Tarifa! What memories it invokes! In the olden and golden days of primitive man, before corporation lawyers had learned how to frame pillaging statutes, and rascally politicians to bamboozle confiding constituencies--thus I used to put it--the gentle pirates of Tarifa laid broad and deep the foundations for the Protective System in the United States.
It was a fruitful as well as a congenial theme, and I rang all the changes on it. To take by law from one man what is his and give it to another man who has not earned it and has no right to it, I showed to be an invention of the Moors, copied by the Spaniards and elevated thence into political economy by the Americans. Tarifa took its name from Tarif-Ben-Malik, the most enterprising Robber Baron of his day, and thus the Lords of Tarifa were the progenitors of the Robber Barons of the Black Forest, New England and Pittsburgh. Tribute was the name the Moors gave their robbery, which was open and aboveboard. The Coal Kings, the Steel Kings and the Oil Kings of the modern world have contrived to hide the process; but in Spain the palaces of their forefathers rise in lonely and solemn grandeur just as a thousand years hence the palaces upon the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park and along Riverside Drive, not to mention those of the Schuylkill and the Delaware, may become but roosts for bats and owls, and the chronicler of the Anthropophagi, "whose heads do reach the skies," may tell how the voters of the Great Republic were bought and sold with their own money, until "Heaven released the legions north of the North Pole, and they swooped down and crushed the pulpy mass beneath their avenging snowshoes." The gold that was gathered by the Spaniards and fought over so valiantly is scattered to the four ends of the earth. It may be as potent to-day as then; but it does not seem nearly so heroic. A good deal of it has found its way to London, which a short century and a half ago "had not," according to Adam Smith, "sufficient wealth to compete with Cadiz." We have had our full share without fighting for it. Thus all things come to him who contrives and waits.
Meanwhile, there are "groups" and "rings." And, likewise, "leaders" and "bosses." What do they know or care about the origins of wealth; about Venice; about Cadiz; about what is said of Wall Street? The Spanish Main was long ago stripped of its pillage. The buccaneers took themselves off to keep company with the Vikings. Yet, away down in those money chests, once filled with what were pieces of eight and ducats and doubloons, who shall say that spirits may not lurk and ghosts walk, one old freebooter wheezing to another old freebooter: "They order these things better in the 'States.'"
IV
I have enjoyed hugely my several sojourns in Spain. The Spaniard is unlike any other European. He may not make you love him. But you are bound to respect him.
There is a mansion in Seville known as The House of Pontius Pilate because part of the remains of the abode of the Roman Governor was brought from Jerusalem and used in a building suited to the dignity of a Spanish grandee who was also a Lord of Tarifa. The Duke of Medina Celi, its present owner, is a lineal scion of the old piratical crew. The mansion is filled with the fruits of many a foray. There are plunder from Naples, where one ancestor was Viceroy, and treasures from the temples of the Aztecs and the Incas, where two other ancestors ruled. Every coping stone and pillar cost some mariner of the Tarifa Straits a pot of money.
Its owner is a pauper. A carekeeper shows it for a peseta a head. To such base uses may we come at last. Yet Seville basks in the sun and smiles on the flashing waters of the Guadalquivir, and Cadiz sits serene upon the green hillsides of San Sebastian, just as if nothing had ever happened; neither the Barber and Carmen, nor Nelson and Byron; the past but a phantom; the present the prosiest of prose-poems.
There are canny Spaniards even as there are canny Scots, who grow rich and prosper; but there is never a Spaniard who does not regard the political fabric, and the laws, as fair game, the rule being always "devil take the hindmost," community of interests nowhere. "The good old vices of Spain," that is, the robbing of the lesser rogue by the greater in regulated gradations all the way from the King to the beggar, are as prevalent and as vital as ever they were. Curiously enough, a tiny stream of Hebraic blood and Moorish blood still trickles through the Spanish coast towns. It may be traced through the nomenclature in spite of its Castilian prefigurations and appendices, which would account for some of the enterprise and activity that show themselves, albeit only by fits and starts.
Chapter the Thirtieth
The Makers of the Republic--Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster--The Proposed League of Nations--The Wilsonian Incertitude--The "New Freedom"