Tower of Babel had become insuffer- able, and that one of three things must happen — either Pavia must appear with a battalion of troops; or the "Carborin" {i.e.^ charcoal seller), a noted Federalist Volunteer leader, would turn them all out; or that he, himself, would take forty men, and throw the deputies out of the window. He was saved the trouble. While the clamour was in full swing, two aides-de-camp walked into the Hall, and requested to speak to Don Nicolas Salmeron, who had resumed his place as President of the Chamber, when he resigned his place at the head of the executive govern- ment. These military gentlemen informed Don Nicolas, with a politeness truly Spanish, that "they had the grief to be compelled to inform His Excellency that the Captain General of Castile required the deputies to evacuate the Palace." They added that " the Captain General found himself constrained to allow the deputies a very brief space in which to retire." The uncomely nakedness of an order to get out was, probably, never more decently covered. When the message of the Captain General was conveyed to the Chamber by the President, the deputies behaved as if such a thing as a pronunciamiento had never been heard of in Spain before. Their indignation was loud, and if their surprise was not genuine, it was admirably acted. They did everything that the outraged representatives of a free people ought to do. They voted themselves in permanent session. They outlawed Don Manuel Pavia by a unanimous vote, and, in answer to an THE END OF LA FEDERAL, 205 impassioned appeal from their President, they swore to die in their seats. At this moment, a pallid deputy rushed into the hall, with the announcement that the Civil Guard had entered the building. It is said that, at this last moment of the eleventh hour, a vote of con- fidence in Senor Castelar was moved, and received with acclamation. As Pavia remarked drily, it came a little late. Indeed, it is doubtful whether it was ever formally put, for, at this moment, the dark blue uniforms of the Civil Guard were seen at one door of the hall. Indignant deputies rushed at the intruders, and made gestures, as if to drive them back. The officer in command felt that politeness required him to help the deputies out of a disagreeable position. Gentlemen who have just sworn to die in their seats, cannot well retire at the mere sight of the uniform of the Civil Guard. He ordered one of his men to fire down the corridor outside the Chamber. The hint was immediately understood. Silence fell upon the hall, broken only by the sound of the deputies' feet, as they hurried out of the opposite door. Don Manuel Pavia always reflected with pleasure that he had done no harm to any single deputy. Senor Salmeron went home to his early chocolate — for it was now nearly daybreak, on a raw morning. So did Senor Castelar, and all the other deputies. A few spectators had dragged themselves out of bed to see the sight, but they were very few. Madrid gets up, as a rule, rather late, and did not feel called upon to make an exception to its usual habits on this occasion. When it did get up, and was informed that one more pronunciamiento had been made in the night, it uttered no comment, except that this was what 2o6 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. might have been expected. The rest of the country was of the same way of thinking, and, indeed, Pavia might have quoted Cromwell's words on a somewhat similar occasion, " that no dog barked " when the Parliament was sent about its business. The Federal Republic had been, from the first, a foolish adventure, which was possible, even as an experiment, only because Spain was dis- organised. Its continuance was an impossibility, and, since the Federalistic deputies could not be got to see what, was as plain as even the sun of Spain at noonday, by any other means, they had to be taught by the Civil Guard, acting on the orders of the Captain General of Castile. CHAPTER IX. THE END OF THE REVOLUTION. Don Emilio Castelar returns to private life — Two revelations of honesty — A Provisional Government — Serrano as figurehead — The dog in the manger — Organization of the Royalist party — Don Arsenio Martinez de Campos — The last pronunciamUnto — The l)^nning of better things. THE eleven months from February, 1873, to the first days of January, 1874, contained the whole of Senor Castelar's official life. He has never held office since he was expelled from it by the Federal deputies, who were themselves immediately scattered in all directions by Don Manuel Pavia with his soldiers. On the face of it, no public man in Europe could well be said to have had a more lamentable experience. He had seen his party suddenly put in power by a series of accidents, only to prove its perfect incapacity to govern. Within two months it had given the lie to the declaration of years by making use of force to get rid of a Cortes, which it had just declared to be the legi- timate depository of authority in Spain, because it feared that this body would prove hostile to itself. The first effect of the responsibility of office on Don Emilio had 207 2o8 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. been to convince him that his theories could not even begin to be applied without plunging Spain into anarchy. He had found himself compelled to exert his eloquence in order to persuade his fellow Republicans not to endeavour to carry into effect any of those remedies for the social and political evils of Spain, which he had spent years in advocating. At once he had found that they would no longer listen. The incapacity, and the fears of others, had for a time — a very short time indeed — left him at the head of the Government. He had used his power to avert the ruin of the country, but he had to work by using all the resources of a centralised administration, by permitting his officers to inflict that pain of death which he had wished to abolish, and by levying the most severe conscription ever raised in Spain, by using, in fact, the very things he had laboured to abolish. By this course he had indeed earned the gratitude of the vast majority of Spaniards, but he had also aroused the hostility of his fellow Republicans. He had found himself in the cruel dilemma of having to chose between overpowering them by military force, or allowing them to renew all the evils he had just beaten down. He preferred what seemed to him the more honourable course, only to find that others were not disposed to submit tamely to be ruined by folly. What must have been still more cruel was, that he had to see these others earn the gratitude of nineteen Spaniards out of twenty by their violent action. The end of the Federal Republic had been a pronunciamiento^ which was universally allowed to be legitimate. It had, in fact, attained to nothing, except to give respectability THE FRUITS OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC. 209 to that intervention of the soldier in politics, which had hitherto passed for the particular disgrace and misfortune of Spain. This cannot well have been less bitter, because the chief of the pronunciamiento did not condescend to take notice of the leaders of the Federal Republicans. None of them were molested, because none of them were thought dangerous enough