"Not directly. That's the hell of it. If not for me, or someone else with as much money to risk as I'm risking, this manganese would be useless to everyone. But I'm not going to sink a fortune into the mine only to have the cream taken away from me."
"By Tabio?"
A slight smile touched Margaret's lips. "Not exactly," she said. "I'm a little more rational than Fernandez and his friends. It's not Tabio I'm afraid of, darling. It's the thing he's started. You don't open a few thousand schools all over a backward country and then expect the people to remain the same. It's not only the kids who go to these schools; grown-ups pack the same school houses every night. People don't want things they don't know about. But when they go to school they start learning about a million things they'd like to have—and none of these are free. They begin to want modern houses and radios and refrigerators and pianos—you have no idea what they begin to want, Matt!
"The schools are only the beginning. Once the miners learn how to read and write, the unions come along and flood them with printed propaganda about higher wages. They tell the miners that higher wages mean higher standards of living."
"Don't they?" Hall asked.
"Not for the mine owners, dear," she said. "Higher wages mean lower profits. And when you run a mine, the idea is to keep the profits up. That's where the politics come in, Matt. You don't pass laws—as the Popular Front has—forcing employers to bargain with the unions without making the unions so powerful that they can and do elect whole blocs of union deputies and senators. And then these blocs push through laws on hospitalization and social security and death benefits that cut into a mine owner's profits nearly as much as the wage increases.
"In other words, Matt, it all boils down to dollars and cents. Tabio and his ideas are great vote-catchers—but the costs are enormous. And these costs don't come out of the pockets of the people who vote for the Popular Front candidates."
Hall watched her in fascination as she spoke. This was no mystic Pilar Primo de Rivera, he thought, no hyper-thyroid hysteric falling on her knees in the cathedral and then rushing out with blood in her eyes and emptying a Mauser full of bullets into the warm bodies of housewives shopping in the Madrid slums. Margaret's voice had not risen by one note. Her hands were calm, she was still relaxed in the settee. If not for the hard sharpness of her voice now, she might still be discussing soy-bean culture or anything else as remote from her true interests.
"Fernandez and the Cross and Sword crowd might be hysterical," Margaret said, "but they are on the right track. The government has to change quickly, or it will be too late for all of us. The Cross and Sword crowd aren't really natives, you know. They're Spaniards. They got the scare of their lives when Tabio's Spanish counterparts took over in Spain."
"But why? They live here. Spain is an ocean away."