Evening Post. THUKSDAY, JANUARY 30, 1930. A PATRIARCHAL DICTATOR

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 25, 30 January 1930, Page 8

Evening Post. THUKSDAY, JANUARY 30, 1930. A PATRIARCHAL DICTATOR

General Primo de Rivera has been very far from the conventional type of dictator. He has been distinguished by a frank and breezy simplicity, a beaming geniality, and an unfailing sense of humour which have provided an invaluable supplement to his military power and smoothed his way out of many. a tight place where a dictator's normal remedy of force might have resulted in deadlock and disaster. Nor has anything in his official life become him like the leaving it. The pathetic and heroic elements which we are accustomed to associate with these occasions— Farewell! A long farewell to all my greatneasl ' and so on—were conspicuously wanting. The "homey" and the cheerful characteristically take the place of the heroic and the pathetic in the Spanish Dictator's last official words: X am going home to have supper quietly. I think you will agree I well deserve it. Even the most rabid of democrats will surely agree that after six difficult and dangerous years this most unorthodox of dictators has deserved to sup in peace. Equally characteristic with his leave-taking was the cause which rendered it necessary. He had been threatened with more than the usual amount of trouble in the provinces, especially in .Andalusia and Cadiz, and it is ftardly necessary Lo add that Barcelona was to the fore again. But what was most serious from the Dictator's standpoint was that the state of unrest which had spread throughout the country was attacking with special violence his seat of power in the Army. Discontent in the Army was of course no new thing. It was this discontent in a country where the Army occupies a unique political position that enabled Primo de Rivera, then (.Captain-General of Catalonia, to execute his great coup in September, 1923, and establish himself as Dictator. He had brought the Army, as his manifesto declared, to liberate the country from the professional politicians, the men who, for one reason or another, are responsible for thj>. period of misfortune and corruption which began in 1898 and threatens to bring Spain to a tragic and dishonourable end. From these corrupt politicians the Ring needed to be delivered no less than his people, for "the wide net of greedy politics has caught in its meshes and imprisoned the Royal will itself." A Military Directorate was the substitute . proposed, which was to find a prompt solution for the problem of Morocco and to establish responsibility by the formation of "tribunals of recognised moral authority." The Military Directorate remained, but the tribunals which were to establish civil responsibility have been futile and even farcical. The Dictator, says Signor Madariga in the new "Encyclopaedia Britannica," despite his evident good will and his successes in more than one field of government, has been the prisoner of his political inexperience. By gagging the nation he ha* deprived himself of adversaries, but by the same stroke he hag deprived himself and the Crown of any alternatives. By a rigid censorship General Primo de Rivera had a great success in suppressing politics outside of the Army, but inside the Army it still flourished, and may even have ac« quired a greater energy from the fact that the Army had become the undisguised instrument of government. That it* lower ranks must be humoured as well as its leaders was recognised by the Dictator when as one of his first official acts he granted a substantial increase in pay to the non-commissioned officers.

But the report which reached us from Madrid on Monday showed that under the growing pressure of military and civil unre.st General Primo de Rivera had taken a step well calculated to weaken the power which it was intended to revive. He issued what is described as "a remarkable Government communique" to all military and naval heads, in which he declared his readiness to voluntarily submit himself to a decisive test by publicly asking the Army and Navy whether he still deserves confidence, adding that if this is not forthcoming he will resign within five minutes of the verdict.

It was an astonishing proof both of failing power and of that worldly unwisdom and ignorance of human nature which the Dictator had so frequently displayed. There was much more sense in that electoral plebiscite to which he decided to submit himself at the close of his third year of power. Martial law throughout the country and a plebiscite of confidence in the Government made a delightful combination on that occasion, and the plebiscite was rendered perfectly innocuous by a very simple precaution. The electors were given "an opportunity of voting confidence in the Government," but they had no opportunity of voting the other way.

If the proposed reference to the Army and Navy had been safeguarded in the same way it might have been less objectionable, but it is not surprising that even in Spain so ludicrous a proposal was not allowed to come to a vote.

The reply of both the Army and the Navy was given through its officers without any reference to the rank and file. The Navy replied very properly:

Your question is political. We are not politicians.

General Barera, who succeeded Primo de Rivera as Captain-General of Catalonia, appears to have replied on behalf of the Army. What he said is not reported, but the result of his interview with the King was the immediate resignation of Primo de Rivera with the admission that he had made a mistake in issuing his communique to the Army and Navy. It appears, however, that it was not the crass absurdity of a public request by the Dictator for a vote of confidence from the fighting services that led to his downfall, but the fact that in so doing he had infringed the Royal prerogative. The culminating point of the trouble was, we ar£ told,

that during his conference with the King General do Rivera stated that he did not realise that his note to the Army in effect ignored the King's authority, thereby placing the opinion of the Army and Navy above that of the King, who possessed the absolute right to appoint and dismiss Ministers. It is good to know that, though a Dictator may .ride roughshod over popular rights in Spain, the King whom he was supposed to have superseded is still something better than a figurehead or a rubber stamp. The suspicion that Alfonso's part in the coup d'etat which brought Primo de Rivera into power was not quite so passive as it was generally supposed to have been- is confirmed by the manner in which he appears to have asserted himself in order to make a change when a change was badly needed. That in both these cases the step was taken without violence of any kind is very much to the credit of all concerned. The late Dictator in particular fully deserves the high praise awarded him by a special correspondent of the "Spectator" in its issue of the 7th December.

To anyone who goes to Spain after having been in Italy or Russia, especially, the Spanish Dictator's treatment of his political opponents is an eyeopener. It is a fact which is insufficiently appreciated abroad, that during the six years of his rulo, if we except the drastic measures taken by his colleague, General Martinez Anidb, against tho gunmen and criminals in Barcelona, there has not been a single instance of personal violence or of bloodshed. Sometimes heavy fines have been imposed, it is true, but on persons like tho ex-Liberal Primo Minister, Count Romanones, who were known to bo well able to pay them. Arrests, too, have been plentiful, when conspiracy was in the air, but as a preventive measure only, not followed by any highhanded attempt to crush tho Opposition. Except for one or two mistakes of judgment—the case of Miguel de Unamuno is the classic e:\tmplo—Genoral Primo de Rivera has behaved, as wo should say in England, like a gentleman, and has redeemed for us moderns the namo of Dictator. ;

This "patriarchal dictator," as he once called himself, has done his country good service at a much smaller cost than what most of his tribe have exacted, and he probably carries with.him into his retirement something like universal goodwill.