THE DECAY OF SPAIN.
ACORRESPONDENT last week was quite indignant with us for saying that there must be in the Spanish character, otherwise a very strong one, some root of in- efficiency ; but how else can he explain the continuous decline of Spain ? Greece was conquered three separate times,—first, by the Macedonian clansmen fused together by two men of military genius ; secondly, by the disci- plined strength of Rome ; and thirdly, after a wonderful revival in the Eastern Empire, by a warlike Tartar horde which had turned a tribute of children into a most efficient standing army. Rome was conquered after two hundred years of battle by the incessant invasions of half- barbarous white tribes, who were individually bigger and braver than the free Romans, who were probably as a whole more numerous, and who found invaluable allies in the crushed and miserable population of white slaves that performed the manual labour of the Empire. The Tartars, whose realm was once wider than that of Rome, and who seemed for a few years about to master the world, were " warred down" by the Slays in a struggle which lasted nearly as long as that by which the bar- barians subjugated their Roman foes. Spain, however, the next claimant to world-wide empire, was never con- quered. She was defeated once at sea by Elizabeth's fierce privateers, but she was never conquered, and in 1580 she was by far the greatest Power in the world, owning all she owns now plus Portugal, the Milanese, Naples, including Sicily, the Low Countries, and the whole of the two Americas south of the 34th parallel, a dominion to which neither that of Great Britain, nor Russia, nor the United States can, in some respects, and especially in respect of potential wealth- yielding power, fairly be compared. The Empire, too, rested on strong foundations. It lasted in Naples for two hundred years. The people of the Low Countries only threw it off by an effort that was like a martyrdom, while the Spanish ascendency in America was so deeply rooted that to this hour the creed, the language, and the civilisation of every land that belonged to Spain remain essentially Spanish. Nevertheless, some change, real or apparent, did pass over Spaniards, and from 1600, the history of their country has been one of continuous misfortune and slow decay. Why ? There are men among us who attribute it all to Catholicism, as Macaulay was inclined to do ; but France while she was Catholic, persecutingly Catholic, did not decline in that way, and we do not see any good reason why the Spanish Church should enfeeble the Spanish people any more than the Russian Church does. There are historians who say that the valour of the people decreased ; but Napoleon's Marshals did not think so, the guerillas often fought as if Cortez had been leading them, and in the still more recent American wars the Royalists often accomplished prodigies of valour. Individually, the Spaniard, by the consent of all who know him, is as brave as anybody else. A favourite explanatiou is that the energetic section of the people poured itself into the New World, leaving only a feebler residue in Old Spain ; but no such consequence has followed the vast outflow of Englishmen and Germans. Why did not Spanish vigour, with a glorious country and room per- petually left by the emigration, fill up all gaps and develop a State stronger even them of old ? Many Englishmen attribute the decline to the oppressiveness of Spain, which even her own children, once outside the Peninsula, could not bear ; but how happened it that the 'people, if they had in them no root of inefficiency, never 'learned by experience how to govern, and never altered their methods until they would work fairly well ? The American Spaniards did not rebel out of any self- developed perverse hatred of Spain, but because they were unable to bear her treatment. The Spaniards themselves say the cause is a kind of accident, the perpetual recur- rence of inefficient Governments ; but they had the power to make and undo their Governments like every other race. Why did they not create one which, up to the limit of the national strength, could at least succeed, which, for example, could give them a fully organised army, a strong fleet, a Treasury as effective, say, as that of far poorer Prussia ? Spain ought to have absorbed Portugal long since, and to have been a wealthy nation of thirty-five millions, with colonies in Asia, Africa, and America, with the trade of the Mediterranean in her hands, and with a country as safe from invasion as if it were an island with an armed population. There was, that outsiders can see, nothing to prevent her, and yet she has declined until she will probably by 1900 be a weak Kingdom or Republic, with only part of the Peninsula in her possession, with scarcely seventeen millions of people, with no colonies, with a broken Treasury and a divided Army, unfeared in Europe and unremembered in the great struggles of the world. That seems a hard destiny, and we confess we see as yet but an imperfect explanation of it. The Spaniard, we maintain, is a strong man ; and wherefore, then, is a nation of Spaniards ineffective ? It is very easy to say that a race wears out like a family, but even if that doctrine is true, which we doubt, not seeing evidence that the Jews, who are the oldest of races, are worn out, or that the Parsees are feebler than the fire- worshipping Persians from whom they descend, the wearing out takes a long time, and Spain has taken, on the hypothesis, less than three hundred years. She was at her -highest point during our Elizabethan period, and it would be hard to prove that, except perhaps in the power of pro- ducing first-class poetry, the Victorian English are at all inferior to the Elizabethan. They are certainly as efficient for all the different tasks of life, which is the point we are now discussing, and more efficient both as administrators and as industrials. Spaniards are not, and it seems to us a matter of keen interest to discover a reasonable explana- tion of the difference.
