What a deluge of shoddy snobbery and vulgar display pours out of
America!
It is often argued that Spaniards should eulogize South Americans for political reasons. This is one of many recommendations which proceed from the craniums of gentlemen who top themselves off with silk hats and who carry a lecture inside which is in demand by Ibero-American societies.
I have no faith that this brand of politics will be productive of results.
Citizens of old, civilized countries are still sensible to flattery and compliment, but what are you to tell an Argentine who is fully convinced that Argentina is a more important country than England or Germany, because she raises a large quantity of wheat, to say nothing of a great number of cows?
Whenever Unamuno writes he decries Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and then promptly eulogizes the mighty General Aníbal Pérez and the great poet Diocleciano Sánchez, who hail from the pampas. To these fellows, such praise seems grudging enough. Salvador Rueda himself must appear tame to these hide-stretchers.
XVI
POLITICS
I have always been a liberal radical, an individualist and an anarchist. In the first place, I am an enemy of the Church; in the second place, I am an enemy of the State. When these great powers are in conflict I am a partisan of the State as against the Church, but on the day of the State's triumph, I shall become an enemy of the State. If I had lived during the French Revolution, I should have been an internationalist of the school of Anacarsis Clootz; during the struggle for liberty, I should have been one of the Carbonieri.
To the extent in which liberalism has been a destructive force, inimical to the past, it enthralls me. The fight against religious prejudice and the aristocracy, the suppression of religious communities, inheritance taxes—in short, whatever has a tendency to pulverize completely the ancient order of society, fills me with a great joy. On the other hand, insofar as liberalism is constructive, as it has been for example in its advocacy of universal suffrage, in its democracy, and in its system of parliamentary government, I consider it ridiculous and valueless as well.
Even today, wherever it is obliged to take the aggressive, it seems to me that the good in liberalism is not exhausted; but wherever it has become an accomplished fact, and is accepted as such, it neither interests me nor enlists my admiration.