law already provides a way of escape. Employers who find themselves injured by the conversion of Trade Unions into political organisations can respond by establishing Trade Unions of their own which will have exactly the same privileges as those formed by the workmen. For the sake of greater precision it is worth while to quote the definition of a Trade Union in the Act of 1876 :— "The term "Trade Union" means any combination, whether temporary or permanent, for regulating the relations between workmen and masters, or between workmen and workmen, or between masters and masters, or for imposing restrictive conditions on the conduct of any trade or business, whether such combination would or would not, if the principal Act had not been passed, have been deemed to have been an unlawful combination by reason of some one or more of its purposes being in restraint of trade.'

It will be seen from this definition, which still holds good, that the privileges of a Trade Union are not limited to associations of working men. Any group of persons acting in combination to regulate wages or prices or otherwise restrain trade can be registered as a Trade Union. It must therefore be clearly understood that the reversal of the Osborne judgment would open the door for the maintenance of Members of Parliament on a wholesale scale by groups of rich men with axes of their own to grind. That means a complete change in our whole conception of representative government. Hitherto the House of Commons has been very jealous of its reputation for financial purity. For generations it has not been even suggested that a member of the English House of Commons could be induced to sell his vote for hard cash on any question. It is now proposed to legalise a new system under which certain members, in return for so much a year, will sell their votes on all questions.

HAROLD Cox.

Art. 13.-SPAIN AND THE VATICAN.

THE clerical problem in Spain, which has wrecked one Cabinet and raised another to European eminence, is commonly believed to be ripe for radical solution. Indeed, it is confidently asserted to be at the bottom of the national crisis which has broken out over the whole Peninsula ; and foreign observers are now curious to see what further aspects the ailment will assume in the most Catholic country, and what specific remedies or palliatives will be applied to it. The diagnosis has been made by two Spanish Premiers, each of whom has prescribed a course of treatment for the malady; and the opinion of MM. Moret and Canalejas has been emphatically confirmed by their republican and socialist adversaries. All are agreed that the nation is sick almost unto death, and that its chief ailment is clerical cancer. But, while Señor Moret holds that the only efficacious remedy is an operation to extirpate the cancerous growth, Señor Canalejas, the present Prime Minister, is of opinion that less drastic means will effect a cure. He is convinced that restrictive laws against religious congregations, the taxation of their property, and the laicisation of the schools, will be adequate to the present requirements of the case. In accordance with this opinion he is drawing up his legislative programme amid the plaudits of democratic Europe. The only matter for discussion in Spain at the present moment is, which of the two schools of political medicine is right that which calls for the dissolution of all religious communities, and the entire separation of Church and State-measures that involve a change in the Constitution; or that which deems sufficient those severe checks and impassable barriers which the State can apply without straining the Constitution or doing violence to the Concordat. The tracing of the symptoms to the organic malady is on all hands assumed to be correct; judgments do not begin to diverge until the treatment of the ailment comes up for discussion.

Now from this consensus of opinion we respectfully venture to differ. The diagnosis appears to have been hastily and arbitrarily arrived at; and the politicians who made it seem to have been swayed, unconsciously no

doubt, by irrelevant considerations. It is not suggested by a closer study of the symptoms, nor borne out by a more careful analysis of the history of the disease. That there is a clerical problem in Spain, no one acquainted with that country will deny. The statistics of the religious congregations there, the sums of money which they collect and distribute, the large share of the nation's commerce and industry which passes through their hands, their sharp and successful competition with professional tradesmen, leave no doubt on that point. Clericalism, in certain of its aspects, is therefore a real grievance, calling for immediate and efficacious remedies, which the State has it in its power to apply at any moment. But to pass from this moderate statement of a demonstrable fact to the sweeping proposition that it is the question of questions, to the solution of which all Spanish policy ought to be subordinate, is, it seems to us, to pass from the region of concrete facts to that of illusion.