to require notice. Once turned out of their hall they were allowed to return to their business, or to fall back into their obscurity with the most contemptuous in- difference. It was not even thought necessary to call a new Cortes. The self-appointed rulers of the country, meeting at the invitation of a military officer, took the administration in hand, unopposed by a country which did not ask them to show any legal right to their place, which, in fact, asked nothing of them, except not to be Federal Republicans. It would appear inevitable that a politician, with such a history behind him, in 1874, must needs have been buried in ridicule, and have little to ask from his countrymen, except that they would be good enough to forget him. Yet, the unexpected fact is that Don Emilio Castelar went back to the very modest flat which he shares with his sister, to his lectures — for he had never ceased to hold the chair of Philosophy of History in the University of Madrid — and to his literary labours, in the enjoyment of no small measure of respect. Moreover, during the last five and twenty years he has enjoyed as much influence as ever he did, and has assuredly exercised it in an incomparably more useful way. The explanation of this second seeming paradox is to be found in the o 2IO DON EMILIO CASTELAR. course which he has since followed. That he earned respect and not ridicule is due to his success in convincing his countrymen of his honesty. Spain had not been prepared by the history of the last forty years to ask from its politicians that higher kind of honesty, which bases its opinions on the careful study of evidence, and refuses to present mere dreams, or vague aspirations, as attainable. It did not expect so much, and was not even aware that so much might be demanded. It was content with a more humble standard. There was novelty in the spectacle of a politician who really did seem to mean what he said, and, on the whole, Spaniards were persuaded that Don Emilio did not use words for the purpose of conceaUng his thoughts. He had not always meant consistent things, but at the time of speaking, he was saying what he thought. Then so many politicians in Spain had begun no less humbly than Don Emilio, to end in the possession of fine houses, and fortunes, of which the source was more or less mysterious, that he was thanked for returning to his quiet little home as poor as he left it. No doubt his days had been few and evil, but that was largely by his own decision. It was well known that Don Manuel Pavia would have given him effectual help in getting rid of the Cortes. If Madrid had learnt from the papers that the Cortes had been dissolved by order of the Chief of the Executive Govern- ment, that a new Ministry was formed, in which Pavia had the portfolio of war, and that the troops were under arms, ready to make short work of all who objected, nobody would have been in the least surprised, nor would anybody have been severely shocked. The world would THE NOVELTY OF HONESTY. 211 have laughed a little, and have drawn its own deductions as to the motives of Don Emilio's conversion to sanity, but since that happened to coincide with the general interest, it would have been not unwelcome. Castelar would have been only one politician the more of the usual stamp, and not worse than others — that was all. When, however, he refused to prolong his own tenure of office, and did so on what really seemed grounds of principle, a new planet swam into the ken of Spaniards. They may not have thought him much wiser, but they did think him honest, and that he had set a good example, which might be followed with advantage. Castelar, in fact, raised the level of what was expected from politicians, and thereby he did his country no contemptible service. It was to the very great advantage of Spain that Don Manuel Pavia turned out to be the unexpected, but effectual, colleague of Castelar in this good work. Little of a more humorous nature was to be seen in the country at this time than the puzzlement, not unmixed with annoyance, which was caused by Pavia's conduct at the end of this crisis. Nobody, of course, had taken his declarations of disinterestedness seriously. They were regarded as things which it was decent to say, but which it would have been candid, not to say pedantic, to expect any man to act up to. Even Don Manuel's fiery wrath, when he found that Serrano, a few days before the coup d'etat^ had, measuring other men's corn by his own bushel, been dropping hints that he was not disinterested as he wanted to appear, failed to produce much impression. That also was understood to be part of the game. If, when the blow had been struck, he had announced that a 212 - DON EMILIO CASTELAR. sense of duty compelled him to assume the duties of Chief of the Executive Government for himself, nobody would have been surprised, and again, nobody would have been shocked. The great numerical majority of Spaniards have no more notion that they can control the Govern- ment, than that they can influence the moon. They accept it as something which they must obey, and are content to rub along, provided only that the business of life is not disturbed. The minority which had political interests was, in 1874, under the influence of two con- victions — one that the Republic could not last, and that the only alternative was a restoration of the Bourbons; the other was that there was no hurry, and that, on the whole, it was better to let the king grow a little in surroundings which they felt, not altogether without shame, to be decidedly more wholesome for him than the palace and political world of Madrid. In the interval they would have accepted any tolerable man in possession, and Pavia would have been even more acceptable than most. The best thing he could have done for his country, and by far the most profitable for his own interests, would unquestionably have been to take the power which lay at his hand, to go on resolutely with the reorganization of the army, to strike a vigorous blow at the Carlists, then to summon a reaUy free Cortes, which would infallibly have been Alfonsist, and to recall the King. He would have had the co-operation of Don Antonio Canovas, whose wish it was, if possible, to avoid the necessity for another pronunciamiento. The circumstances of the Restoration of Charles II. might have been most exactly PAV/A'S DISINTERESTEDNESS. 