The war has now lasted two-and-a-half years and caused perhaps a million deaths, besides unheard-of-misery. How much damage has it done to the cause of democracy? One has only to consider the possibilities of modern war, the kind of things that governments will have to do to hold their peoples together, to feel very doubtful whether there will be much democracy left anywhere after several years of ‘all-in’ warfare between great nations. Yet it is a fact that the Spanish war, in nearly every way so terrible, has been a hopeful portent in this respect. In Government Spain both the forms and the spirit of democracy have survived to an extent that no one would have foreseen; it would even be true to say that during the first year of the war they were developing.

I was in Catalonia and Aragón from Christmas, 1936, until about the middle of the following year. To be in Spain at that time was a strange and moving experience, because you had before you the spectacle of a people that knew what it wanted, a people facing destiny with its eyes open. The rebellion had plunged the country into chaos and the Government nominally in power at the outbreak of war had acted supinely; if the Spanish people were saved, it had got to be by their own effort. It is not an exaggeration to say that practically the whole resistance of the opening months was the direct and conscious action of the ordinary people in the street, via their trade unions and political organisations. Transport and major industries had devolved directly into the hands of the workers; the militias which had to bear the brunt of the fighting were voluntary organisations growing out of the trade unions. There was plenty of incompetence, of course, but also there were astonishing feats of improvisation. The fields were tilled, trains ran, life away from the fighting line was for the most part peaceful and orderly, and the troops, though poorly armed, were well fed and cared for. With all this there was a spirit of tolerance, a freedom of speech and the press, which no one would have thought possible in time of war. Naturally the social atmosphere changed, in some ways for the worse, as time went on. The country settled down to a long war; there were internal political struggles which resulted in power passing from the hands of socialists and anarchists into the hands of communists, and from the hands of communists into the hands of radical republicans; conscription was imposed and censorship tightened up – two inevitable evils of modern war. But the essentially voluntary spirit of the opening months has never disappeared, and it will have important after-effects.