It was curious to observe how constantly the Carlist and Cuban wars seemed to be in the minds of the people during the regime of repression. Frequent comparisons were drawn between the reign of Queen Isabella and the rule of Señor Maura, all highly unfavourable to the latter. It was always Maura and the Jesuits: never was the King blamed in Spain for the sins of his ministers. The Carlist war seemed as fresh in the minds of the unlettered masses as Mellila itself. Tales were raked up of shocking cruelty to the rank and file, and of a callous disregard of their sufferings in Cuba and the Philippines, and it seemed to be believed by many of the speakers that similar abuses were being repeated in Morocco.
A nation which has been prevented from developing its intellectual life is inevitably thrown back upon its recollections, and traditions of class injury cannot fail to be more permanent among a people who have no other occupation for their thoughts.
For nearly forty years the uneducated Spanish peasantry, and the artisan classes, have nursed their wrath against the body whom their parents believed to have dethroned, for their own ends and at the cost of a bloody civil war, a Queen desirous of ameliorating the lot of her people; and for ten years of that time their resentment has been increased by the conviction that the same body plotted to sell the last of the once world-wide Spanish colonies, and strewed the road to that sale with the corpses of Spanish peasants, set to fight, without arms or equipment, against the overwhelming forces of the enemy, while the Jesuits appropriated to their own purposes the money wrung from the nation for the expenses of the war.
How much of the indictment against the Jesuits is justified I do not pretend to decide; but all the world knows that the Spanish Army again and again went into action in Cuba and the Philippines so destitute of munitions as to be practically unarmed, while the tragic loss of the Spanish Navy at Santiago will never be forgotten by those whose friends and relatives were sent to an inevitable death “by order of the Government in Madrid.”
Had the people been allowed to educate themselves during the years that have passed since those fatal adventures, the wound, though it will long remain unhealed, would have been skinned over by consoling comparisons drawn between these and the great disasters of other nations. But the Religious Orders have always opposed the spread of popular education. The people have been driven back upon tradition, old and new, for their mental nourishment, while other nations have been forging ahead. Thus the Religious Orders have sharpened a sword for their own undoing. The longer the Spanish peasant is left to nurse the memory of his grievances, the more bitter grows his resentment against those whom he holds responsible for them.
To the Jesuits the people attribute the downfall of Isabel II. and the years of internecine strife which followed; to the Jesuits they attribute the fiasco of the Spanish-American War, with all the suffering it entailed upon the poor; to the Jesuits they attribute the war in Morocco, with its heavy account of bloodshed, sickness, and money-cost; and to the Jesuits they impute the chronic unrest in Cataluña, which they believe to be fostered in the interests of Don Jaime of Bourbon. They are convinced that all these things were and are engineered by the Carlist party, being well aware that, as the Pretender himself stated, in a published document, the “Monarch” of the Ultramontanes has no hope of entering Spain again, save on the waves of a national revolution, which would bring misery and desolation to thousands of homes.
Let us now see what evidence may be found in incidents that have occurred and statements that have been published since the regime of repression was abolished, to support the popular theory of Jesuit-Carlist intervention in the events of 1909.
The belief, industriously promulgated in Spain and abroad, that Ferrer engineered and conducted the July outbreak, fell flat, generally speaking, among the Spanish working people; always excepting, of course, the more educated elements in the larger industrial cities.
“They are saying that this Ferrer, whoever he may be, paid Morral to throw the bomb at the King and Queen. If that is true he deserved to be shot. But others say that the Jesuits themselves paid Morral, and others again say that Don Carlos employed him.[14] What do I know about it? The only thing certain is that the Jesuits had a hand in this Barcelona business, for they have a hand in everything that is bad for the country. Where the Jesuits are, there are the Carlists also. As for this Ferrer, who is he? We never heard of him till Maura shot him.”
This commentary on “the execution of an anarchist” or “the martyrdom of an enthusiast” is, of course, that of the peasantry alone, not that of the Republicans and Socialists, to whom he was well known long before the Barcelona riots took place. But let it be remembered that the unlettered peasant forms the great majority of the working classes in Spain.