Year One of the Spanish Republic
By W. HORSFALL CARTES.
has been striding with seven-league boots in -I- Spain since the news of the establishment of a Republic startled the world a year ago. Even those whose
Year One of the Spanish Republic
By W. HORSFALL CARTES.
has been striding with seven-league boots in -I- Spain since the news of the establishment of a Republic startled the world a year ago. Even those whose way it is to trot out ready-made notions culled from the history books will have to think twice about labelling "backward " a country where matrimony is now based on equality between the sexes;. where divorce by mutual consent or on certain conditions at the request of one party is now the law of the land; where illegitimate children have the same rights as children born in wedlock; where women have the vote on equal terms with men (at the age of 23); where there is a Parliament which really acquits itself of its function as a forum of opinion and has worked so wisely and so well that in the space of six months it has Passed an up-to-date democratic constitution which can give points to any in the world ; where finally the privi- leged positions of Church and Army that have so long made Spain an anachronism in the modern world have been undermined with the least possible fuss, and in an eminently realist manner that bodes nothing but good for Spain's future.
The interest of foreigners naturally fastens on the so- called "religious question." Actually of course it is not religious at all, but political. Four times during the nine- teenth century the religious orders were suppressed or their property confiscated. Their fate has been boundup all along with the see-saw struggle between" Liberalism" and the Bourbon monarchy. The Church in Spain—or. properly speaking, the ecclesiastical hierarchy—has striven to maintain into the twentieth century the old alliance of throne and altar. For that. " political" mistake it is to-day paying the penalty.
When Setior Alcala Zamora, the Prime Minister and with him his fellow-Catholic, Schor• Miguel Maura, 'the Home Minister, resigned rather than be a party to the original draft of Article 24, which was pure sectarianism, taken over from France,. the prophets of woe began to suggest that the Republic was going to founder. They reckoned, however, without the unusual ability and character of Spain's present leaders. The situation was saved by a forcible speech from the Minister of War, Senor Azaila, who pleaded for realism. "What is the sense," he argued, "of a policy treating religious commu- nities as in themselves.blameworthy—when a large number of the ` religious'are monks and nuns knowing none but a 