Letter

              Storth Lodge, Moorwoods Lane, Owlers Bar, SHEFFIELD.
14th November, 1934.
Personal
Dear Mr. Tracey,
I have completed the immediate task and enclose a pack of details from which you can take items or make conclusions, etc. I hope it may satisfy and give you some new points and ideas and lead someone to fellow up affairs more closely.    A Spanish scholar who had previously studied sympathetically their political affairs could probably pursue the clues and keep you informed now and onwards.    The Spanish daily papers are obtainable in London and occasionally there are sympathisers who have leisure and interest. I subscribe to "El Sol" and receive other papers occasionally from two friends in Spain.
I cannot tell you whether the republican left will get Besteiro.    They have angled for him and would like Fernando de los Rios as they would also destroy Caballero (in prison) and Prieto (in Paris) - with the hated Azana.    These two former may remain as they are to-day, sincere, intellectual and constitutional Socialists within that section of the party which prefers the gradual approach, and they may feel that the majority's recent alliance with the hitherto violently critical Communist party was not worth the risk of the early quarrel and separation - although the revolt against the accession of the reactionary Clericals to office and participation in power was successful.    I am not sufficiently informed to say that, knowing the sinister and inevitable developments of the counter-Clerical attack since last December and the General Election, the revolt and the alliance was justified, and I have no inside connections to-day.   I would like to talk with  Luis Araquistain about it, for he understands our English point of view as well as the next one.
I believe, however, that we must not take our English view and experience into our judgment of Spanish movement and temperament, and, if former experience is repeated, the Spanish Left will recover after a while, and fight again.    The Clericals can fall out as well as the left, can split into Anarchist-Syndicalists, who, like the anti-Clerical atheist, usually hates government because all known government is corrupt; Communists, who see no way except by violent upheaval, and, like the more steady organised Socialists, who, however constitutionally inclined, view an elementary lopsided system of administration and taxation, see an upper class by comparison much worse and much more privileged than ours, and may also despair of winning through a measure of freedom and social benefit in his day by using our more sober and slow methods.    Primo de Riviera's military-Clerical rule began with severe repression and continued the general graft, although it brought good odd items along.    In these seven long years, workers, leaders were shot and disappeared and paid pistol users could be immune from murder charges and a national scab union be protected. but employer leaders, who had records not printed in their obituaries could also pay the grim penalty with foul murder. Organised spying did not always pay the man who worked or his pay master in the long run.    The bile of the Dictatorship was eventually thrown up and I doubt whether the individualist Spaniard will accept suppression as tamely as the German, at least for any length of time.   The last one and a half years of dictatorship was a trembling time for the dictator's servants.
The defeated revolt of October 6th, 1934, will for the set back the attempt to place the Church beneath the State, but; although the Constitution-expressed extinction of Clerical salaries may for a few years be followed by the payment of Clerical