213 repeated, and the fortune of Don Arsenio Martinez de Campos is proof positive that Pavia would have gained for himself such a position as was enjoyed in England by Lord General Monk. But Pavia was either not clever enough to play this game, or he did not think it honest. He was a little puzzle-headed, and his own preference was for a Republic of the Thiers' order. He thought that the country ought to try this, and only to fall back on the Monarchy if it failed. It seemed so obvious — so simple to him, if people would only behave with common sense, that he entirely overlooked the important facts that Spain is not France, and that there was no M. Thiers. The course he actually followed, after announcing to all Spain by telegraph, and in the most downright historical style, that he had wiped out the Federalista Cortes, was to summon a meeting of notables. He invited the leaders of all the parties — except the impracticable Federalistas — Castelar himself, and Don Antonio Cdnovas, the Radicals, the Constitutionalists, Serrano, and all the officers of the rank of Captain -General present in Madrid. Then he asked them to form a government. It was with great annoyance that he found the work not so simple as he thought it ought to be. Castelar would not come at all. Don Antonio Canovas came, but he stated explicitly that he could not have anything to do with an administration which was not formed for the express purpose of restoring the King. The other parties hesitated, being perhaps a little at sea in these circumstances, and not quite sure they were not being led into a trap. Finally, Pavia, in a fit of irritation, told them that if they did not form a government, he would do so himself. It is said that 214 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. he meant to make a Cabinet of soldiers, and give his countrymen a lesson. The experience might have done no great harm, but the stimulus was sufficient. The Radicals and Constitutionalists undertook to form a Provisional Government, with Serrano at its head. Then Pavia resigned his very brief tenure of power, and fell back for good into the position of an unemployed military gentleman, who was well received in society. The Spaniards were more puzzled by this than even by the conduct of Castelar. Some of the Royalists were annoyed rather unfairly, but the general feeling was one of sheer amazement that there should be an officer in Spain who could make a pronundamiento^ and such a pronunciamiento^ and get no good out of it for himself. There was a notion that Don Manuel, if not a little mad, was certainly rather foolish. He was nicknamed, in polite society, El Flor de un Dia — the Flower of a Day. In caricatures he was commonly represented by the turkey, which, in Spanish, has a name not unlike his own — the pavo. As it is much eaten at Christmas in Spain, and he made his pronunciamiento about that season, the joke consisted in insinuating that he had only appeared in his glory to be eaten. Yet in this case, too, Spaniards came finally to the conclusion that Don Manuel Pavia, if not very clever, was very honest. He might have pushed his fortunes, and he did not. The motive of his conduct did really seem, on consideration, to be a sincere, if not very enlightened, sense of what was required in the interest of his country ; and if his countrymen laughed at him a little, they respected him a good deal, and thought that he had given the Generals A NEW EXPERIMENT. 215 almost as good an example as had been given to the politicians by Castelar. The Administration which was actually established was a makeshift, and could not well be anything else. It might, however, have been an intelligent makeshift with a patriotic purpose ; but any chance it had of being this was destroyed when the Duke of La Torre was put at its head. The name given to it sufficiently describes its character. It was called " the provisional," and it had as much authority as an administration accurately described by this title could be reasonably expected to have. Everybody knew that it must lead to something else; and there was daily less doubt as to what the only possible alternative must be. Yet, in the interval, the country would have been well satisfied if Serrano had gone on resolutely with the work of re-organizing the army, had pushed the war against the Carlists with vigour, and had given the country such a measure of tranquility as would have allowed the final settlement to be made quietly. What actually happened was that the Government lived from January, when it came into existence, till December, when it was upset by the pronunciamiento of Martinez de Campos at Murviedro, from hand to mouth. The one idea of the men at the head of affairs seemed to be to prolong the interregnum which left them in office. There was no visible effort to put down the Carlists. Carthagena was, indeed, finally taken with a degree of difficulty which was infinitely discreditable. Bilbao, which was closely besieged by the Carlists, who greatly needed a seaport, and who hated the town as the centre of Liberalism in their country, was reheved in a sudden 2i6 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. spasm of activity. To have allowed it to fall would have been ruinous, and so Serrano exerted himself. Even this, however, was not done till thousands of men had been wasted by the imbecile policy of sending insufficient forces to make front attacks on such powerfully-entrenched Carlist position as San Pedro de Abanto. The credit of finally doing it belongs to old Don Manuel de la Concha, on whom Serrano was compelled to call to bear out his own flagrant incapacity. When once Bilbao had been relieved, everything fell back into the old state of idleness. Serrano, in fact, played the part of what the Spaniards call the gardener's dog {el perro del hortelano), and we the dog in the manger. He would neither eat, nor let others eat. He would not leave Madrid, and political intrigue, and his easy life, to take command. In the meantime no other officer was allowed to exert himself, lest he should gain too much reputation, and become dangerous. The difference between " the provisional " and the Federal Republic, was that between the government of a slovenly, selfish adventurer and of a raging lunatic. Some critics — mainly French — who seem to think that there is a particular virtue in the name of the Republic, have been very tender to Serrano's Government, and have been proportionately severe on those Spaniards who finally took measures to make an end of it. But there was no republic in Spain. There was only a knot of adven- turers, who had been drifted to the head of affairs, and who governed without any shadow of legal right, who gagged the Press, and who did not render the country any one of the services which might reasonably be ex- pected of a vigorous military administration. These THE DOG IN THE MANGER, 217 same critics have occasionally wondered at the toleration which Serrano's Government showed to what are called Alfonsist intrigues, by which is meant the efforts made by some of the ablest men in Spain to get an in- telligent stable Government for the country. But it would have been wonderful if they had not been tolerant. Serrano and his chief civilian adviser, Don Mateo Praxedes Sagasta, were perfectly well aware that the majority of officers were Alfonsists. Any measures of severity against them would only have provoked an immediate explosion. Sagasta, who has since repeatedly been Prime Minister under the Restoration, was the last man in the world to make irreconcilable enemies of those who might soon have the power to injure him. The wonder, perhaps, is that Serrano did not take measures to restore the Bourbons himself; but the merest sham and make-believe of a sovereign position is known to have an irresistible attraction for a certain type of man. The reason why his rule lasted for even eleven months may be as well given in the words of Froissart — "Thus one and other said, but there was none that stirred forward, but tarried to hear other news." The Alfonsist leaders were not all of one mind. During the relief of Bilbao, a number of officers, including Martinez de