It must be well understood that these politicians are not denouncing the rival party. They are describing the system which flourishes to-day, and is employed by each party when it comes to power—the system which the Marquis de Riscal scourged in the same terms twenty years before, and that the Marquis de Torre Hermosa described in 1899 as "not a Parliamentary system with corruption, but what we call its corruptions are the system." However, I need not now fill the chapter with quotations. A few more responsible strictures, and I pass on to describe the system.
"All is rotten in our unfortunate country. It has no government, no electoral body, no parties, army, or navy. All is fiction, decadence, and ruin" (El Correo, February 7, 1901). "We are now more or less at the level of a kabila of the Rif, though we seem in constitution and laws to be a civilised people" (April 19, 1901).
"Every citizen has a vote, but few use it; and if they do so to the detriment of the Government, it is falsified in the urn" (El Imparcial, January 26, 1901).
Señor Sanchez de Toca (in El problema cubano) not only roundly denounces the whole system as corrupt, but traces the corruption to "the demoralisation of those who hold the highest political offices" (p. 234). It is "a government by the worst": honest men hold aloof from politics. Dr. Madrazo (El pueblo Español ha muerto?) tells us that "all the institutions of Spain are framed to put abilities at the service of the oligarchs," that the Liberals and Conservatives are "branches of one tree," and that the Church "shrinks from no means, however unjust, to attain its end." But these authorities will suffice. Further dozens will be found in the work issued by the Madrid Athenæum.
Many a reader will begin to wonder, not that there are revolutionaries in Spain, but why there are not more, and those more effective. The story we have to tell presently may throw some light on that; but it must not be supposed that cultivated Spaniards who are not working in the system, and living on it, are silent. I repeat that the whole of recent Spanish literature is full of fierce strictures and pathetic demands for reform. But I must now explain more in detail what is meant by this extraordinary corruption.
