fficials have to be
placated. For all that money is needed. Men taking to the roads in
search of work are persecuted as vagrants by the civil guards. Arson
becomes the last retort of despair. At night the standing grain burns
mysteriously or the country house of an absent landlord, and from the
parched hills where gnarled almond-trees grow, groups of half starved
men watch the flames with grim exultation.

Meanwhile the press in Madrid laments the _incultura_ of the Andalusian
peasants. The problem of civilization, after all, is often one of food
calories. Fernando de los Rios, socialist deputy for Granada, recently
published the result of an investigation of the food of the
agricultural populations of Spain in which he showed that only in the
Balkans--out of all Europe--was the working man so under-nourished. The
calories which the diet of the average Cordova workman represented was
something like a fourth of those of the British workman's diet. Even so
the foremen of the big estates complain that as a result of all this
social agitation their workmen have taken to eating more than they did
in the good old times.

How long it will be before the final explosion comes no one can
conjecture. The spring of 1920, when great things were expected, was
completely calm. On the other hand, in the last municipal elections
when six hundred socialist councillors were elected in all Spain--in
contrast to sixty-two in 1915--the vote polled in Andalusia was
unprecedented. Up to this election many of the peasants had never dared
vote, and those that had had been completely under the thumb of the
_caciques_, the bosses that control Spanish local politics. However, in
spite of socialist and syndicalist propaganda, the agrarian problem
will always remain separate from anything else in the minds of the
peasants. This does not mean that they are opposed to communism or
cling as violently as most of the European peasantry to the habit of
private property.

All over Spain one comes upon traces of the old communist village
institutions, by which flocks and mills and bakeries and often land
were held in common. As in all arid countries, where everything depends
upon irrigation, ditches are everywhere built and repaired in common.
And the idea of private property is of necessity feeble where there is
no rain; for what good is land to a man without water? Still, until
there grows up a much stronger community of interest than now exists
betwee