APPENDICES
Spanish politicians
On Baroja's anarchists
Note




INTRODUCTION


Pio Baroja is a product of the intellectual reign of terror that went on
in Spain after the catastrophe of 1898. That catastrophe, of course, was
anything but unforeseen. The national literature, for a good many years
before the event, had been made dismal by the croaking of Iokanaans, and
there was a definite _defaitiste_ party among the _intelligentsia_.
But among the people in general, if there was not optimism, there was at
least a sort of resigned indifference, and so things went ahead in the
old stupid Spanish way and the structure of society, despite a few
gestures of liberalism, remained as it had been for generations. In Spain,
of course, there is always a _Kulturkampf_, as there is in Italy,
but during these years it was quiescent. The Church, in the shadow of
the restored monarchy, gradually resumed its old privileges and its old
pretensions. So on the political side. In Catalonia, where Spain keeps the
strangest melting-pot in Europe and the old Iberian stock is almost
extinct, there was a menacing seething, but elsewhere there was not much
to chill the conservative spine. In the middle nineties, when the
Socialist vote in Germany was already approaching the two million mark,
and Belgium was rocked by great Socialist demonstrations, and the
Socialist deputies in the French Chamber numbered fifty, and even England