SPAIN AND PORTUGAL
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—As I write, Portugal is quiet and on the whole con- tented. Spain is ablaze with civil war. It is said' that Portugal went through and came through what • Spain has been going through during the last few years—but the problem for Spain is a very different one. Portugal is a small country, Spain a very large one, making the' problem of government, in the primary sense of keeping order, a much more difficult one in the latter. The peoples of the two countries are unlike in many ways, but are the same in having a high regard for any government capable of keeping order.
In Portugal this is a relatively easy matter, but in Spain, the vast areas separated by the Sierras, do not make fOr unity of authority or even of combined patriotic feeling in a country where every man is inclined naturally to be a law unto himself. There, local feeling is stronger than the feeling for Spain as a whole. As Richard Ford says in his classic Gatherings from Spain, the average Spaniard considers his Province the only one in Spain, his Village the only one in that Province and he, himself, the best man in that village. Incidentally this is a harmless vanity which does not make you like him any the less, but in Portugal it is an attitude that at any rate fmds far less expression. Geography here favours a greater welding of all into one, which greatly faalitates government.
Recently Galicia voted by a large majority in favour of autonomy and Viscaya has for long pressed its claims in that respect. Catalonia has in a large measure achieved it, and, to an onlooker, it would seem as if in a federation of all the great regions may lie the solution of the immemorial difficulty of finding a workable government 'for Spain. There would need of course to be a central government in Madrid, but the people's chief concern should be with the parlia- mentary representation of their own regions. - Madrid to the-. majority of provincial Spaniards is a far-distant city where their interests are submerged in a sea of political unrest and intrigue.
The military dictatorship which seems likely to emerge from the present chaos will have to form, sooner or later, a government of civilians, even if, as in Portugal, the element of force, for a time at least, has to be kept behind it. It is to be hoped that the claims of the Federalists, who already form a party, will receive attention, as offering a likely practical solution of the problem of finding a better govern- ment for a country of great area where the regions differ widely in climate and the character of their peoples, making it diffi- cult for them to be welded into one.—YOurs faithfully, A. O. BROWN.
Mina da Bodiosa, Bodiosa Vizeu, Portugal.
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