THE SPANISH COLONIES.
IT is curious that Spain, which is so frequently forgotten as a European Power, should be in danger of having to fight for her last remaining Colonies, but there can be little doubt that this is the position. For the second time in this generation the Cubans are making an effort to throw off the dominion of the mother-country, and although all details are carefully concealed, it is obvious that the insurrection has attained the dimensions of a civil war. The Queen-Regent of Spain would not be sending her best fighting General, Marshal Martinez Campos, who is sorely needed at home to keep the Army within bounds, in order to put down a local rising ; nor would the Spanish Administration, which has never a penny to spare, despatch twenty thousand of its best troops to the Antilles unless there was need for a most serious effort. There is even talk, which may however be only talk, of the despatch of fifty thousand men, and the Government of Washington is said to have discussed the expediency of recognising, or advising the recognition of, the insurgents as belligerents. The rising, we may depend on it, is most formidable ; and it is not quite certain that it may not presently be suc- cessful. Spain is loathed in the Colony as she was in all her dependencies on the mainland. The immediate cause of quarrel has not been allowed to transpire, though we believe it is connected with some fiscal alteration as to sugar, which is the life - blood of the great island. But the permanent grievances of the colonists have never undergone much modification. They are, they say, pillaged for the benefit of Spain. The surplus revenue is never spent to supply their public needs, they maintain an army which they do not want, and the hosts of officials sent out from Madrid awe only to fill their pockets. Spain, in fact, treats the Cony as an estate, and the million and a half of colonists, eight hun- dred thousand of whom are whites, resent this treatment with a bitterness which is aggravated by the feeling that he Spaniards from Europe look down upon them as inferiors. They are always ready to rise, they carry with them most of the coloured population, and we presume they see in some local circumstances, invisible to us, some new and promising chances of success. One would have thought that their hopes had died with the fall of the Southern Confederacy ; but they are sure of a certain sympathy in the Union, they are thoroughly armed, and they have already succeeded in one or two skirmishes of im- portance. There is a whisper, too, we perceive, though we cannot vouch for its truth, that they rely upon desertions from the Royal forces, and that they have friends in Madrid who furnish them with early informa- tion. Be that as it may, they certainly fight as if they believed in their own prospects, and Marshal Martinez Campos has before him an enterprise quite worthy of his rank among the soldiers of Europe. He can in any event only win by sharp fighting, for the country is a difficult ne, and the ruling classes at home will not permit him to offer autonomy as in Melbourne, or in fact to decree any reform which would deprive the island of its character as a profitable estate.
The other great dependency of Spain, the Philippines, is said to be in danger from the Japanese. It is impossible, if they acquire the long line of islands which stretches down the eastern coast of China, and also acquire Formosa, that they should not also desire the magnificent group, the possession of which would double the Japanese Empire. The Philippine islands are in the aggregate as large as Japan, they would in Japanese hands prove at least as rich, and with the exception of some Malays, they have no population whom Japanese officials could not manage. The Japanese emigrants are already numerous, a quarrel on their behalf could easily be raised, and it is not easy to see how Spain could bear either the expense or the exertion of providing so distant a possession with an adequate defensive force. The Japanese would cut off all supplies or reinforcements from Europe, they would sink the Spanish ships, and they would conquer the group, island by island, each one yielding as its fortress fell. Nothing is organised for resistance, no section of the people are loyal to Spain, and it is quite possible that the Mikado's Government would be welcomed as a relief. flerr Brandt, many years a German diplomatist in the Far East, looks upon the effort as certain to be made when the Chinese war comes to a conclusion, and we confess we are inclined to agree with him. We do not believe in the Japanese restir g on their oars ; they have caught the fever for "expansion" and "Empire," and there is no prize in Asia at once so tempting and apparently so attainable as the Philippines. The effort may be greater than they expect, for the Spanish soldiers are not Chinese, and when her pride is stirred, Spain will live upon bread and onions rather than yield the smallest of her possessions ; but if the Mikado desires more territory, the Philippines are undoubtedly in the line of least resistance, and Japan is stronger than Spain. We do not see that Europe would have any motive to interfere, and without such inter- ference a war could only end in the loss by Spain of a possession about which, probably from its distance, her people have never greatly cared.
