WHEN MARX REPORTED SPAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue CXXIII, 10 April 1937, Page 27

WHEN MARX REPORTED SPAIN

No doubt, during the last six months, you have read other dispatches much like this (says the "Christian. Science Monitor"): "Some months before ..the outbreak of the present Spanish revolution I told your readers that Russian influences were at work in bringing about a peninsular commotion. . For that. Russia'wanted no direct agents. There was -The Times' (of London). There were besides... the diplomatic agents of the English Ministry. . . .

While Russia is now intriguing in the peninsula through the Bands of England, it, at the same time, denounces England t6 France^ ;.';..,. What interest has Russia.in fomenting commotions

in Spain? To.create.a diversion in the

West, to. provoke dissensions between France and England, and lastly to seduce France into ah 'intervention. Already we are -told by the .'. Anglo-Russjan papers that1 French insurrectionists constructed the barricades at -Madrid."

Familiar ,as this sounds, you .are struck ""by" some oddities. ' These' are not. explained, until the dispatch is dated. It was originally printed in the New York "Tribune" of .September 1, 1854, and the name signed to it was that of probably the most famous

foreign corresponGent the ."Tribune" ever had—Karl Marx. .' .

The "New York Herald 'Tribune"— successor in interest .to Horace Greeley's old paper—acknowledges that ihis dispatch, with the rest of the series Karl Marx wrote on the-Spanish're-bellion of 1854, was called to its attention by a 'French journal. Marx was then a 'reporter, and on a subject on which" he was an expert,.. Later in that year he wrote a Series 'of articles, also published in the "Tribune," on the history of revolution-in Spain since the sixteenth century.'■';

' And no doubt muc:, of what Karl Marx told of the, earlier rebellions in Spain would have sounded as much like the present one as does'.this dispatch of 1854. For centuries Spain has been a country of almost continuous revolutionary movement, and, though the objects have been various, certain patterns of savagery run through them all. In the accounts of the Carlist wars of just a century ago passages can be found telling of callous butchery of prisoners and hostages,,on both sides, that would be perfect for the description of incidents happening this time in Spain, and again on both sides.- ■