THE DEFENCE OF DEMOCRACY
THAT the Spanish Civil War has raised far graver issues outside Spain than inside it is a common- place. Fortunately 'the immediate dangers have been exorcized by the agreement at last reached by the Great Powers to refrain • from intervention direct or indirect on behalf of either party in the Spanish conflict—an achievement for which great credit is due to the French Prime Minister, M. Leon Blum, and hardly less to our *own Government, which has supported the French initiative strenuously and single-mindedly in every capital in Europe. The agreement is belated. Both sides, the rebels much more than the Government, have profited con- siderably already by external assistance, and it still remains to be seen how loyally the agreement, when it is finally and formally concluded, will be honoured by the various contracting Powers ; there"is obviously a case for some kind of international supervision. But the first necessary step has been taken. It is legitimate to hope that the Spaniards will now be left to fight out their own battles in their own way. Disastrous and deplorable as the fate of the unhappy country is, the fate of Europe would be tenfold more deplorable if the attempt to isolate the Spanish war failed.
At this juncture it is profitable and necessary to point out one danger which sympathisers in this country with the respective combatants are gratuitously creating—the danger of dividing the country when it was never more essential to unite it. Democracy and Fascism, we are told, are at grips in Spain, and sections of the British Press (since public men are widely scattered at this season the Press • becomes more than ever the stimulant of opinion) are extolling the Government or the insur- gents,- as the case may be, as the potential saviours not only of- Spain but of Europe, if not the world. That, it may be said, is 'inevitable. The answer is that it is not inevitable at all, except within the narrowest limits. There is no doubt a Right and a Left in every country, and it may be natural that the Right in this country should tend to sympathise with the Spanish rebels and the Left with the Govern- ment. But that such sympathy should lead, as it is leading, to the distortion of truth, the suppression of facts, the fomenting of domestic antagonisms and a blind subservience to misleading appellations is neither natural nor rational nor pardonable. Neutrality of spirit, such as President Wilson asked of his countrymen in the early days of the Great War, may be neither attainable nor desirable, but at least confusion of thought can be abjured, and some restraint on inflammatory impulses achieved before they translate themselves into inflammatory words.
That appeal will be addressed in vain to organs whose attitude is the fruit of blind and dishonest bigotry and nothing else. But there are others— the persons and papers in particular whose conviction that the battle for democracy will be won or lost in Spain is reiterated daily. That doctrine is both dangerous and false. It is dangerous because it implies that the business of the democratic countries is to support Spanish democracy by all Means
legitimately possible, notably by supplying. the Government with all the aeroplanes, munitions and weapons it needs for defence against the rebels, in spite of the certainty that the dictatorship:countries would continue to arm the rebels on. an equal and . more extensive scale, that the result would be to sever more fatally than ever, the democrati..froqi the " Fascist " Powers of. Europe, . and. .that the - inevitable' end would be a European war. And it is false, because it rests on a veneration not merely for labels but for spurious labels. , • Coniider these labels. In'Sliain, it is said, demo- cracy is pitted against Fascism. What Fascism. is we-need not here stop to enquire. The State structure in Italy is certainly not the same thing as Ale State structure in Germany, and what the State structure in Spain would be if - General Franco's Military rebellion succeeded neither General Franco, nor anyone else knoWs. Spanish democracy deserves closer study, for in the name of that the deinoCiats of this country and Fiance and Russia—the demo- cratic Russia of Tuesday's shooting-squads—are being urged to intervene. The plain fact is that in Spain there is no democracy, as democracy is uinder- stood in Great Britain and France ; there never has been ; and there is no shadow of possibility of the establishment of a democratic regime after thiS war, whichever side wins it. There has for the last five years been a Parliamentary system which spasmodically and for brief intervals has functioned as a Parliamentary systeni should, and every adherent of Parliamentary institutions anywhere must wish it well, deplore its failures and hope for its Survival and ultimate success. But to call the syste'M that has existed in Spain since Primo de Rivera fell a democracy is either affectation or ignorance..
What are the essential elements of Parliamentary" democracy ?' These at least ; that there - shall, be freedom of speech and writing ; that the. eXecutive shall be responsible to a legislature elected by the free vote of men and women sufficiently edneated to know what they are voting for ; that Iaws shall be enacted only by a majority vote of the legislatUre.; and that no man shall be punished for breaking them except after a fair trial in public. It is notorious that hardly one of those conditions has been fulfilled in Spain in recent years, or indeed ever. An illiterate electorate has been exposed to every kind of influence, from the priests, the landoWners, the laboui uniOns,. the village bosses (caciques), the mayors (akaldes.).;_ local authority, regular or irregular, has always been more effective than the writ of the central ,goVern- ment ; no administration, not even that eleeted last February, has been strong enough to maintain order and suppress rioting ; not the most constitutional government, such as that elected in 1981, could: govern for more than a few weeks without abandoning constitutional methods and resorting (in breach of the constitution) to special legislation providing for the suspension of newspapers, iinpriSoninent without trial, internment or 'deportation, and all the farniliar expedients of arbitrary governments in MoSeOiy: and Rome and many othei lesser capitals. -*this is distressing, but it is true, and profound as our sympathy with the Spanish Government in its' struggle may be, it is plain folly, and dangerous folly, to label that Government democratic and declare that by its success or failure the cause of democracy everywhere stands or falls.
The Spanish war, lamentable as it is, is a civil war, and it must be kept a civil war—as there is now good reason to hope that it will. If, and only if, the Government is victorious, there may ultimately be an advance to something like a democratic regime, though certainly not for years to come. Meanwhile democracy elsewhere has plenty to do at home in its own defence. In this country we need to guard jealously against encroachments on individual liberty and any tendency to subordinate the authority of Parliament to the will of the executive. The best way to defend democracy is to make democracy work, and work better than any dictatorship system can. That is a duty which deVolves on Conserva- tives, Labour and Liberals alike—for belief in democracy is not a virtue peculiar to the two latter.
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