Gatherings from Spain. Richard Ford
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Thus, vast portions of Estremadura, the south of Toledo and Andalucia, by nature some of the richest and most fertile in the world, are now dehesas y despoblados, depopulated wastes, abandoned to the wild bee for his heritage; the country remains as it was left after the discomfiture of the Moor. The early chronicles of both Spaniard and Moslem teem with accounts of the annual forays inflicted on each other, and to which a frontier-district was always exposed. The object of these border guerrilla-warfares was extinction, talar, quemar y robar, to desolate, burn, and rob, to cut down fruit-trees, to “harry,” to “razzia."[2] The internecine struggle was that of rival nations and creeds. It was truly Oriental, and such as Ezekiel, who well knew the Phœnicians, has described: “Go ye after him through the city and smite; let not your eye have pity, neither have ye pity; slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children and women.” The religious duty of smiting the infidel precluded mercy on both sides alike, for the Christian foray and crusade was the exact counterpart of the Moslem algara and algihad; while, from military reasons, everything was turned into a desert, in order to create a frontier Edom of starvation, a defensive glacis, through which no invading army could pass and live; the “beasts of the field alone increased.” Nature, thus abandoned, resumed her rights, and has cast off every trace of former cultivation; and districts the granaries of the Roman and the Moor, now offer the saddest contrasts to that former prosperity and industry.
BUONAPARTE’S INVASION.
To these horrors succeeded the thinning occasioned by causes of a bigoted and political nature: the expulsion of the Jews deprived poor Spain of her bankers, while the final banishment of the Moriscoes, the remnant of the Moors, robbed the soil of its best and most industrious agriculturists.
Again, in our time, have the fatal scenes of contending Christian and Moor been renewed in the struggle for national independence, waged by Spaniards against the Buonapartist invaders, by whom neither age nor sex was spared—neither things sacred nor profane; the land is everywhere scarred with ruins; a few hours’ Vandalism sufficed to undo the works of ages of piety, wealth, learning and good taste. The French retreat was worse than their advance: then, infuriated by disgrace and disaster, the Soults and Massénas vented their spite on the unarmed villagers and their cottages. But let General Foy describe their progress:—“Ainsi que la neige précipitée des sommets des Alpes dans les vallons, nos armées innombrables détruisaient en quelques heures, par leur seul passage, les ressources de toute une contrée; elles bivouaquaient habituellement, et à chaque gîte nos soldats démolissaient les maisons bâties depuis un demi-siècle, pour construire avec les décombres ces longs villages alignés qui souvent ne devaient durer qu’un jour: au défaut du bois des forêts les arbres fruitiers, les végétaux précieux, comme le mûrier, l’olivier, l’oranger, servaient a les réchauffer; les conscrits irrités à la fois par le besoin et par le danger contractaient une ivresse morale dont nous ne cherchions pas à les guérir.”
“So France gets drunk with blood to vomit crime,
And fatal ever have her saturnalia been.”
Who can fail to compare this habitual practice of Buonaparte’s legions with the terrible description in Hosea of the “great people and strong” who execute the dread judgments of heaven?—“A fire devoureth before them, and behind them a flame burneth; the land is the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness, yea, and nothing shall escape them.”
REVENUE.
No sooner were they beaten out by the Duke, than population began to spring up again, as the bruised flowerets do when the iron heel of marching hordes has passed on. Then ensued the civil fratricide wars, draining the land of its males, from which bleeding Spain has not yet recovered. Insecurity of property and person will ever prove bars to marriage and increased population.
Again, a deeper and more permanent curse has steadily operated for the last two centuries, at which Spanish authors long have not dared to hint. They have ascribed the depopulation of Estremadura to the swarm of colonist adventurers and emigrants who departed from this province of Cortes and Pizarro to seek for fortune in the new world of gold and silver; and have attributed the similar want of inhabitants in Andalucia to the similar outpouring from Cadiz, which, with Seville, engrossed the traffic of the Americas. But colonisation never thins a vigorous, well-conditioned mother state—witness the rapid and daily increase of population in our own island, which, like Tyre of old, is ever sending forth her outpouring myriads, and wafts to the uttermost parts of the sea, on the white wings of her merchant fleets, the blessings of peace, religion, liberty, order, and civilisation, to disseminate which is the mission of Great Britain.
The real permanent and standing cause of Spain’s thinly peopled state, want of cultivation, and abomination of desolation, is BAD GOVERNMENT, civil and religious; this all who run may read in her lonely land and silent towns. But Spain, if the anecdote which her children love to tell be true, will never be able to remove the incubus of this fertile origin of every evil. When Ferdinand III. captured Seville and died, being a saint he escaped purgatory, and Santiago presented him to the Virgin, who forthwith desired him to ask any favours for beloved Spain. The monarch petitioned for oil, wine, and corn—conceded; for sunny skies, brave men, and pretty women—allowed; for cigars, relics, garlic, and bulls—by all means; for a good government—“Nay, nay,” said the Virgin, “that never can be granted; for were it bestowed, not an angel would remain a day longer in heaven.”
THE BOLSA.
The present revenue may be taken at about 12,000,000l. or 13,000,000l. sterling; but money is compared by Spaniards to oil; a little will stick to the fingers of those who measure it out; and such is the robbing and jobbing, the official mystification and peculation, that it is difficult to get at facts whenever cash is in question. The revenue, moreover, is badly collected, and at a ruinous per centage, and at no time during this last century has been sufficient for the national expenses. Recourse has been had to the desperate experiments of usurious loans and wholesale confiscations. At one time church pillage and appropriation was almost the only item in the governmental budget. The recipients were ready to “prove from Vatel exceedingly well” that the first duty of a rich clergy was to relieve the necessitous, and the more when the State was a pauper: croziers are no match for bayonets. This system necessarily cannot last. Since the reign of Philip II. every act of dishonesty has been perpetrated. Public securities have been “repudiated,” interest unpaid, and principal spunged out. No country in the Old World, or even New drab-coated World, stands lower in financial discredit. Let all be aware how they embark in Spanish speculations: however promising in the prospectus, they will, sooner or later, turn out to be deceptions; and whether they assume the form of loans, lands, or rails, none are real securities: they are mere castles in the air, châteaux en Espagne: “The earth has bubbles as the water has, and these are of them.”
For the benefit and information of those who have purchased Iberian stock, it may be stated that an Exchange, or Bolsa de Comercio, was established at Madrid in 1831. It may be called the coldest spot in the hot capital, and the idlest, since the usual “city article” is short and sweet, “sin operaciones,” or nothing has been bought or sold. It might be likened to a tomb, with “Here lies Spanish credit” for its epitaph. If there be a thing which “La perfide Albion,” “a nation of shopkeepers,” dislikes, worse even than a French assignat, it is a bankrupt. One circumstance is clear, that Castilian pundonor, or point of honour, will rather settle its debts with cold iron and warm abuse than with gold and thanks.
The Exchange at Madrid was first held at St. Martin’s, a saint who divided his cloak with a supplicant. As comparisons are odious, and bad examples catching, it has been recently removed to the Calle del Desengaño, the street of “finding out fallacious hopes,” a locality which the bitten will not deem ill-chosen.
SPANISH “STOCK."
As all men in power use their official knowledge in taking advantage of the turn of the market, the Bolsa divides with the court and army the moving influence of every situacion or crisis of the moment: clever as are the ministers of Paris, they are mere tyros when compared to their