Campos, had endeavoured to persuade Concha to pro- claim the King. Concha was a well-known Royalist, but he belonged to a generation to which intrigue was meat and drink. It is hard to say why he held back; and his death shortly afterwards, in a confused, unsuc- cessful battle with the Carlists, at Estella, put an end to all hopes from him. Don Antonio Canovas del Castillo 2i8 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. wished to avoid a milii^xy pronunciamiento, partly because he was himself a civilian, and therefore not anxious to give the most prominent part in the restoration to a soldier ; partly also because he is really a statesman, and understood what an evil the mihtary politician had been. He hoped to the last to secure the recall of the King by a free Cortes. In the meantime, he was completing the organisation of the party. Queen Isabel had been induced some time before to abdicate in favour of her son, and " the King," as he was now openly described in ordinary conversation in Spain, had given Don Antonio a commission to act in his name. In the autumn, Sefior Canovas published the manifesto, in a form of a letter from the King to himself, which was, in fact, the final notice to quit to Ferrano's provisional Govern- ment. It was a somewhat lengthy document, but it was by far the wisest, and the most free from empty, sonorous phrases, which had been put before the Spaniards for many a day. In this letter the King was made to promise amnesty and oblivion, and not merely in the sense given to the words in the well-known jest of Charles II. — that is to say, amnesty for his enemies and oblivion for his friends. There was to be a sponge passed over all that had happened since September, 1868, and every man who was prepared to accept the Monarchy had the King's promise that his services would not be refused. The Church's right to its due respect was explicitly promised, and the army was assured, in words of considerable dignity, that it too would have its honour and reward. In a phrase which was well calculated to please the majority of Spaniards, the King promised to A WEIGHTY MANIFESTO. 219 rule, as the ancient Kings of Spain had done, with his Cortes; while the Radicals and Constitutionalists, who represented the old Progresista party, were assured that he understood the necessity of accepting modern ideas. The language was, no doubt, studiously vague, and a good deal would depend on the interpretation put on it in practice; but, at least, here was a definite policy. The King promised a Government based on ancient right, and yet prepared to give all "necessary liberties." The alternative was a succession of casual Adminis- trations, formed of adventurers whom luck had floated to the top, and compelled, by the nature of the case, to live from hand to mouth. Spain would, indeed, have been safe for the fate of Poland, if it had hesitated in its choice. The end came in December, 1874, when Don Arsenio Martinez de Campos, Don Luis Duban, and other officers, proclaimed Don Alfonso King, at Murviedro, which the Spanish Republicans, with childish pedantry, had re-named Saguntum, because it stood, not exactly on, but very near the site of the Greek colony which Hannibal destroyed. Don Antonio Cdnovas, and a few others — Don Mateo Sagasta, probably, among them — could tell the truth as to this transaction, if they chose ; but it is unlikely that they will. Report said, at the time, that the pronunciaviiento was the work of the soldiers alone, and was undertaken against the wish of Seiior Canovas. It would be very rash to make confident assertions on such a point. What is known is that Martinez de Campos was a recognised partisan of a restoration, and that at the close of the year he was 220 DON EMILIO C A STELA R. on half-pay in Madrid, regarded with some suspicion by Serrano. The Duke de la Torre himself, after dawdling through the fine weather in Madrid, had suddenly betaken himself to the headquarters of the army of the north, at Logrono, when the country was so covered with snow, and the torrents so full, that active operations were nearly impossible. At this moment, Martinez de Campos left Madrid in company with Luis Duban, whose brother commanded a body of troops concentrated at Murviedro, for the purpose of overawing the Federalistas of Valencia, and the Carlist bands in the hill country. They went to the camp, and there called the troops under arms. All the officers were of one mind, and in the newly-raised army the soldiers were as obedient as the old had been, till the Federalist agitators corrupted them. Martinez de Campos was at that time a Mariscal de Campo — an officer who, in the Spanish Army, corres- ponds to our Lieutenant- General. It was maliciously said that his zeal for Don Alfonso was much quickened by his desire to gain, as rapidly as might be, the two remaining steps of Teniente- General, our General, and a Capitan- General, our Field Marshal. He addressed the soldiers, making many appeals to their patriotism, and ended by calling upon them to "pronounce" for Don Alfonso. No difficulty was found in inducing them to do so, though it is said that one old captain begged to be excused, on the ground that he had never taken part in any pronunctamiento, and did not wish to begin now. His scruples were treated with tenderness, and it is not likely that they interfered with his discharge of his duties as company officer. After this fortunate THE LAST PRONUNCIAMIENTO, 221 beginning, everything went upon wheels. The troops at Murviedro were marched to Valencia, where they were joined by the garrison. From thence the movement was propagated by mere report. It is true that at first the Government was informed from all sides, by civil governors and mayors of towns, that the news of the unpatriotic behaviour of the troops at Murviedro had caused profound indignation in their neighbourhood. Before a week was over, telegrams began to pour in from the same places, and not infrequently from the same persons, informing the new Government that the news of his Majesty's happy restoration had been received on all hands with indescribable enthusiasm. There was, on the whole, less romance in the second set of telegrams than in the first. The mass of the nation, as usual, stood quietly by, with a leaning towards approval of the action of the troops. Among the governing classes the satisfaction was very great when it was known, as it soon was, that the Generals were everywhere giving in their adhesion to the "act of Saguntum." They were all, indeed, so eager to join, that it seemed daily more wonderful that the makeshift Government of Serrano had not been swept away long ago. General Jovellar, who commanded the armies of the centre, joined, and was at once followed by General Primo de Rivera, who commanded in Castile. Then the senior officers of the army of the north informed Serrano that they could no longer restrain the ardour of their men. Nothing more complete, more unanimous, and, in all parts of Spain except Catalonia, more bloodless was ever seen, than the movement which brought back the dynasty of 222 DON EMILIO CASTE LA R. Bourbon, after five years of exile. In Catalonia there was some slight opposition from the Federal Volunteers, but the troops made very short work of it. The country was in