CHAPTER XII

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Luring the Reader into a Stony Desert--A Duel on the Carpet--Disappointment of the Special Correspondents--The People Amuses Itself--How the Ballot Works--A Historic Sitting of the Congress--Castelar's Great Oration--The Glory of Spain--About Negro Manumission--Distrust of "Uncle Sam"--Return of Figueras--The Permanent Committee--A Love-Feast of Politicians--The Writer Orders Wings.

It may be urged with some show of truth that under the mirage of the adventurous, I have lured the reader, anxious for the sensational, into exhausting deviations in the stony desert of politics. I am guilty, and I am sorry that I shall have to sin again--politics are so ultimately interwoven with life in Spain. But it must not be imagined that these accounts of what happened more than a decade ago are no more useful or interesting than the stale report of the death of Queen Anne. In Spain history has the trick of literally repeating itself. The country is split into the same camps still, and occurrences similar to those of which I treat are certain to be presented to the world anew. The drama will be the same; the company only will be strange. And the information, such as it is, which I give now, may furnish the key to much that would otherwise be hard to unlock when the curtain rings up again.

Before one more error of political errantry, I must tell of a duel which did not come off, for the sake of its moral. This was how the affair arose. There was a discussion in the Assembly in reference to an alleged insurrection in Porto Rico. Señor Padial asked, was it true that the insurgents had raised cries of "Death to Spain," and demanded the independence of Porto Rico, and the massacre of the local volunteers? Several members got up to speak, and one of them, for what reason I cannot fathom, characterized the question as "a farce unworthy of the Conservative party." After a little while Señor Ardanay proceeded to read some documents proving the reality of the disturbances. He was interrupted by a torrent of voices, and Señor Padial shouted that the Civil Guards and volunteers of the island had got up the whole row, and that General Sanz was the author of the farce. General Sanz politely retorted, "Your worship is wanting in truth." Several honourable gentlemen sprang to their feet, and asked that Señor Padial's words should be taken down in writing. And then the Assembly became a bear-garden. Señor Olavarrieta claimed "la palabra," but the President would not give him the privilege of speaking. He spoke all the same, and said, "We shall not allow ourselves to be insulted by those señores," pointing to the Porto Rico deputies. The confusion became worse confounded. The President rang his bell, called "Order," and threatened to suspend the sitting. General Sanz then rose, looking wicked, and asked that the words offensive to the Civil Guards and the volunteers should be taken down in writing. As for what had been said offensive to himself, he asked nothing; he knew what course to take. In England this might have meant that the soldier would treat Señor Padial with silent contempt; in Spain, with my preconceived notions of the pride of blue blood and the fire of Castile, and all the rest, I took it that it could only mean "pistols for two and coffee for one." The confession is sad; but the truth at any price, the truth is so rare under this sky. Sundry Special Correspondents who had come out to describe the revolution that would not come off, were cudgelling their brains to discover how they could assist at this passage of arms, in order that they might render a full, true, and particular account to the public. The encounter would have been more diverting than a bull-fight. Opinions were divided as to whether it was better to go disguised as a hackney coachman or an apothecary's assistant. I hurried, after dinner, to the Café Fornos, the great rendezvous of Madrid politicians, to hear the latest details of the pending affair of honour. It was to come off--no doubt of it; but when and where, I could not hear. Next morning I read that the difficulty had been arranged. It may be a satisfaction that the barbarous "code of honour" has fallen out of fashion in Spain; but it would be a still greater satisfaction if the practice of gentlemen giving each other the lie in public were to fall out of fashion also. The scene was disgraceful, and I am glad to be able to add that most of the deputies were thoroughly ashamed of it; and in places of public resort some went so far as to say that they would take their seats no more in the Assembly. But they were in their places all the same on the following afternoon. The Congress of Spain is no more mannerly on occasions than legislatures elsewhere; but the occasions are rare.

My visit to the Café Fornos was not for nothing, after all. There was a scene there too. A group of low fellows, overheated with wine, entered about eight o'clock, while the immense hall on the ground-floor was crowded with Radical deputies, officers, and quiet Madrileños who frequent it nightly, and commenced bellowing for the Republic after their hearts--that is to say, the Republic, Federal, Social, and Uncompromising. The shout was taken up by another group outside, which blocked up the entrance in the Calle de Alcalá. It was evidently a premeditated manifestation. A Republican deputy who was present tried to calm the disorderly crew, but to no purpose. They had come to shout, and they would have their shout out. Señor Estévanez, the civil governor, was dining in a room upstairs, but Señor Estévanez did not leave his repast. When the thirsty and uncompromising federal social citizens were hoarse they retired. They had effectually succeeded in annoying the coffee-drinking tyrants who had the impudence to wear broadcloth, and they withdrew to drain bumpers to their tremendous exploit elsewhere.

