THE DISTRESS IN SPAIN.

Evening Post, Volume LXX, Issue 39, 15 August 1905, Page 5

THE DISTRESS IN SPAIN.

STARVING LABOURERS.

[rHESS ASSOCIATION.] (Received August 15, 8.30 a.m.)

"MADRID, 14th August.

Anarchy prevails at Osuna (48 miles east of Seville), owing to the distress caused by the failure of crops in South Spain. Troops have been sent to quell the disturbance.

Starving labourers throughout Andalusia are stealing sheep at night, and the authorities are powerless to stop them.

In smiling Andalusia, the most fertile part of Spain, practically the whole work-ing-class population is weakening from starvation (wrote the Madrid correspondent of the Daily Express on 15th June). In the provinces of Cadiz, Seville, Malaga, and Granada the peasantry, who comprise two-thirds of tho total inhabitants, have been living for the last few months almost exclusively on herb 3, roots, and berries. The bakers from the towns, who supply the more prosperous inhabitants with bread, have been obliged to make their rounds secretly at night, for the appearance of a baker's cart in the daytime inevitably means an attack by a mob of staiving peasantry, desperate with want* and destitute of work, who have nothing to do but lounge about and struggle against the gnawing ppngs of hunger. Many cases have occurred of isolated country house and villas being broken into at night by improvised banks of robbers, who, nevertheless, despite the temptation to general plunder, have always confineo! their depredations to the larders, and have taken nothing but food with which to keep body and soul together. Many poor peasant mothers, rendered desperato by the pitiful cries of their starving children, have been driven to take from their little stores of medicine, put aside in case of illness, powerful drugs with whicli to send the suffering infants to sleep, and thus still their cries.