fact passing weary of its six years of Revolution, and had good cause to be. The "glorious" rising of September, 1868, seemed to have brought nothing except bankruptcy and insurrection at home and in Cuba. Spain was in no need of a social revolution, for it was a country in which there were no class privileges, and indeed less envy below, and less pretention above, than anywhere in Europe. Good government it did indeed want, but the worst it had ever had was less bad than the successive administrations given it by the Revolution. A vulgar military adventurer had been followed by a sham monarchy, and that by anarchy, from which the country had only escaped to fall into the hands of the most in- significant of barrack-room conspirators. It was clear that good government was not to be got on that road; and it was with relief, and more confidence than it had felt for many a day, that Spain returned to the government which it had cast off in 1868. Yet something had been done. Spain had been made to realise the consequences oi pronunciamientos. Martinez de Campos and his friends did really mean this to be the last, and would have denied that it bore any resemblance to the older movements so-called — and they would have been largely right. They may have had selfish motives, but in the main they did want to obtain a more tolerable government for their country, and the presence of that motive makes a considerable difference in the quality of the act. It was not only the soldiers who had learnt THE NEW ERA. 223 something. The civilian politicians had also become wiser. They had begun to understand that to pack a Cortes entirely with their friends, and to exclude the opposition bodily, was a mistake, since it drove opponents to take refuge in conspiracy. It may be said, too, that everywhere, and in all ranks, Spaniards had been shocked and shamed into realising that the old practice of treating politics as a mere species of gambling was a mistake for the interests of the politicians themselves in the long run. They were really ashamed of the figure their country was cutting in the eyes of all Europe, and were honestly anxious for something better. The new spirit was dis- played in ways both respectable and a little comic, when the victors met to make a temporary settlement at Madrid. There was a universal agreement that the King's repre- sentative, Don Antonio Cdnovas, must be allowed to take the first place. The soldiers for the first time in modern Spain stood aside, and acknowledged his leadership. So far that was very well, but some trouble was caused by the difficulty which everybody had in adapting himself to the new standard of virtue. They were all so eager to prove their disinterestedness that it was not easy to form a Cabinet. This reluctance was, however, finally con- quered, and a Ministry was constructed to arrange for the return of the King. It was another result of the Revolution that the Monarchy had also learnt something. The Bourbons are proverbially a race which learns nothing and forgets nothing, and before he died, Don Alfonso had made some mistakes. It may be that fortune was kinder to Spain than she has generally been, when she removed 224 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. him early, and left the country to be governed by his widow. Yet when Don Alfonso came back, it was with a clear understanding that there must be no more of that erratic interference with the working of constitutional government, under the influence of mere whim, which had been so disastrous in his mother's reign. Spain had not wholly changed its skin and its spots. There were to be " barruntos," that is, sudden starts and erratic inclina- tions towards a revival of the old excesses, but between politicians who had at last learnt to endeavour to play the game, and a sovereign who at least abstained from upsetting the table, the Constitutional experiment had a fair chance of being made on conditions which rendered success possible. It has lasted now for twenty-one years, without actually breaking down. We can go on to survey that period without having to turn aside to consider what this Captain General was scheming or that, and without having continually to keep in mind that the Cortes was very little better than a sham, because the real direction of affairs was either in barracks, or rested with some camarilla in the palace, which was only to be approached by back-stairs intrigues. CHAPTER X. THE BENEVOLENT NEUTRALITY OF CASTELAR. Twenty years of peace — Don Emilio's new course — The influence of the Queen Regent— What is a Possibilista ? — The Constitu- tions 1869 and 1876 — A mischievous agitation — The sorrows of the Queen— Castelar reconciled to the Monarchy — His life work and the prospect for the future. RATHER more than twenty years have elapsed since the prominciamiento of Martinez Campos, and his friend Daban, at Murviedro. A few months less than twenty have passed since the final collapse of the Carlists in the first months of 1876. During this, for her unwontedly prolonged period, Spain has enjoyed peace. There have been alarms and conspiracies. Belated military adventurers have made attempts to revive the use of pronunciamientos. The Cortes has been divided as before into wrangling groups, ever varying in number, always ready to coalesce with others, or to subdivide. Ministerial crises have occurred periodically, for reasons of a purely personal character. Prime Ministers have been as liable as ever to find themselves suddenly deserted by their Cabinets and majorities. The party in office at the date of dissolution, has never failed to secure much the P 225 226 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. greater part of the seats in the Cortes elected under its direction. So far there has been little apparent change for the better, yet there has been a change, and in the right direction. If Spain has not contrived to attain to a new heaven and a new earth, it has, at least, been able to go on with the old in a much saner fashion. The improvement may be partly explained by natural causes. Exhaustion had a good deal to do with it. The eight years, between 1868 and 1876, were enough to sicken even Spain of tumult. Increase in population and wealth, which had been continuous in spite of in- triguing politicians and military adventurers, has made the Spaniards more disposed to be quiet, because they have more to lose. Spain is still a poor country, in spite of those immense resources of which the Spaniards are very fond of talking, but have never been able to develop. Sixty years ago it deserved the harsh epithet of "beggarly," applied to it by Adam Smith. Natural causes are not entitled to all the credit. The Spaniards themselves may claim a part of it. The soldiers have seriously amended their ways. Martinez Campos and the others did seriously mean the pronmtctamtento of 1875 to be the last. When an obscure officer "pro- nounced" at Badajoz, in 1883, he received no support in the army, and his movement collapsed. The politi- cians, too, have their share of merit. Don Antonio Canovas and Don Mateo Sagasta, who have alternated in office pretty regularly, have never attempted to use the bayonet as an instrument in Parliamentary conflicts. A great deal more remains to be done before Constitu- tional Government can be said to be working thoroughly THE TEACHING OF EXPERIENCE. 