These individuals were all in favour of the "social liquidation." This cry of the drones had partisans in every citizen with an empty pocket and a patch on his garments, for it means that the provident shall be robbed to satisfy the improvident. But nathless these agitators, Spain, I was told, was likely to be quiet for five or six weeks--that is, quiet in the Spanish sense, with an insurrection in one stage of heat or another, smouldering or flaming, in half a dozen provinces. The elections would be tranquil, with "scrimmages" here and there; they would not be elections without. The voting is by ballot. Theoretically the system is faultless, but in practice jugglery is possible, and does habitually occur. The alcalde has some influence in the matter, so has the parish priest, so has the nearest large landed proprietor, so has the local police functionary, and so has the mob. Ballot-boxes have been broken open or have disappeared mysteriously. And thus it happens that a Spanish constituency sends in a buff man as its representative by a crushing majority at one election, and a blue man or a red man by a crushing majority at the next. The constituency has not changed in the interval, but the Minister in the Gobernacion, or, as we should call it, the Home Office, has. There lies the secret.

I pass over small squabbles, which were of daily occurrence at the Palace of the Congress, to come to the sitting of the 21st March, 1873, which deserves to be handed down to history. On that day the Bill for the Abolition of Slavery in Porto Rico was introduced by Castelar, in a speech over which all Madrid went into raptures. The "inimitable tribune," as his admirers call him, surpassed himself. He led off in the usual oratorical style by pretending that he was not going to be oratorical--"the bench on which he sat was one for actions, not words"--and then, in the usual oratorical style, he contrived to say so many words that the official paper next morning was full of them.

His first speech, made when he was but twenty-one, in the year 1854, was on the very same subject, as he reminded his hearers. The Christian religion, he said in the course of his remarks, was the religion of the slave, and the Apocalypse the poem of the slave. Christ was the descendant of enslaved kings, a bondsman of Roman conquerors. But I must give up the attempt to follow the "inimitable tribune;" his lengthened and dazzling chain of eloquence was too elaborate to be picked up link by link. He was historical, passionate, and poetical by turns, but always intensely rhetorical, keeping a close watchfulness for effect, for Señor Castelar does not argue so much as declaim. He had the good taste to defend the Radical Ministry from the charge of having acted in favour of emancipation because the influence of the United States was brought to bear upon it. Such a course, he asserted, would be unworthy of the dignity and independence of the country.

I must tell you that the way to make Spain recoil from doing an act she admits to be good and needful is to counsel her to do it--she will not be advised by others. It would not be Spanish. If a Spaniard has a notion of getting himself re-vaccinated, take care, if you are a friend of his, how you talk to him on the subject. If you recommend him to have the operation performed, he will change his mind at once. He will not be bidden, he will risk small-pox in preference. It may happen that he will die, but at all events he will have the satisfaction of having had his own way.

Señor Castelar flattered the self-love of his countrymen by assuring them that they were magnanimous of their own free will, and not because foreigners had advised them to be magnanimous. He next delivered himself of some tuneful periods about humanity, and then wandered off into a spoken essay on the behaviour of the great European Powers on this question of serfdom. He alluded to England as "the least democratic, but most liberal of nations," and praised Russia for having set Spain the example of unriveting the shackles of the slave. He apostrophized the opponents of abolition, telling them that on their heads would fall the responsibility if the law were not passed, but that he and his colleagues would be answerable for the consequences if the law were passed. Then the speaker waxed patriotic, and spoke the stereotyped sentences on the glory and grandeur of Spain. Why should there be rivalries between Creoles and Peninsulars--those who were born in the colonies and those who were born in the mother-country? It was deplorable. Were they not all of the same race? Was not the blood of the Cid and of Pelayo careering in all their noble veins, and the spirit of Spain living in all their generous souls? His peroration was grandiloquent; he appealed to them to cease their bickerings, to close up their ranks, and to labour unitedly for the maintenance of order, authority, and the integrity of the territory, and they would earn the benediction of history and of conscience, which was much more, for it was the benediction of God.

At the close of his discourse, which was incontrovertibly a masterpiece, Señor Castelar was surrounded by numerous colleagues, and warmly congratulated. His speech established among other welcome things that the orator-minister was no atheist. His remarks breathed the truest Christianity. Next it was manifest that Spain, Republican as Monarchical, would not, without a bitter struggle, cede one inch of territory over which the national flag floated. Those who were interested in the retention of slavery in the colonies were the holders of slave property, and the deputies who had lived there and shaken the pagoda-tree to some purpose, and who, now that they were back in Spain, had a grateful recollection of what they owed to slavery. Those gentlemen predicted that the immediate emancipation of the negro would be the ruin of the colonies, and would inevitably lead to their loss by the mother-country. The Ministry of King Amadeus originally brought in the measure for the abolition of slavery in Porto Rico, preliminary to the introduction of another to get rid of the system in Cuba. The chief argument against the measure was that it was due to intriguing on the part of American politicians, whose object was to smooth the way to the ultimate incorporation of the Antilles with the United States. The sincerity of American friendship is suspected by Spaniards. They know that Uncle Sam has a longing eye on the islands in the Caribbean Sea; and has already tried to negotiate Spain out of her American possessions. Spain, recollecting this keenly, mistrusts him. And Señor Castelar, whilst acquitting his predecessors in office of having acted at the suggestion of the United States, let it be very plainly understood that this Republic would fight that other and greater and aggrandizing Republic to her last man and last dollar, before she would consent to the abandonment of one square foot of soil. The vested rights of slave-owners would not suffer completely, for the bill embraced a proposition to pay them an indemnity equivalent to eighty per cent. of the value of their live chattels. Forty per cent. of this was to be guaranteed by the mother-country, and forty by the enfranchised colony, so that twenty per cent. was the comparatively small pecuniary sacrifice the inheritors of an odious system would have to make to conscience.