Spain is in the throes of an ordeal from which, whatever the upshot, it will ultimately emerge a transformed nation. For the crisis is not ministerial, nor political, nor dynastic; it is largely of an economic character, intensified by national, political and dynastic elements. To simplify these complex issues by reducing them to one, and to label that one clericalism, is to misstate the problem. If Senor Canalejas were to break with the Vatican to-morrow, to dissolve all religious communities, to confiscate their property, and even to divorce the Church from the State, he would be able to announce the death of clericalism in Spain. But the palsy which has stricken his high-spirited and richlyendowed countrymen would continue unabated. Only one of the hydra's heads would have been severed from the body, and that the smallest of them all. The expulsion of the religious orders would not brighten the dismal outlook of the mining population around Bilbao. A rupture with the Vatican will not bring the nation, even by a hair's breadth, nearer to a solid educational reform. The disestablishment of the Church will not give a fillip to Spanish commerce and industry, or provide with constant sources of livelihood the numerous and restless section of the population which has neither settled income nor permanent employment, and is doomed

to live from hand to mouth. The roots of the evil from which Spain is suffering lie deeper. They have been nurtured by the easy-going temperament of the nation, by the world-renunciation taught by the Catholic faith, by the influence of unwise rulers, and perhaps, above all else, by the hegemony of morbid Castile, which has never been able to assimilate or fuse the heterogeneous national elements it formerly subdued.

This last aspect of the matter offers a fertile field for the philosophic historian, who will trace the baleful influence of diseased Castile upon the healthy organisms of Aragon, Catalonia, and Navarre, in political, social, economic and religious matters, from the Middle Ages down to the first decade of the twentieth century. He will show how in every department of Spanish life the mark of Castile stands out in plain relief, and in all cases it is the mark of the beast. He will point out that it was owing to the baleful action or inaction of its rulers that Spain became a political amalgam, an artificial entity, instead of a genuine organism characterised by natural growth. As there have been artificial languages, spoken by no people, but employed by a caste or a community, like Sanscrit in India or Pahlevi in medieval Persia, so there have been artificial nations. And of such nations Spain offers a striking example. It is hardly too much to assert that there has never been in reality a Spanish nation, but only an amalgam of ill-assorted communities, compacted.merely by political force.

To this novel theory one may feel tempted to demur, on the strength of objections drawn from the patriotism evinced by Spaniards of all provinces during the foreign wars waged by Spain before and since the Armada, and from the unifying influence of a splendid literature, which is the outward and visible symbol of a great civilised and civilising nation. But the strength of these objections is deceptive. If we we read contemporary chronicles, we find that the armies were recruited by pressure, that military service was at all times odious, and that the bulk of the people looked upon the military establishment of the Castilian monarchy with loathing. And of the literature something similar may be said. Apart from a few genial exceptions, the masterpieces of Spanish dramatists and novelists of the golden age of

literature mirror forth a life which was essentially artificial. Compare the average hero of the novel and the tragedy-the comedy is often much nearer to reality -and you will look in vain for his counterpart in the chronicles of the times. The historian must investigate provincial annals if he would acquaint himself with the centrifugal strivings and ideals, the customs and traditions, of the genuine social organisms that were constrained to live under the crown of Castile, and to adjust themselves to the needs of the artificial nation.

Many significant facts of the present day, on which politicians are not wont to dwell, point to the same conclusion. Local patriotism, for instance, is a characteristic of each province, of every district, of every parish; but national patriotism is lacking. We hear a great deal about 'regionalism' in Catalonia, which is sometimes called separatism, and contrasted with the public spirit evinced by every other province. As a matter of demonstrable fact, we are confronted with the same regionalism whithersoever we go. It prevails in Galicia, in Andalucia, in Murcia. In point of politicosocial cohesiveness, the peoples of Spain are to-day what they were five or six centuries ago. Taking a lively interest in parish or country affairs, they display no taste, and therefore little capacity, for national politics.

This complete indifference of the Spanish people to national politics is one of the cardinal facts of the situation. Unless we understand it, we shall fail to grasp the complex problem with which the Cabinet is now endeavouring to grapple. Legally organised as a democracy with liberty of meeting, liberty of association, liberty of the press, and with universal manhood suffrage, the bulk of the nation eschews politics altogether. It is only when stirred to its depths by some unwonted event which touches everybody to the quick, that the people meddle directly with public affairs. A war to which it must sacrifice its sons, a new and irksome tax, can at any moment rouse the masses from their torpor, and sting them into seismic upheavals. Patriotic motives are powerless. In normal circumstances, national affairs are the preserve of a few thousands of individuals recruited from the ranks where economic conditions are least stable, and livelihood most precarious. These