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and the enormous hat of the Spanish priest, would be inconvenient in campaigning, and dangerous. He assumed the dress worn by the peasants-the low vest of strong brown cloth, the red sash round the waist, the loose-fitting breeches of the mountaineer of Navarre, reaching to the knee, the legs enveloped in black gaiters, and the feet protected by the sandals or alpargatas of the country. Before close-shaven, like all Spanish priests not missionaries, or of the monastic orders, he has let his beard and moustache grow, the restless life he leads compelling him to forego the luxury of the razor. He carries in his belt a pair of loaded revolvers, and in his hand the thick stick which is as necessary a part of the equipment of a Basque peasant as the shillelah to an Irishman. His head-dress is the boina or flat cloth cap, white in colour, with a blue tassel in the centre, which, according to the fancy of the wearer, may be of woollen, silk, or silver fringe. His body-guard is composed of ten or twelve stalwart youths from his native village, who accompany him in all his expeditions, armed and equipped like himself, and prepared to execute any orders he may give them. They are true to him heart and soul; and it would be a dangerous experiment for any one to tamper with their fidelity, or to even remotely suggest the advantage of betraying him. He has unbounded confidence in them. They have known each other from infancy, and they regard him not only as their chief and their friend, but, in spite of the irregular life he leads, as their pastor. His partisans say that since the time of the Navarrese hero Mina there has been no captain of guerillas who, in so short a space of time, and with such small means at his disposal, has done so much for the national cause. Apart from the excesses

which are the accompaniment of civil war everywhere, and particularly in Spain, it is affirmed that his private conduct is without reproach. There is, however, one act of his which many friends of the cause he is engaged in have justly denounced in the strongest terms-the shooting of a young woman who, he alleges, was caught conveying despatches from the officer commanding the troops, was known to be a spy, and who had received a sum of money to betray him to his enemy, as well as the alcalde of a village after the combat of Aya. This deed produced such sensation that Santa Cruz addressed the following letter to the Carlist paper that published a well-deserved censure on his conduct :

"March 13, 1873.

"In a late number of your journal I read a letter from a Guipuzcoan correspondent which you seem to approve, since you stigmatise my mode of acting during this rude campaign, opened by me in the month of December last. You say that the Carlists of Guipuzcoa are painfully affected by certain barbarous acts committed by one of the chiefs of the party in this province; alluding, no doubt, to the execution of a woman of the high lands.

That chief is the person who writes these lines; and he has a right to ask, who are the men of the Carlist party? who is the author of the letter? who is the writer who composes diatribes by his fireside at the moment when, pursued by the enemy's columns through the snow, I am hunted to the death? Does your correspondent imagine that, from a caprice of indescribable barbarity, it is a pleasure to me to take the life of one of God's creatures? Do you know why I ordered the woman and other guilty persons to be executed? Is it then so precious, the life of a wretch

who, availing herself of her title of Carlist, betrays the volunteers of God and of the king, and carries despatches from the enemy sewn up in her dress? Are these Carlists aware how much suffering and peril we endure for the final triumph of our cause? If they know nothing about it, let them hold their tongues, and not sow division amongst us; let them hold their tongues, and not excite the volunteers against the chiefs who hourly expose their lives for the success of the cause and the defeat of the Revolution; let them keep silent, and leave dishonest manœuvres to those who have not the courage to put their names to what they write. It is not true that our friends in this province blame me. Those friends desire to finish with the anarchists, with the deputies who offer large rewards for our heads, with our despots and our tyrants; and they ought to know that if I acted as I did, it was because I could not do otherwise. All my young volunteers approve me. Those brave young men are disposed to shed the last drop of their blood by my side; on one condition, however that I relieve them from the spies who plot our ruin'; the spies of the enemy, of whom some are spies through fear, and others for money: it is the Basques who pay for both. "It is said that the Carlist party, who have nobly carried on the war up to the present day, despite a thousand calumnies, have a right to require that the cause shall not be dishonoured. You know how in May last certain volunteers gave up thousands of muskets-and this was one of the most shameful pages of Carlism. We must have no second Amorovieta. I am justified by the laws of war in punishing spies, and still more in punishing those who push their treason so far as to surrender their flag. My volunteers are convinced that

we must act with severity, and eradicate the evil; but the punishment is only inflicted for offences of the most heinous character.

"MANUEL SANTA CRUZ."