227 well in Spain, but an immense step in advance was made, when politicians gave up using methods which are absolutely incompatible with this form of administration. A Cortes split into unstable groups is at least better than a Cortes of dummies, liable to be sent about its business at any moment by a battalion of infantry. Don Antonio and Don Mateo may take good care to provide themselves with a majority, but the gentleman who is in allows the gentleman who is out a reasonable number of seats. Parties in Spain no longer find themselves wholly excluded, and driven to intrigue or the barricades, in order to secure a hearing. They know that they will be allowed to speak. Experience has taught them that time and chance will surely bring them back to office at no remote period, and therefore they can wait with patience till their chance comes once more. The virtue of the soldiers and politicians has been most materially helped by the complete change in the way in which the influence of the Crown has been exercised since the Restoration. Don Alfonso XII. was not a constitutional King in the full sense of the word — a sovereign who reigns, but who does not govern. He intervened with effect, but it was not on the per- suasion of some palace camarilla of intriguing fanatics. The very able lady who has now been Queen Regent for ten years, has continued to exercise the influence of the Crown with a measure of ability, of tact, and of the power of winning affection, which justify the belief that if it is possible to regain for the Spanish monarchy all the loyalty it threw away in former unhappy reigns Queen Cristina will do her son that inestimable service. 228 DON EMILIO CASTELAR- The little King has no easy task before him. Yet it will be incomparably less difficult than it might have been but for his mother, and it may even be said that he has to thank her for his prospect of reigning at all. We have yet to see whether the old absolute monarchy of Spain can so change its skin as to become con- stitutional and stable. Queen Christina has, at least, made this solution possible. No small share of the credit of keeping Spain quiet, and gradually training it to be really governed by con- stitutional methods, belongs to Don Emilio Castelar. Its education is very far from completed. It is only the other day that Don Mateo Sagasta was driven from office, because some hot-headed military gentlemen thought fit to retaliate for newspaper libels with cudgels. Fear that the army would go further, had a good deal to do with the crisis which brought Don Antonio Canovas back to office. It was thought that excited military men would have more respect for a Conservative than a Liberal Premier. Yet something has been done, and Don Emilio has helped in the doing. When Don Alfonso XII. was put on the throne in January, 1875, Castelar retired for a time into exile. He did not stay abroad long, and there was no reason why he should. There was no wish to keep him out of Spain, or even out of the Cortes. He returned, resumed his professorship, and found a seat. In one sense of the word his political career was over. He could not honourably take office, and in all probability he never will. Don Emilio Castelar remains a Re- publican, but he has qualified the name by a most THE DEFINITION OF POSSIBILISTA. 229 important adjective. He is a Republicano Possibilista. A Possibilist would appear on the face of it to be only what every politician who is in his sober senses must needs be. The alternative is an Impossibilista, or person who deliberately endeavours after the impossible, which is perhaps as good a definition as any of the political lunatic But there was nothing superfluous in the adjective as Senor Castelar used it. On the contrary, it amounted to an avowal of past errors, and gave guarantees as to the future. Hitherto he and his friends had been " Impossibilistas." They had in the earlier days of the Democratic agitation refused to have anything to say to concessions and reforms which fell short of their full demands. After the Revolution of 1868 they had been equally uncompromising. They would have their full Democratic Federal Republic, or they would, within the limits of their power, prevent anybody else from governing. Contact with facts had waked Don Emilio from his early dreams. He came back to Spain prepared to accept part since he could not get the whole, to conform to a Government which was not his ideal, and to give it even support in return for concessions. He was prepared, in fact, for compromise; in other words, he re-entered political life with the spirit of a statesman, and not a fanatic. This is what he meant when he called himself " Possibilista." There were some of his colleagues who had learnt nothing, and forgotten nothing. They were, and have remained, fanatics. The object then that he set himself, and has to a very large extent obtained, has been to bring about the re introduction of the Liberal Constitution of 1868. When 230 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. the King's party had established him on the throne and had pacified Spain, they made a new Constitution. It was mainly the work of Don Antonio Canovas, and was of a distinctly Conservative character. The suffrage was limited, and religious freedom was given with a grudging hand. The difficulties of Don Antonio were created far less by his enemies than by his friends. He had majority enough to do as he pleased with open opponents ; but the Spanish clergy, egged on by Pio Nono, with all his usual indiscretion, made demands which it was impossible to grant. Senor Canovas was even, for a time, forced to resign, by his inability to satisfy his clerical supporters. But, like Pitt, in somewhat similar circumstances, he thought that his resignation of office released him from his engagements, and he soon returned to powen The Constitution of 1876 was finally voted by a Conservative Cortes, though it gave the clergy much less than their demands. Under this new settlement, some good and necessary work was done, mainly by Senor Canovas. Martinez Campos pacified Cuba; that is to say, the trouble was skinned over for a time, only to break out again, with greater violence than ever, within the last year. The finances were brought into some kind of order. Spain is very far indeed from being secure against another bankruptcy ; but the Government has won so much confidence at home, that a good deal of the foreign debt has passed into native hands. It is, perhaps, a guarantee for some measure of financial honesty in future, that another failure of the State to keep its engagements would not defraud only the foreigner. The country had THE NEW STYLE OF REFORM. 