They were always fighting in Parliament, Maura, Pablo Iglesias, and Lerroux, and they painted on the walls slogans such as ‘Down with Maura’. Sometimes they would write in red, ‘Maura, up!’ The workers were those who wrote ‘Down with Maura!’ Those who wrote ‘up’ were the gentry… At nightfall, when Alcalá Street is crowded, a group of young gentlemen will appear shouting ‘Maura, up!’ Then a group of workers and students is formed at once, and begins to shout ‘Maura, down!’… The civil guards charge, but they never attack the gentry.

When I read that last phrase, ‘the civil guards never attack the gentry’, there came back to me a memory which is perhaps out of place in a review, but which illustrates the difference of social atmosphere in a country like England and a country like Spain. I am six years old, and I am walking along a street in our little town with my mother and a wealthy local brewer, who is also a magistrate. The tarred fence is covered with chalk drawings, some of which I have made myself. The magistrate stops, points disapprovingly with his stick and says, ‘We are going to catch the boys who draw on these walls, and we are going to order them six STROKES OF THE BIRCH ROD.’ (It was all in capitals in my mind.) My knees knock together, my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth, and at the earliest possible moment I sneak away to spread the dreadful intelligence. In a little while, all the way down the fence, there is a long line of terror-stricken children, all spitting on their handkerchiefs and trying to rub out the drawings. But the interesting thing is that not till many years later, perhaps twenty years, did it occur to me that my fears had been groundless. No magistrate would have condemned me to six STROKES OF THE BIRCH ROD, even if I had been caught drawing on the wall. Such punishments were reserved for the Lower Orders. The Civil Guards charge, but they never attack the gentry. In England it was and still is possible to be unaware of this, but not in the Spain that Señor Barea writes of. There, injustice was unmistakable, politics was a struggle between black and white, every extremist doctrine from Carlism to Anarchism could be held with lunatic clarity. ‘Class war’ was not merely a phrase, as it has come to be in the Western democracies. But which state of affairs is better is a different question.