(Extract from Spain of Today by W. R. Lawson 1889)
To-day we bring to your attention the account of The Industrial Capabilities of Spain taken from William R. Lawson’s Spain of To-day which was published earlier this year.
Spanish statistics take a long time to mature, but when fully matured they are both elaborate and valuable. As regards population, they are still operating on the census of 1877, according to which there were 16,634,000 souls on the Peninsula and the adjacent islands. The Antilles, including Cuba and Porto Rico, had an additional 2½ millions, and the Philippines 5½ millions. Under the Spanish Crown there are consequently 24½ millions of subjects distributed over some of the richest portions of the globe.
Prima facie there should be no insuperable obstacle to such a community paying its way, even without a perfect system of government. A first-class State has more than once been built up with smaller materials. The whole of South America, Brazil included, contains only a few millions more people than Spain and her colonies have.
The next question is as to their productive value. For a test of that, we may take Spain’s wealthy and energetic neighbour France, as to whose industry there can be no doubt. Somewhat less than 38 millions of Frenchmen export at the rate of 120 millions sterling per annum. In years of high prices, like 1876 and 1882, it has risen to over 140 millions sterling; but in bad times it has been as low as 123 millions sterling. The mean here adopted gives an average of nearly £3 10s. per head.
The 16,600,000 Spaniards produce for export about £30 million sterling per annum. The total has been in some years £34 million, and in others as low as under £20 million. At £30 million it gives an average of £1 15s. per head—exactly one-half of the French rate.
Here is one palpable cause of the difference in economic condition between these two nations—one on the north and the other on the south side of the Pyrenees. When Spanish exports approach the French level, Spain will be as prosperous a country as France, and possibly more so, for she has advantages which France does not enjoy, and is not likely to in our day.
Exports are only a small part of the industrial range of a community. It may be estimated that domestic consumption represents three times as much more. France, on this basis, would produce and consume at home £390 million sterling a year against £130 million exported, and her national industry would be worth altogether over £500 million sterling a year—obviously a very moderate estimate.
At the same rate the home production and consumption of Spain would be £90 million sterling a year, which, added to £30 million of exports, make a national industry of £120 million sterling a year.
The figures need only to be stated in order to demonstrate what a wide margin there is for industrial development in Spain. Very probably the present generation will see Spanish exports trebled and home consumption increased on a still larger scale. That is going to be one factor in the solution of the financial dead-lock. It is almost bound to come whether other ameliorations happen or not. The worst Government which would be tolerated nowadays cannot long repress the growth of a nation so surrounded with opportunities as Spain is on all hands.
Reasons for being sanguine about the future of the Peninsula are not far to seek. They may be found by the dozen in the census tables, some of them very characteristic as well as interesting. The industrial status of a population is always significant, and in Spain particularly so. The following is the classification officially arrived at in the 1877 returns:
| Category | % of Population |
|---|---|
| Commercial | 0.80 |
| Transport | 0.95 |
| Industrial | 1.26 |
| Diverse occupations | 2.59 |
| Liberal professions | 2.99 |
| Officials | 4.06 |
| Agriculturists | 29.87 |
| Without profession | 57.48 |
The first three classes are amusing, and not less so is the last. Hardly one Spaniard in a hundred condescends to soil his ancient lineage by associating it with trade. They think it a shade less degrading, apparently, to whack mules or sport railway uniform, than to keep shop, though all three occupations put together make up a very puny total. Artisans number about one in eighty of these charming lotus-eaters; and miscellaneous occupations are claimed by one in forty. Everything that the census-takers can, by any stretch of indulgence, call an industry, when collected and analysed, makes less than 6 per cent of the population, or, say, one in seventeen.
When we turn to the genteel modes of life, the figures grow rapidly. Liberal professions absorb nearly 3 per cent, and officials over 4 per cent. Here, manifestly, is where the shoe pinches in Spain. One person in twenty-five prefers being kept by the State to keeping himself. He will be a clerk in the post-office, a tide-waiter, a baggage-searcher in the Custom-house—anything with a bit of gold lace and a salary to it, rather than forage for his own living. It is a bad choice, both for him and the country. Nine-tenths of the men who thus vegetate as officials have brains enough and opportunities enough to treble their starvation incomes if they would only pocket their pride and throw a little more energy into the process of existence. The State, on its side, would be better served if it were rid of one-half of them.
Officialism is the curse of Spain, and the Hercules who can strangle that snake which, in ever-lengthening folds, coils itself round the Treasury, will be the first practical reformer in Spanish politics. His next exploit might be to annihilate the swarms of beggars who infest every public place in the Peninsula. They rank, I believe, as one of the learned professions, and in point of numbers they run the priests rather close.
The agriculturist, who is the backbone of the country, must have a hard time with so many parasites hanging on to him. He forms less than a third of the population—29.87 per cent—and has to work for all. Farmers are one of the few classes of Spaniards who are better than their reputation. Report pictures them as lazy, fanciful, and erratic. They are, in fact, laborious, peaceable, and plodding. Whether toiling alone on their little farms, or working in groups at the mines or marble-quarries, they are, I am assured, satisfactory workers. At the Rio Tinto they have been employed side by side with Cornishmen, and better value for the money has been got out of them.
In such establishments the use of native labour is increasing, and rising in quality at the same time. Responsible duties, such as engine-driving and ore-picking, are now intrusted to Spaniards which formerly were reserved for Englishmen or Germans.
The Spanish labourer is very little to blame for the slow progress of his country. He has, at the worst of times, done his share fairly well, and since he came under skilled leadership he has improved greatly. There is as good labour, both skilled and unskilled, to be got in most parts of Spain as anywhere else in Europe, not excepting England. There need be little fear on that score in undertaking any new enterprise in the Peninsula.
The Spaniard is eminently teachable, and on piece-work he soon outgrows any tendency he may have to mooning around and counting his beads. From sunrise to sunset he can keep the hammer going, not fast but steadily. Half an hour for breakfast, two hours for dinner, five minutes for his cigarette at mid-day, and another five in the afternoon, are all the rest he needs in the longest summer day. He may lay off occasionally when he has a few pesetas to spend, but while at it he works regularly, and makes good wages. Labourers fit for heavy work like mining, quarrying, railroading, earn little if any less in Biscaya or Andalusia than in Lancashire or Yorkshire.
Only of late has this great economic improvement set in, and its effects are yet in embryo; but they may soon be strong enough to help the Treasury out of its chronic deficits.
All the requisite elements of profitable industry exist in Spain; the only trouble is that they have not yet learned to co-operate effectively. Capital has been accumulating from generation to generation since it first began to flow in from the New World. Bone and sinew abound in every Spanish village, and brain is running to seed among the educated classes for sheer lack of employment. Enterprises are to be had in boundless variety which should weld muscle and brain together in a co-partnery of success and progress.
Spain is slowly awakening to the fact that the days of knight-errantry are over, and that a new age of prosaic hard work has set in. Though the last of the ancient nations to give up castles in the air for factories and foundries on solid earth, she may not have to lag much longer in the rear. Her resources are so vast, her commercial facilities so rare, and her national character in many respects so sound, that regeneration when it begins, will flash through the land like a flood of sunlight.
