and we all went on to see the editor of
_Andalusia_, a regionalist pro-labor weekly.

In that dark little office, over three cups of coffee that appeared
miraculously from somewhere with the pungent smell of ink and fresh
paper in our nostrils, we talked about the past and future of Cordova,
and of all the wide region of northern Andalusia, fertile irrigated
plains, dry olive-land stretching up to the rocky waterless mountains
where the mines are. In Azorin's crisp phrases and in the long ornate
periods of the editor, the serfdom and the squalor and the heroic hope
of these peasants and miners and artisans became vivid to me for the
first time. Occasionally the compositor, a boy of about fifteen with a
brown ink-smudged face, would poke his head in the door and shout:
"It's true what they say, but they don't say enough, they don't say
enough."

The problem in the south of Spain is almost wholly agrarian. From the
Tagus to the Mediterranean stretches a mountainous region of low
rainfall, intersected by several series of broad river-valleys which,
under irrigation, are enormously productive of rice, oranges, and, in
the higher altitudes, of wheat. In the dry hills grow grapes, olives
and almonds. A country on the whole much like southern California.
Under the Moors this region was the richest and most civilised in
Europe.

When the Christian nobles from the north reconquered it, the
ecclesiastics laid hold of the towns and extinguished industry through
the Inquisition, while the land was distributed in huge estates to the
magnates of the court of the Catholic Kings. The agricultural workers
became virtually serfs, and the communal village system of working the
land gradually gave way, Now the province of Jaen, certainly as large
as the State of Rhode Island, is virtually owned by six families. This
process was helped by the fact that all through the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries the liveliest people in all Spain swarmed
overseas to explore and plunder America or went into the church, so
that the tilling of the land was left to the humblest and least
vigorous. And immigration to America has continued the safety valve of
the social order.

It is only comparatively recently that the consciousness has begun to
form among the workers of the soil that it is possible for them to
change their lot. As everywhere else, Russia has been the beacon-flare.
Since 1918 an extraordinary tenseness has come over the lives of the