231 once more a period of prosperity, due in some measure to the ravages of the phyleoxera in France, which gave a great stimulus to the export of Spanish red wine. Periods of prosperity have never stopped political agitation in Spain, and this did not. The various representatives of the old Progresista Party continued to exert themselves for their principles. They split into three main sections, variegated by numerous sub-divisions. Don Mateo Sagasta and his followers accepted the dynasty, and formed what was called the Dynastic Left. They were, in fact, a Liberal Party, loyal to the Crown, but intent on a Reform Bill. Then there were the others, who would not call themselves Dynastic. They were not without their sub- and cross-divisions; but, roughly speaking, they may be said to be composed of those who were disposed to follow Don Emilio Castelar, and those who followed Senor Ruiz Zorrilla. Don Emilio's party were the Possibilistas ; the others were the uncom- promising Republicans. A complete and withal some- what comic exchange of parts was made between these two leaders. Ruiz Zorrilla had been Minister to Don Amadeo, and there was nothing in his history to make it impossible for him to adopt the same course as Don Mateo Sagasta. He might, consistently enough, have been content to be a Liberal politician in the Cortes of the restored Bourbon Monarchy. The difficulty in his way was probably the existence of Don Mateo. The place of leader was, in fact, occupied, and so Senor Ruiz Zorrilla had to look elsewhere for a party. There was no room on the Conservative side. Don Emilio Castelar led the moderate Republicans, and closed the road on 232 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. that side too. But there was an opening in the direction of the extreme miHtant RepubUcans. Ruiz Zorrilla rushed into it. The ex-Minister of Don Amadeo, the ex-Radical who had helped to make the Monarchical Constitution of 1868, suddenly became a Republican a tons crinSi Democratic, Federalist, and everything else that a Republican can be. He was, in fact, the " ImpossibiHsta " of the party, and, to the best of his power, the most mischievous of the politicians of his time. At home, until he was sent into exile by Senor Canovas, and then abroad, he continued to agitate, and was the prime mover of the futile — and, because futile, doubly wicked — attempts to revive civil war which agitated Spain from time to time, during some years. He failed entirely, and, at last, was so completely broken down, that he made his peace with the Royal Govern- ment, and returned to Spain to die. The most important consequences of Zorrilla's efforts to revive the late monarchy for his own benefit, was to emphasize the peaceful attitude of Don Emilio Castelar. It would be most unjust to say that he was persuaded to adopt this course by mere personal rivalry. On the con- trary, he had argued against the use of force from the day that Pavia had turned the Federalistas into the street. He had submitted quietly to the feeble dictatorship of Serrano, and, although he had retired into exile for a time after the Restoration, had studiously abstained from agitation. Experience had convinced him that a Republic was impossible in Spain, until a great deal more had been done to persuade and educate the country. His whole influence was exerted to induce the Republicans to under- THE AFTERGLOW OF AGITATION. 233 take the work of persuasion and education. To do this effectually, they must themselves set an example of obedience to the law, and of the use of legitimate parliamentary methods. Still, it was not in human nature that he should not be influenced by finding himself ousted from the confidence of a large portion of the Republicans by a mere adventurer, who had taken up the cause only because his ambition could be satisfied in no other way. The split between them came early, and ended in a complete division in 1881. Zorrilla, now in exile in Paris, began to agitate and conspire, for the purpose of bringing about an armed Democratic revolt. Of course, it was to be made by soldiers, and to succeed by fomenting mutiny. The effects of this villainous agitation were seen for some years, in a succession of small revolts and mutinies, in Catalonia, at Carthagena, and at Badajoz. They were commonly the work of the pritnos sargentoSy were all suppressed, and were in many instances followed by the shooting of the ringleaders. Castelar answered the appearance of Zorrilla, as a Republican revolt-maker, by a manifesto, in which he formally disassociated himself from the extreme men, and announced his intention of uniting with the Left, for the purpose of modifying the constitution of 1876, in the sense of that of 1868. Whether he knew it or not, he had now entered on a course which, in very conceivable circumstances, might end by making him, for all practical purposes, a loyal supporter of the Crown. A politician who declares his preference for one particular form of government, but is ready to obey another, and to help it, provided it carries measures of which he approves, is 234 DON EMILIO CASTE LAR. liable, when he is taken at his word, and if he is an honest man, to find himself committed to support the government which complies with his conditions. The Monarchy has taken Don Emilio at his word, and he is an honest man, so that the inevitable consequence follows. His Republicanism has shown a steady tendency to approximate to the Jacobitism of those Scottish and English gentlemen of the latter half of the last century, who were very loyal subjects of King George. It is little more than a regret and a sentimental preference. When some ill-conditioned busybody told George II. that his Highland soldiers drank the health of "the Pretender," His Majesty answered that they might drink for whomsoever they pleased, as long as they fought for him. The King's ministers at Madrid might equally say, if drinking of healths were a Spanish custom, that Don Emilio was free to toast the Republic at his discretion, as long as he worked loyally. His conversion, if it may be called so, has been largely the result of very honourable sentiment. When Don Alfonso XI I. died in November, 1885, he left his widow with child. Queen Cristina had already gained the affection of the Spaniards. They were pleased to see the throne shared by a lady of the House of Austria, which had governed Spain in the most glorious period of its history, and the Archduchess had very speedily gained a great personal popularity. Upon the death of the King, her painful position appealed to the chivalrous sentiments of the nation. Zorrilla and his agents only saw a chance for disorder, but the overwhelming majority of the nation was revolted at this cynicism. All parties THE QUEEN'S CONQUEST, 235 in the Cortes, and the generals, were agreed that there must be no disturbance of order. The present King was born in May, 1886, and his rights were recognised without question. At an earlier period of his life, and when he was dealing with an historical example, or an hypothetical case, Castelar would certainly have insisted on what he would have called the absurdity of allowing the right to govern a nation to depend on the sex of an unborn child. When, however, he had to deal with the actual case, when he found that he had before him a lady in a most pathetic position, and a child in its cradle, he listened to no doctrine but to his natural feelings as a Spaniard and a gentleman. In that very year the Queen completed the conquest of the Republican orator, by an action which, on the face of it, did not appear to be dictated by sound common sense. One Villacampa, an officer, who was in league with Zorrilla, made an abortive rising in Madrid, in which two other officers were killed. Villacampa was captured, and