The crucial question to-day in Spain is the religious question. Not the belief or disbelief of the people in their religion, but the relations of the Church—i.e., that of the priests and, far more, of the Religious Orders—to the nation.
From tradition and from the circumstances of their lives, the mass of the people have come to look upon the Religious Orders as their evil genius, and at every turn one meets with evidences of their distrust of and hostility to those who should be their spiritual guides. Until July, 1909, this feeling, although for long past there have been clear indications of it, was not openly expressed by the people in public places. They not only hated the “good fathers,” as they satirically call them, but dreaded their vengeance upon those who offended them. Since the rising against the Religious Orders in Cataluña, however, the attitude of the two parties towards each other has been reversed. It is now the priests and the Religious Orders who are afraid. So little do they understand the people whom they are supposed to teach, that they go in fear of their lives lest the working classes should rise en masse against them; whereas the working classes en masse desire nothing better than a peaceable solution which shall ensure their daily bread to them and their children.
On every side the people see the baneful hand of the Church, interfering or trying to interfere in their domestic life, ordering the conditions of employment, draining them of their hard-won livelihood by trusts and monopolies established and maintained in the interests of the Religious Orders, placing obstacles in the way of their children’s education, hindering them in the exercise of their constitutional rights, and deliberately ruining those of them who are bold enough to run counter to priestly dictation. Riots suddenly break out in Barcelona: they are instigated by the Jesuits. The country goes to war in Morocco: it is dragged into it solely in defence of the mines owned, actually if not ostensibly, by the Jesuits. The consumos cannot be abolished, because the Jesuits are financially interested in their continuance, and so forth. Rightly or wrongly, the people attribute all the ills under which they suffer to the influence of the Church, and sooner or later, unless measures are taken to restrain the interference of the Church in public and private life, an explosion will come which will sweep the whole institution away. Moreover, the steady and continuous efforts made by the Church to upset the existing regime and bring back a reign of absolutism with the proscribed branch of the House of Bourbon, though not continually present in the minds of the people, are not unknown to or ignored by them.
But with all this intensely anti-clerical feeling, the mass of the people are untouched by modern scepticism, and are deeply and sincerely religious. Their religion is simple in the extreme: many would call it gross superstition, but such as it is, it suits their stage of intellectual development and undoubtedly has a considerable effect on their conduct. To represent the Spanish working man—as the Church newspapers always do—as an atheist and an anarchist, only to be restrained by force from overthrowing the social order, merely proves how completely ignorant the Clericalists are of his real character.
RACIAL AND CLASS DIVISIONS
CHAPTER I
RACIAL AND CLASS DIVISIONS
The relations between rich and poor, between rulers and ruled, between employers and employed, in Spain are peculiar and not easy to understand.