SPAIN EXPLAINED.

Waipa Post, Volume XXIV, Issue 1415, 13 October 1923, Page 7

SPAIN EXPLAINED.

While Spain has been pouring out millions in Morocco for 10 years past the Spanish people seem to have reached an amazing pitch of misery. A writer in the Fortnightly Review a year or two back declared that in the Las Hurdes region of the Estremadura, in “Sunny Spain,” there are human beings herding like savages in holes and caves—half-starved, clothed in rude skins, without doctors, churches or schools. Such statistics as they collect in Spain show that there are 12 million people out of the 21 millions in the country who can neither read nor write, nor calculate the simplest figures. Nearly half the small towns and villages are without even roads. Half the area of the country is uncultivated. The army has been in revolt against the incompetent General Staff for years, and has juntas or committees which issue orders to which the Governments have either to agree or resign, as six or seven have done in as many years. “Our country,” declares Senor Jose Ortegany Gassett, “is a rotting carcass in the last stages of decomposition.” And the defect of this unsavoury comparison, from all accounts, is that it understates the case.