condemned to death by a court-martial. Under the influence of the feeble modern sentiment, which is favourable to all political crimes, an agitation was begun to induce Government to spare his life. The ministers were, or professed themselves, resolute to allow the law to take its course. The Queen Regent, however, intervened with a strong personal appeal to ministers to consent to the commutation of the sentence of death into banish- ment. Such a request at the time was not to be denied, and Villacampa escaped with his life. It is, must be said, to his credit that he expressed a proper measure of gratitude to the Queen Regent, and gave his promise, 236 DON EMILIO CASTELAR. which has so far been honestly kept, to take no further part in revolts against her Government. To most observers it seemed that the escape of a military con- spirator, who had richly deserved to be shot, must be ruinous to discipline. But so much are men governed by sentiment, that the Queen Regent's action has had the contrary effect. Other discontented officers who may have been previously disposed to follow Villacampa's example, have apparently considered themselves bound by his promises to repay the clemency of the Queen with loyalty. There has, at any rate, been no repetition of Villacampa's offence. If ministers affected a greater rigour than they really felt, in order that the whole merit of pardoning him might be earned by the Queen, and that it might become shameful to take arms against one who was so gracious and humane, they certainly acted with practical good sense. To Castelar, who was already well disposed to approve of the Queen Regent's acts, the pardoning of Villacampa was especially pleasing. He had always been opposed to capital punishment, even when necessity had driven him to consent to the severe measures of Pavia. Now he was glad to affirm his belief in his old opinion, and delivered a speech in her praise, which had much the look of a declaration of unlimited personal devotion. What was begun by the clemency of the Queen Regent was completed by her maternal sufferings and anxieties in 1890. The little King — a very weakly child — fell desperately ill, and it was, at one time, thought that he could not possibly survive. He did recover largely through the nursing of his mother ; and what might have THE FINAL CONVERSION OF CASTELAR. 237 been a great crisis for the Monarchy passed away, leaving it stronger in the affection of the Spaniards than it had been for very long. Castelar, who had already as good as given his word to accept the Royal Government as established and above dispute, now congratulated the Queen on her son's recovery, assuring her that he con- sidered Alfonso XIII. as doubly King, by law and by miracle. When it has got to this with a Republican gentleman — that he obeys a Royal Government, co- operates with Royalist Ministers, and acknowledges the King to be King by human law and divine sanction, the space which divides him from a full Royalist has well-nigh ceased to be visible to the naked eye. In Senor Castelar's case Republicanism has come to mean little more than this — that he does not think that his past life allows him to take office under the Crown with decency. The modification of the Constitution of 1876 in the direction of the previous Constitution of 1869, which Castelar had undertaken to forward in combination with Sagasta, was finally carried out in 1890. It is one more proof that Spain is really fitting herself to Constitutional ways that this Liberal measure was finally carried with Conservative help. Six years earlier, Don Antonio Cdnovas had announced his disposition to accept moderate reforms, provided they were asked for by those who had previously acknowledged the Monarchy without reserve. In fact, he was disposed to make the desired changes, lest they should be made in a more extreme form by opponents. The inability of the Spaniards to form definite enduring parties, their incli- 238 DON EMILIO CASTE LA R. nation to split into groups under the influence of personal rivalry, debarred the revision of the Constitution till 1890. The work was at last done by Don Antonio Canovas himself. Universal suffrage was re-established. This "dishing of the Whigs" would, no doubt, in some countries, have amounted to a revolution. In Spain it was a measure of no considerable practical importance. Where there is little political interest felt in any class other than that which is, by profession, political; where there is no class hatred, and the rnass of the population wishes only to be tolerably governed in quiet ; where the overwhelming majority would never vote at all, if some pressure were not put upon them ; where the Govern- ment, in reality, directs the elections — it does not matter much whether the suffrage is limited or universal. The Liberals were in favour of it, because they thought it the proper thing for a Liberal to support. The Possibilistas were with them for very much the same reason. When the revision had been completed, there was nothing but his sense of what was personally decent to make Castelar refrain from taking office himself. There was nothing to restrain his followers; and in 1894 one of them — Sefior Abarzuza — did actually occupy the Ministry of the Colonies in the Cabinet of Senor Sagasta. I am conscious that Don Emilio Castelar appears to have played, during by far the greater portion of his life, a subordinate part. His tenure of power was short. During previous years his personal influence was never equal to that of a score of political and military intriguers. It can hardly even be said that he had much direct share in overturning the throne of Isabel II. Since the THE LIFE WORK OF CASTELAR. 239 Restoration the actual doing of the work has been in the hands of other men. The later years of his life may be said to be the condemnation of the earlier ; and the charge could, with difficulty, be rebutted. Nobody who has the least conscience in the use of words can say that he is a great statesman ; and we can only allow that he is a great orator, with many and severe limitations. Yet, when every allowance is duly made, it is still true that he has played a great part in his country, and that in its later stages it has been a very wholesome one. What Spain needed was to learn that since it had to conduct Government with, at least, the forms of a Constitution, it must give up using the bayonet for the purpose of excluding minorities, or expelling majorities. Don Emilio Castelar has had his share in the original sin of Spanish politics, but it has been small. Except in the case of rising in 1868, and the coup (Vetat in April, 1873, he has always endeavoured to persuade his countrymen, by precept and example, to rely on persuasion for the propagation of their opinions. We may hope from the experience of the last twenty years that the lesson has been, at least, partly learnt. If so, he has helped to render Spain a great service indeed, and one of which the value will be seen in the crisis which is certainly being prepared by the revolt in Cuba. PLYMOUTH : WILLIAM BKENDON AND SON, PRINTERS. A Catalogue of New Books and New Editions published by Bliss, Sands, and Foster at 15 Craven St., Strand, London, w.c. 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