It would have been natural that portraits of the Queen should appear in connection with the War Fund initiated by her Majesty and taken up with enthusiasm all over the country. But no. A portrait and several pictures of the Marquesa de Squilache, who acted as honorary secretary, were published, showing that lady at work in her office, distributing money to applicants, &c. But I have not been able to discover that any such pictures appeared with the young Queen as the central figure. The Marquesa de Squilache is a philanthropist whose fame deservedly extends all over Spain, and the admirable organisation of the fund was certainly due in a great measure to her clear-headed and business-like methods. But she would be the first to acknowledge that the Queen, and not herself, should have been represented in the picture-papers as the head and front of this effort to alleviate the misery caused by the war. It is difficult to believe that the marked omission of her Majesty’s portrait in the illustrated papers during the clericalist Press-censorship was accidental, while at the same time a series of thirty-six postcards of Don Jaime of Bourbon in the Castle of Frohsdorf was being freely advertised in Madrid.
The War Fund, initiated and presided over by the young Queen, was perhaps the first charitable appeal ever issued direct from the Court to the nation, without the intervention of the Church. At first it was stated that applicants for relief from this Fund must bring certificates of birth, baptism, marriage, &c., from their parish priests. [11] But the Heraldo, one of the leading Liberal-Monarchist papers, pointed out that such a condition would deprive all those who had been married by the civil authority of participation in the Fund, and put in a further plea for the children of soldiers not born in wedlock. The Queen and her committee of ladies decided on the widest interpretation of the family limitation, and at an early stage in the war relief was given to a child whose father was at the front, although the mother did not bear his name. This broadly charitable decision commended the Fund warmly to the mass of the people, for, as already shown, the prohibitive cost of the marriage licence in many, if not all, the Spanish dioceses compels numbers of decent couples to use the civil rite or none. Thus the decided action taken by, the Queen and her committee, notwithstanding the recommendations of the Church, endeared Queen Victoria Eugénie to thousands of mothers who, if the first conditions proposed had been made obligatory, would have been without the pale.
The interminable lists of subscribers, appearing day after day and week after week, and the innumerable small subscriptions, often not exceeding ten centimes, and sometimes falling as low as five, proved how whole-heartedly the poor gave of their penury, and various incidents which occurred showed a real spirit of self-sacrifice in the wage-earners. Such was the action of the cigarette-makers of Seville, the two thousand women of all ages whose fame has been so often sung in the opera of “Carmen.” They were ordered to make up several thousand boxes of cigarettes with the legend “For the Army at Melilla.” They immediately asked to be allowed to do the whole work gratis as a tribute to the Army; and on being informed that this could not be permitted, because the consignment was a gift to the troops from the Company which rents the tobacco rights from the Crown, the cigarreras volunteered to forfeit a whole day’s pay, to be given to the Queen’s Fund for the Wounded. Numbers of these women are mothers of families, and many of them have only three or four days’ work weekly, at a wage ranging from 75 centimes to pesetas 1.50, so that a whole day’s pay was a serious consideration to them. Nor were they by any means alone in their generosity, for many industrial guilds, companies, trade unions, and civil servants, such as, e.g., the minor post-office officials and telegraph operators, also gave a day’s wage.
Judging from the results of previous appeals to the public for charitable purposes, it is safe to say that the enthusiastic response to the Queen’s Fund was due in a great measure to the national confidence that the money would be well and wisely administered under her Majesty’s auspices, for it is a melancholy fact that similar confidence is not felt by the poor in the case of subscriptions raised under the patronage of the Church.
I have quoted at random a few observations from among many betraying animus against her Majesty on the part of the priests. Here is another, which shows why they dislike the young Queen so much. I met one day in a mountain village a Franciscan friar who had come from a neighbouring city to deliver a course of sermons. He mistook me for a Frenchman, and therefore had the less hesitation in enlarging upon the evils that the King’s marriage would bring upon the country. One remark particularly impressed me, as expressing in a few words the attitude of the Church towards education.
“She will do untold harm by trying to introduce her English ideas about the education of women. The women of Spain have quite as much education as is good for them. More would only do them harm.”
In this connection it seems worth while to mention that what most appealed to the working women (who certainly are not over-burdened with education) in relation to the birth of the Prince of Asturias was the announcement that the Queen intended to nurse her baby herself, instead of following the old-fashioned custom, universal among the upper classes, of employing a wet-nurse. This is not the place to discuss the unhappy, results of the system on the general health and morale of the nation. But the announcement was seized upon by the poor as bringing the royal mother into close contact with themselves.
“Have you heard that she is suckling her child, just as we do?”
And when soon after it was stated that “owing to the Queen’s state of health, and having regard to the duties of her position” the infant Prince had been handed over to a wet-nurse like any other rich man’s child, a sigh of disappointment went up.
“You see, the doctors would not let her do as she wished. Health? Rubbish! Any one can see that she is the picture of health. But what would become of the commissions the doctors get from the wet-nurses for recommending them if the Queen put wet-nursing out of fashion?”