The immediate dependents of a well-to-do family are allowed a freedom of manner and intercourse which is incomprehensible to English exclusiveness, and a sense of responsibility for their dependents, and especially for those who have rendered long domestic service, is almost universal among employers. Thus there is hardly a family of means that does not, as a matter of course, support for the rest of their lives one or more of the wet-nurses who brought up the children; and during the famine in Andalusia a few years ago, most, if not all, of the landowners continued to pay, to the limit of their means, the wages of their permanent labourers, although owing to the drought no field work could be done for months. But with all this very real generosity towards those with whom they are brought in contact, the rich have no corporate or class sense of responsibility for the working classes, and make no effort to understand or provide for their needs as a whole. Spaniards are liberal in alms-giving, and every good Catholic gives doles on one day of the week to his or her regular pensioners; but there is no public provision for the destitute, and it is not in the least realised that an organised system of poor relief would be less costly, and certainly far less demoralising, than the haphazard distribution of pence to all and sundry. It is true that in some towns benevolent societies are carrying on good work according to their means, but these, consisting only of voluntary gifts, are not sufficient to do more than touch the fringe of the poverty produced by the conditions of the country.
The original causes of this combination of an almost patriarchal relation between the master and his immediate dependents, and complete ignorance of and indifference to the lot of those outside of the home or estate, lie deep, and must be sought in the relations between Christians and Moslems when the Castilians re-conquered Spain. It must be remembered that the Arabs had brought agriculture and many industries to a high state of perfection, and after the conquest they continued to cultivate the land and work at their manufactures for the benefit of their conquerors. Thus for some hundreds of years the dominant was living with the subject race, and the conquerors would feel for the conquered the contempt of the fighting man for the labourer, of the Western for the Oriental, of the victor for the vanquished, and of the Christian for the infidel. It is easy to see that when the mass of the industrial population was of alien race, any idea of responsibility on the part of the employers for the employed as a class would be unlikely to arise, while on the other hand the personal relation between master and servant would become intimate, as it did in the Southern States of America in the slave-holding days, and as it is in the East to-day. This accounts for the relation between rich and poor already remarked on: liberal protection of immediate dependents, coupled with indifference to the general welfare of the working classes. The tradition, handed down from the time when the bulk of the proletariat were aliens, has persisted for two hundred years after the last of the Moslem inhabitants was expelled.[1]
A right understanding both of the past history of Spain and of its social and political condition to-day is made still more difficult by the claim made by Castile, with Madrid as the capital, to speak for Spain as a whole. Most histories of Spain are written from the Castilian point of view, and foreign writers naturally go to the capital in search of their material. But this procedure leaves out of sight the very important distinctions between the different parts of Spain, and especially those between the Castilian and the Aragonese of the centre and north, and the Andalusian, Valencian, and Murcian of the south. Setting aside Cataluña and the Basque Provinces, with a population in round numbers of 2,500,000, the rest of Spain north of the Sierra Morena has a population of 9,000,000, while the three ancient southern kingdoms, Valencia, Murcia, and Andalusia, have between them a population of 6,000,000. The distinctive characteristics of these provinces, which contain about a third of the total inhabitants of the country, are left unnoticed by Castilian writers and those who follow them, or, if the southerners are mentioned at all, it is usually with some expression of contempt. This applies especially to the Andalusian, who is always spoken of as lazy and incompetent, without ambition, content to sit in the sun and smoke a cigarette, a windbag who talks everlastingly and does nothing, and generally a negligible quantity in Spanish politics, and a person unworthy of serious consideration in Madrid.
The ingrained orientalism of the south is at the root of the hostility with which it is regarded by Castile and the north. Andalusia and Valencia were under Moslem rule for some 500 years—Granada for nearly 750—and this long occupation and colonisation has left an indelible impress on the race, language, customs, and modes of thought of the south. On the other hand, the Arab invasion of the north was soon driven back beyond the Sierra de Guadarrama, and even in New Castile and Estremadura, north of the Guadiana, their occupation was more in the nature of a military tenure than a colonisation, and, such as it was, came to an end 160 years before the Christians were able to win any footing in the southern provinces. There is, therefore, comparatively little Eastern blood in the veins of the Castilian, while in those of the southerner the Arabic strain is at least as strong as the European.
How little sympathy exists between Castile and Andalusia may be judged from the following facts: In 1904 the south-west of Spain was afflicted by ten months of drought, causing the worst famine known for many years. Men literally died of starvation by the roadside, and the suffering among women and children was something terrible. No national or combined effort was attempted for the relief of the distress, which, indeed, the Clericalist organs of Madrid minimised and almost mocked at, saying that “every one knew that the Andalusians were all farmers, and farmers would grumble whatever the weather was.” On the other hand, when comparatively small districts in Castile, Leon, and Galicia suffered from floods in 1910, over 100,000 pesetas were collected by voluntary subscription within a week.
It must be remembered that, while the reconquest of the whole of Spain except the Kingdom of Granada was completed by the middle of the thirteenth century, there was no large exodus of the Moslem inhabitants until their expulsion in 1609,[2] and that, until Isabella’s religious fervour made things unpleasant for them, they lived side by side with their Spanish conquerors, and were, on the whole, not badly treated until the persecution and expulsion ordered by Philip III. Indeed, all the evidence goes to show that a steady amalgamation of the races went on, with so much intermarriage, that in some parts of the country there is hardly a family without Eastern blood in its veins. But necessarily and naturally the conquered race gradually fell more and more into the position of servants and slaves.
Although the great preponderance of the Arabs and Moriscos was in the south, numbers of them were scattered over other parts of Spain, even so late as the beginning of the sixteenth century, which accounts for the position of the working classes elsewhere being much on a par, so far as their employers’ view of them is concerned, with that of their fellows in the south.
Thus Spain is now divided into two unconsciously hostile camps, with an ingrained tradition of racial and religious hostility at the root of their antagonism, which is a fatal obstacle to mutual understanding. The Spanish labourer has replaced his predecessor of alien race, but the tradition of contempt and indifference remains, and the employer—and especially the employer who is “addicted to the priests”—still regards him, as his predecessor regarded his Moslem servant, as a hewer of wood and drawer of water, whose duty is to pay his taxes, and to use the suffrage nominally bestowed on him by the Constitution in the interests of his master. The working classes, if we are to believe the assertions of their “superiors,” are a godless lot with anarchical leanings, whose vandalistic tendencies have to be suppressed with a strong hand lest they break out to the total subversion of society. But ask a peasant about his politics, and he will say that all he wants is a sufficient wage to provide for his family and a decent education for his children, and he will add that he has no hope that any political party will help him to realise this modest ambition, or do anything whatever for him, because “all Governments, whatever they call themselves, are of one kidney, and care for nothing but pocketing the public funds, and pleasing the Religious Orders; the Conservatives because they love them, and the Liberals because they fear them, and both because the Jesuits are the richest people in Spain.”
The patient submission of the labourer to conditions which he believes to be unalterable is partly the result of three hundred years of corrupt government, during which he has been steadily squeezed to provide money for the wars, luxuries, and amusements of the governing classes; partly of the terror of the Inquisition and the tradition of silence that it has left behind it; partly of Oriental fatalism; but is certainly not due to the animal indifference and stupidity to which his “betters” attribute it. The peasant refrains from open complaint, not because he is contented and has nothing to complain of, but because long experience has taught him the uselessness and the danger of protest. He may offend his employer and lose his place, or, still worse, he may offend the Church and the Jesuits, in which case he will be a marked man, and can never hope to get permanent employment again.
Here is a paragraph which appeared in a leading Clericalist organ on December 1, 1909: