CHAPTER IV.
THE MODERN SCHOOLS
Ferrer returned to Barcelona at the opening of the twentieth century to find the confederate systems I have described flourishing vigorously in an atmosphere of dense ignorance and illiteracy. "Our social condition," the President of the Madrid Athenæum wrote in 1903, "is barbaric, in harmony with our barbaric form of government." The census of 1903 returned 11,945,971 out of a population of 17,667,256 as entirely illiterate. Spain had been far more literate under the Romans 1,700 years earlier; vastly more enlightened under the Mohammedans. Spain in the twentieth century was spending considerably less than two million pounds a year on elementary education, while retrograde clergy and corrupt officials prospered on the general ignorance.
Such education as there was had the express aim of supporting the existing régime. All the authorities agree in describing middle-class education as narrow and heavily biased. The educated class, says Dr. Dillon, betrayed "a monumental ignorance of contemporary history and foreign languages." With something of the quaint conceit of the Chinese, they tried to convince themselves that the traditions of Spain were too precious and splendid to be lost by the process of "Europeanisation" which their deeper thinkers were demanding. The last chapter gives the real meaning of this "Spanish pride." Happily, as far as the middle class was concerned a fine spirit of revolt was spreading. Brilliant writers like Perez Caldos endeavoured to bring Liberal Spain back to the splendid aspirations for which it had made heroic sacrifices in the first half of the nineteenth century. Blasco Ibañez, another distinguished novelist, shamed it with pictures of its lamentable fall from Moorish splendour to Catholic debasement. Of forty books that the educated Spaniard reads to-day thirty-five are Rationalistic.
