But This Is Where Every Question Is Planted
From The Beginning In Spanish Politics.
Every public matter presents
itself under this form:
"Is it consistent with Spanish honor?" and "Will
it be to the advantage of the Roman Catholic Apostolic Church?" Now,
nothing is consistent with Spanish honor which does not recognize the
Spain of to-day as identical with the Spain of the sixteenth century,
and the bankrupt government of Madrid as equal in authority to the
world-wide autocracy of Charles V. And nothing is thought to be to the
advantage of the Church which does not tend to the concubinage of the
spiritual and temporal power, and to the muzzling of speech and the
drugging of the mind to sleep.
Let any proposition be made which touches this traditional
susceptibility of race, no matter how sensible or profitable it may be,
and you hear in the Cortes and the press, and, louder than all, among
the idle cavaliers of the cafes, the wildest denunciations of the
treason that would consent to look at things as they are. The men who
have ventured to support the common-sense view are speedily stormed into
silence or timid self-defence. The sword of Guzman is brandished in the
Chambers, the name of Pelayo is invoked, the memory of the Cid is
awakened, and the proposition goes out in a blaze of patriotic
pyrotechnics, to the intense satisfaction of the unthinking and the
grief of the judicious. The senoritos go back to the serious business of
their lives - coffee and cigarettes - with a genuine glow of pride in a
country which is capable of the noble self-sacrifice of cutting off its
nose to spite somebody else's face.
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