The news from Spain at the end of the week
is distinctly better. Tranquillity appears to have been restored at Barcelona. Some accounts represent the Courts-martial as sending large bodies of men daily to firing parties, but on the other hand, the correspondent of the Times in Madrid, tele- graphing on Thursday, states that the results of the Courts- martial are not yet known. We expect, when the full story comes to be told, that it will be found that the excesses in many cases resembled those of the Paris mobs during the Revolution. We fear also that in many cases the repression has been of a very rough-and-ready kind, in which the innocent have perished with the guilty. Although the riots were directed against the prosecution of the war in Morocco, the people were obviously also moved by a strong anti-clerical feeling, and this remains true whether we believe or not in the stories that nuns were violated and massacred. The proof lies in the number of churches and clerical institutions destroyed—some accounts say as many as fifty-four. General Santiago, who was entrusted with the suppression of the disorders, has superficially, at all events, succeeded. He had at his disposal twelve battalions and three batteries of artillery. The official returns give the casualties as under three hundred in all.