Buffon says, "le style c'est l'homme," and the preceding justification shows as well as anything else the character of the fanatical priest -of one cruel indeed, but ready to endure all that he inflicts on others. Those chiefs of partisans are certainly guilty of acts of ferocity, and it should be borne in mind that reckless disregard of life is not confined to one party exclusively. Both sides have much to answer for in this respect. The summary executions by drumhead courtmartial, or by no court-martial at all, and simply on identification of those who had taken up arms for Don Carlos in the seven years' war, were commenced by military authorities commanding, in the name of Isabella II., then a child of four years old, under the regency of her mother Queen Christina. These executions were indeed fearfully avenged by Zumalacarreguy, whose natural severity kept in submission the troops and the inhabitants of the revolted districts; and increased to such extent that the English Government had to interfere, and imposed on both parties a convention by which prisoners belonging to regular troops on both sides were, in the Basque provinces, allowed quarter. It must be said, however, that when the Carlist commander proposed to extend the benefits of the convention to the districts south of the Ebro, and, in fact, wherever Carlist bands were in arms, General Cordova (Luis), then at the head of the army of the north, refused to allow it to have effect outside the limits of the Basque provinces and Navarre. A Christino General commanding a district in Catalonia, shot the aged mother of Cabrera, and

he, too, terribly retaliated for a crime committed precisely on the same ground as those alleged by Santa Cruz-espionage, and conveying despatches to and from the enemy.

To those who may feel surprised that, after many years' submission to the rule of a constitutional sovereign, Basques and Navarrese should still be found to combat for thegrandson of the Prince whose cause had been virtually lost even before the great defection of Bergara, we may observe that the inhabitants of a country like Spain, intersected by chains and groups of mountains, are the last to accept important changes in government, allegiance, or religion. The Highlanders of Spain have adhered to the cause of Don Carlos, as the Highlanders of Scotland adhered to that of Charles Stuart, long after their repudiation by the majority of the nation, and as the primitive Vendeans behind their woods and marshes clung to the elder branch of the Bourbons. The Basques are a brave, hardy, obstinate race, as proved in ancient and modern times by their resistance to the Roman invaders, to the Moors, and to the French; and in protracted contest, even when there remains slight chance of success, they have no superiors, perhaps no equals. The constant practice of smuggling admirably fits them for guerilla warfare; they come to the fight already veterans; and in power of endurance and activity, they are not surpassed by any others of their class in Europe. One of the principal causes of the success of the Carlists in the first year of the war, after the death of Ferdinand VII., was to be found in the numerous desertions of the troops, and the enforced retirement of officers of merit suspected of disaffection to the new order of things, and in the voluntary resignation of others, who would not swear allegiance to the infant VOL. CXIV.-NO. DCXCIII.

Queen, and who transferred their services to her uncle. In the present day, the overthrow and expulsion of Isabella, after thirty-five years of acknowledged sovereignty, not by Carlists who had accepted the Convention of Bergara, but by men who had never worn any uniform but hers, who never took oaths butto her, and who paid with base ingratitude the favours she had often foolishly lavished upon them, released men of honour from the obligations they had contracted on that occasion, and till then observed. Elio and gentlemen like him pledged their allegiance to Isabella of Bourbon, but not to the Duke of Aosta, and least of all to the Republic, which, reasonably or otherwise, they abhor. Another powerful cause of the spread of Carlism we may discern as well in the social decomposition prevailing in many parts of Spain, as in the demoralisation of the army; and for that demoralisation the heads of the army themselves are mainly responsible. It took, indeed, many years of mismanagement to destroy the solidity of organisation, and the other admirable qualities which distinguished the soldiers of Alva and Farnese ;-respect for superior rank and merit, submission to discipline, and patience in suffering, for which the armies of Spain were in those days famous. By systematically fomenting revolts in quarters, giving promotion as a premium for mutiny, rewarding superior officers for political services or military treason, the old traditions have been long since forgotten-and not only forgotten, but matters have reached that point at which the Spanish army is now become little more than a lifeless body, which the habit of occasional fighting and the presence of insurgents can hardly galvanise. Military sedition promoted by military chiefs dates from a period antecedent to the Carlist war. The revolt D

of the expeditionary army in the Island of Leon in 1820, completed, what was before uncertain, the loss of the Spanish possessions in South America; as the revolt in Cadiz in 1868 was the signal for the insurrection and probable loss of the only remaining possession, Cuba. As was well said by Vergniaud, or some other orator of the French Convention, the Revolution, like Saturn, devoured its own progeny. The remark is not less true of the men who head insurrections in the Peninsula. Riego, the hero of 1820, the principal agent in the revolt of the Isle of Leon, rewarded for that service with the post of Captain-General of Aragon, after being for a space the idol of the army and the people, his name the talisman of liberty, and martial hymns composed in his honour, ended by being drawn in a hurdle to the scaffold, and dying by the hands of the hangman, to the applause of the rabble in the cornmarket of Madrid-the same rabble who, the year before, hailed him as a liberator. His associate Quiroga had to fly the country to escape a similar fate; took refuge in England, and died some few years later obscure and forgotten. The man who in recent times rendered more services to Spain than any of his contemporaries was assuredly Espartero; but, in justice, even he cannot be pronounced guiltless of fomenting revolt in the army under his command, which led to the repulsion of the Regent Christina in 1840, and his own elevation to the regency during the minority of Queen Isabella. The instruments he had employed, or allowed to be employed, before long turned against himself. Not only the chiefs who opposed him, but those who cooperated with him in that act, jealous of the fame he had acquired by putting an end to the Carlist war, and overshadowed by his au