It would be a strange termination, if it occurred, to one of the most singular chapters in history, the development of the Spanish Colonial Empire. In some respects, Spain, when she set out on her career of Colonial conquest, had a greater task before her than ourselves. Most of the wonderful possessions we have colonised, the thirteen Provinces, the Canadas, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, were for the most part unfilled lands, ready to receive any colonists who cared to work and wait for the harvest. Except the French in Canada, we had no for- midable enemies, and after defeating the Indians and the Maoris and the Zulus, we, under our system of govern- ment, left them pretty much to themselves, our only demand being that they should remain quiet. The Spaniards conquered territories almost as wide, their share of the Americas being five million square miles, or twenty-five times the area of France ; they subdued populations which numbered millions, and they filled country after country with a ruling class of Spaniards whose descendants, after three hundred years of varied adventure, still bear rule over the native populations. They built more great cities than we have done, and they effected what we have never attempted to do,—they.made the whole subject population nominally Christian, and im- posed on them, as it would seem permanently, the Spanish civilisation. Of the forty millions of people within their old dominion, the vast majority are Catholics of the Spanish type, understand the Spanish language, and, so far as they have been Europeanised at all, are Spaniards with Spanish ideas and Spanish aspirations. When we remember how small was the population of Spain, how little her great men did in the enterprise, and how fierce were many of the nations, Mexicans, Caribs, and Araucanians, which she tamed, this is a feat which speaks volumes for the energy and the perseverance of the Spanish character. And yet, though she accomplished so much, she was never completely successful, never sent out quite enough colonists, never quite converted the peoples, never quite extinguished Indian hopes of a recurrence to the old ways, and never succeeded in founding what she always endeavoured to found, a true "New Spain." She never devised a form of government which con- tented her colonists, and never succeeded in inspiring either them or the conquered peoples with any loyalty to herself. The moment they could, her Colonies shook off her dominion, and to this day the pro- spect which would rouse the most furious resistance would be the reimposition of the Spanish yoke. Her colonists never ceased to be Spaniards, and the separate- ness of the Spanish character was so great that one would have thought it would have constituted an indis- soluble bond of union ; but it worked all the other way. The Spaniard reniained haughty, and could not bear the hauteur of the Spaniard from home ; he retained that proclivity to localism which is still the diffi- culty of Spanish administration, and could not endure that his new habitat should be accounted less than a State; he was still one of the most economical of man- kind, and he could not put up with the plunder which, under one name or another, Spain exacted from all her Colonies. He fought for Mexico or Peru, Chili or La Plata, as his ancestors had fought for Castile or Aragon, and has ever since the emancipation resisted with deadly bitter- ness any approach to that federation which the Anglo- Saxon colonists from the first accepted as a necessity, and which only a generation ago they spent a million lives to defend. The Spanish States not only will not combine, but they split internally into sections which in daily life hardly know of each others' existence, and which in time of civil war often act as separate organisms. There are twenty-eight " States" in Mexico alone, each one with its own pride, its own history, its own favourite leaders, and practically its own politics. The localism of the Spaniard seems innate, and has undoubtedly tended to the loss of his Colonies, though that loss of course was mainly due to that postponement to Spain of all depen- dencies of Spain, against which Cuba is now once more in insurrection. It is a curious chapter in history, and certainly not one that tends to increase the belief now once again rising among the dreamy that world-wide federa- tions of men who speak the same tongue, are always possible. The Spanish-speaking peoples are as divided as the English-speaking, and neither are so divided as the ancient Greeks, who held themselves to be the flower of the world, and all outside them only "barbarians." Just no v we all think the destiny of the great races is towards unity, but if their histories may be trusted they have fissiparous tendencies too.
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