It is always assumed, as a matter of course, that the whole administration of the country is corrupt. When an unexpected deficit appears in public accounts, governmental or municipal, when a sum of money voted for a certain purpose has evidently not been spent as intended, when, as frequently happens, money owing by the State or the Municipality is not paid—in short, whenever there is anything in the national or local administration of the public funds which calls for explanation, it is taken for granted that some one in office has been stealing. Whether this assumption is justified or not I do not pretend to say. All I know is that it is universally made.
I asked a Spaniard on one occasion why a certain public building had never been finished. “No doubt the Alcalde uses the money to keep up his carriage,” was the reply. The man certainly did not know the facts, but this was to him the most plausible explanation. When a few years ago Admiral Cervera was ordered to fight the United States with ships armed with obsolete guns and shells that did not fit them, every one said, and still says, if the subject is spoken of, that officials in the Government stole the money that ought to have been spent on the Navy. The system extends, or is said to extend, from the highest ranks of officialdom downwards, and if this is true, it must necessarily operate in substantially reducing the total funds available for the Treasury.
A minor matter, which I only mention because, it goes to illustrate once more the system of over-taxation with no adequate result, is the postal service. A letter in Spain does not cost a penny, as it does everywhere else; it costs twopence: of this three-halfpence are paid by the sender and a halfpenny by the receiver. In exchange for this, the Government gives a service which is indifferent in the large towns, and infamously bad in the smaller towns and the rural districts, where there is no security whatever that any given letter will reach sender or receiver, and where, to my own knowledge, a very large number are lost.
Gambling in the national lottery, which is drawn about three times a month, is almost universal, and an immense amount of money must be wasted on it. I remember seeing a man in a second-class railway carriage, after borrowing my newspaper to see the result of a drawing, throw away at least a dozen tickets, representing a cost of either three or five pesetas each. The lottery is conducted with absolute fairness, and it might be argued that, as people will gamble, it is better that they should do so on a straightforward lottery than, e.g., on horse-racing or some other sport of doubtful honesty. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the fact of these lottery tickets being thrust under the noses of the public all day long, coupled with the reports current in conversation and the particulars given in the Press of the sudden wealth which has accrued to this and the other working man through a lucky number, must foment the gambling spirit, which is sufficiently rife in Spain without any such official encouragement. The estimated net receipts from the lottery for 1909 were pesetas 35,250,000 (£1,410,000).
It must be borne in mind, in connection with the universal venality of the lower grades of the bureaucracy, that a certain amount of excuse is to be found in the salaries they receive, which are miserably small in amount and often in arrears. When a man has to keep himself and his family on two pesetas a day, it is not surprising that he takes advantage of the opportunities which his official position gives him to increase by illicit means a wage on which it is quite impossible that he should live decently and honestly.
THE PROCESS OF REGENERATION
CHAPTER XVI
THE PROCESS OF REGENERATION
The regeneration of Spain must necessarily be a slow process, for the causes of her degradation are deep-seated, and are not to be removed by mere legislative enactments or alteration of the machinery of government. One of the principal difficulties with which the country has to contend is the dishonesty of the bureaucracy, which paralyses any reform that may be attempted. Of what use is legislation, when the laws are not honestly administered? If what is the common talk of all classes has any foundation whatever in fact, the whole of the bureaucracy, from top to bottom, not excluding the inferior judiciary, is venal and corrupt, and until a tradition of honest administration is established amendment will be difficult, if not impossible.