PRIMO DE RIVERA
OR THE DICTATORSHIP THAT FAILED
THE fruitful policy of neutrality pursued by Spain in the
European war, brought about a prosperity greater than
she had known for several centuries. But making money
is one thing. Keeping it another. That is a truth which
the Spaniards, who committed the error of investing
their profits in Germany, realized to their cost when,
as a result of the catastrophic slump in German marks,
they found themselves some four thousand million pesetas
out of pocket.
Almost between sunset and sunrise, things in general
had become much less easy, and the grievous disappoint-
ments of this grim period produced in their turn a moral
and social cataclysm.
We beheld the efflorescence of a sort of "gangsterism3,
particularly at Barcelona, in Catalonia, which, being a
great industrial city, harbours a variety of elements
which always take kindly to revolution, or, more prop-
erly, to anarchy.
About the year 1922, a government of politicians of
the old school, Senores Santiago Alba, now President
of the Cortes, and Garcia Prieto, had, owing to their
easy-going liberalism and to their getting themselves
involved in an entanglement with the Left, made it
completely impossible for them to offer any resistance
to the forces of disorder. The government's weakness
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