The suffering in parts of Spain must be very great.
Anda- lusia has been visited with a protracted drought, and it is officially reported that two hundred thousand persons are without means of subsistence. There is no Poor-law, there is chronic feud between the landlords and the peasantry, and the citizens have not the means to provide for the country- folk. The relief voted by the Cortes is wholly inadequate, and the starving villagers are threatening every one whom they believe to have anything to spare. The rich are flying to other provinces, and the officials are bombarding the Government with appeals for aid, which will doubtless be granted, but not before order has for a time disappeared in Andalusia. The calamity may have grave political conse- quences, for the agricultural population of Southern Spain is already convinced that its misfortunes spring from a bad tenure, and that the landlord system ought to be superseded by peasant proprietorship. The matter is complicated by the feeling of the North that it is always being stripped for the benefit of the South, and will, we fear, tax to the utmost what is left of statesmanship in Spain, where, as we have often pointed out, the permanent danger is not so much of revolution as of disintegration.
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