Whether the manumission of the bondsman in Cuba, which was bound to come, would hasten the independence of that island--or, what was more likely, its annexation to the United States--I am not competent to pronounce. Ultimately, it is the conviction of the wise and experienced that the Queen of the Antilles must achieve her independence; but it will be less on account of abolition than for reasons geographical, climatic, and military. The ocean rolls between Spain and the sunny cluster of isles, the climate is deadly to the Spanish soldier, and the Spanish army cannot afford a perpetual depletion.

Nobody in Spain dares to defend slavery as moral, or protest against its abolition on grounds higher than those of political expediency. The adversaries of the bill affirmed that gradual abolition would be safer than immediate abolition, and that the matter could well afford to wait. The newly-proclaimed Republic had interests of far greater present importance to attend to, they said; but the philo-negrists retorted that it was a shame not to free the negro under the Republic, which was based on the broad principle of freedom to all, without distinction of colour, and that a beneficent and noble act could not be done too soon. If the Monarchy had lasted, there could be no denying it, this project of abolition would have been enacted without fail.

Late in the night, after Castelar had delivered his oration, Señor Figueras returned from his trip to the provinces. He was met at the railway-station by groups of friends, personal and political, and escorted to his residence, where he was serenaded by the band of a regiment of foot artillery. The night was dark and rainy, which was an ingratitude to the patriotism of the musicians. If it did not savour of ill-nature one might be permitted to remark that speeches, however splendid as specimens of composition from a bench, which the speaker admits should be one for acts, not words, and midnight clangours of a brass band under the dripping window-sills of a tired Minister, were hardly what was needed most and first in the country. But Spain is not like any place else.

On the 22nd the Assembly sat until seven, when there was a break-up of two hours for refreshments; after which was held a night sitting (a most unusual thing), prolonged until half-past one the next morning. This was the last of that Assembly. The powers of the Cortes, save and excepting such as were purely legislative, were delegated to a Permanent Committee of twenty, which was to aid Ministers in their task, until the meeting of the Constituent Cortes. In the interval between the two sittings this committee was chosen by the nominating sections of the Radical and Republican parties respectively, all shades of opinion being represented upon it. The President of the Assembly, the four Vice-Presidents, and the four Secretaries, held _ex-officio_ seats on the board. An analysis of the names of the twenty-nine shows that there were fourteen Radicals, eight Federals, four Conciliadores (who may be counted with the Federals), two Conservatives, and an Alfonsist.

This moribund sitting was unique in its unanimity and enthusiasm. The Bill for the Abolition of Slavery in Porto Rico was passed without a dissentient voice. There was kissing and clasping of hands, and friendly hugging all round. Señor Padial and General Sanz, who were anxious to fight a duel to the death a few days before, met in the Salon de Conferencias and made up their quarrel. They cemented their reconciliation with an embrace, and one sentimental Deputy who was looking on, cried, "May this be an auspicious omen of the union between Spain and the Antilles!" Señor Figueras promised that the Executive Power would faithfully see to the maintenance of order during the elections. Another señor proposed that the act they had accomplished on the date of the 23rd should be recorded on a marble tablet, to be erected in the chamber. The proposition was received with cheers; and truly the act which knocked the chains off the limbs of 35,000 slaves merited record. The Marquis of Sardoal, who occupied the presidential throne, prayed God to enlighten the minds of the Government and the Permanent Committee, and then declared the Assembly dissolved. There were loud shouts for the "Federal Republic," and just one weak voice for the "Spanish Republic."

The clouds had blown over. Now was the hour for congratulations. Many persons who were preparing to send away their families resolved to let them remain. I had no further occupation in Madrid. A Deputy who had thirty years' experience of life in the capital told me that this was the last place in Spain where there was likely to be a disturbance for the present; but he added, "If you think of going elsewhere, be sure to give me an address where I can telegraph to you, for something may always turn up." I had waited nigh five weeks in the expectation of that something turning up, and at length I began to think I had better seek fresh fields and take a look at real Spain.

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