The nearest we can get is derived from that comparison between our own Highlanders and the Spanish people on which we ventured a fortnight ago. It is in brief this. The Spaniards never were an effective people except for one or two purposes, which have, under stress of circum- stances, passed out of their lives. They never made an efficient Government, or a sound Administration, or a really effective Fleet. Ages of incessant warfare, warfare so keen that every man was a fighter and every fighter seasoned to danger by hourly experience, produced a nation penetrated through and through with the military temperament in its strongest form. They were brave almost to excess, they were proud to punctilio, they were abstemious as regards all bodily wants, they loved ruling, usually by dint of sheer force and daring, but they were indolent and incurably careless of affairs. As it happened, after the expulsion of the Moors these higher qualities found an inadequate field for their display; they were urged forward by their Kings and a few men of adventure on a career of conquest, and they devoted themselves in Europe and America to ruling the races whom they had subjugated by their fighting energy. As fighters they on the whole succeeded in overthrowing far superior armies and keeping much of their dominion for two hundred years, but as organisers they failed. They wasted their resources, especially in subjects, at a frightful rate ; they mis- managed the emigrants till they incurred their deadly hatred ; and they lived on their plunder—in Spain, we mean—as if it released them entirely from the ordinary labours of life. There is said to be evidence that while gold poured into Spain from the New World whole dis- tricts went out of cultivation, and nearly the entire people lived in a sort of dream, dependent upon incomes derived from the labour of distant slaves. Their temper was that of men who have retired from work and depend upon annuities, and to this hour they have not been able to shake that temper off. They are not exactly lazy, for that involves nvolves something of opprobrium ; but they do not relish work ; they would rather spend little than earn much ; they always postpone the thing to be done, not because procrastination pleases them—in itself it pleases nobody—but because the exertion to be made is in se dis- agreeable. They would like it if in their land it was always afternoon. They consequently criticise their government sharply, but they do not alter it. They fret under the absence of civil justice, but let suits drag on for thirty years. They would like an efficient police, but they decide that to create one would be troublesome, and they let it drift. They would prefer to hang the corrupt, but they let them steal. Their tone, as of aristocratic loafers, is reflected with increased strength in the upper class, till the whole nation appears to be struck with torpor, and inefficiency becomes noticeable even in the Army, in which a regiment of three thousand men, all brave, all physically competent, all obedient, and all abstemious, will fail to crush the resist- ance of a few score of guerillas no abler than themselves. Why Spaniards do not increase faster in numbers we cannot even guess, but the same fact was observable in our own Elizabethan period, the total result being that they seem in the presence of advancing Europe, and especially of the energetic, uncontented, pushing Anglo-Saxon, to be standing still. They will fight in this war, as we shall see, right well, and with a great wish for victory at any cost of danger ; but they will always be late, always half- organised, and always baffled when they are most in earnest by the want of a certain capacity in their agents for taking infinite trouble. The true motto of the Spaniard, as of our own brave Highlander, is " I canna be fashed," and it is a motto which, in an age when the trouble-taking races are in front, means disaster if not death.
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