thority, conspired against him repeatedly, and having gained over a considerable portion of the troops, rose upon him, and overthrew him before he completed his term of regency. And he who for three years was the Dictator of Spain, had to take refuge on board an English ship of war, pursued by his foes to the water's edge. O'Donnell, who had figured in more than one revoltwho owed his marshal's truncheon and his place of Prime Minister to the insurrection of 1854, and by the same means ousted his colleague and chief, Espartero, in 1856-died a few years ago in exile at Biarritz. Prim, a conspirator all his life, and proud of his calling, repaid the honours heaped upon him by one more conspiracy against his too generous benefactress, just after he had pronounced a gasconading profession of loyalty to her crown and person, dethroned and drove her from the country, put himself in her place, and not long after was struck down by an unknown hand in a street corner in the capital where he had ruled supreme for a brief space. And Serrano! Serrano, for whom every revolution has been in turn a stepping-stone to power, liberal or reactionary,—the Universal Minister of 1843, the spoiled child of the Court, to whom nothing was refused, and to whom there remained nothing more to give

duke, grandee, Grand Cross of every order in the long list of Spanish decorations, place, wealth,-Serrano recognised the prodigal bounties of his sovereign, which made him the envied among men, in similar fashion. Serrano, Regent of Spain, whilst his brother marshal and brother duke, Prim, was casting about for some one who might be coaxed into accepting the inheritance of the dethroned and exiled daughter of Ferdinand, is indebted for his life to the hospitality of the British ambassador, and escapes from a ferocious

mob, only to fly in disguise, under the same protection, to the first seaport within reach, and seek a refuge at Biarritz.

After such things, who can wonder at the state to which the army is reduced? We look in vain for the man, or the party, capable of arresting the evil to which all alike have contributed. The socalled Moderados, as well as the Liberals, have so helped in undermining discipline for their own selfish ends, that they have not the authority which would reform it. Since the Convention of Bergara to the present time, they have repeatedly used their military position for political purposes. We can least of all expect reorganisation from the professional revolutionists who have long dinned into the ears of the soldiers the duty of insurrection, and held out as a bait the abolition of compulsory service when they themselves should have the upper hand; and they now preach upa Federal Republic-in other words, the dismemberment of the country-as they have effected the dissolution of the army. The army, corrupted by a long system of favouritism-its chiefs recompensed, not for distinguished acts against a foreign or domestic enemy, but for the worst party services on the one hand, and, on the other, by the doctrines of Puerta del Sol demagogues, has, after upsetting ministry after ministry, dethroning one sovereign, giving her crown to another to be overthrown in his turn, at last come to that point that its total disappearance is but a question of time. The Madrid Government, if the men in whose hands the affairs of the country are at the date at which we write can really be called a Government, are probably aware of its condition, and they must know that they are powerless, even if they were willing, to remedy it. They are afraid to accept the aid of

any general suspected of Conservative views, and endowed with energy sufficient—if such a man could be found; and they are driven to the perilous alternative of substituting an armed mob for regular troops. Whilst the Carlists are increasing in number and improving in or ganisation, the force opposed to them will soon consist of little more than undisciplined and ignorant "volunteers," the sweepings of the large towns, attracted more by high pay, or the promise of it, and the freedom from military restraint, than by any other feeling. The right of electing their officers, as ignorant as themselves, is sanction and incentive to disobedience; and as they are as ungovernable in quarters as in the field, they must end by becoming formidable to those whom they are charged to defend, rather than to those whom they are sent to fight. To this complete demoralisation of the army, and the social dissolution which is gaining ground in the southern provinces, the frequent changes of commanders, and the growing popularity of the Carlist cause, are, in the main, to be attributed. Colonels of regiments cannot always get their men to follow them when they are really determined to lead; and in Catalonia particularly, thousands refuse to march, on the ground that their term of service expires in a month or two, and it is not just to expose them to the perils of active warfare. Others clamour for the fulfilment of the promise, so often made, of immediate and absolute discharge from military duty-a reward which they deem they have fully earned by turning their arms against their Queen, and again, by the equally glorious service they rendered in not maintaining King Amadeus. Moreover, an angry and jealous feeling exists on their part against the volunteers, who receive at least four

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