APPENDICES Spanish politicians On Baroja's anarchists Note INTRODUCTION Pío Baroja is a product of the intellectual reign of terror that went on in Spain after the catastrophe of 1898. That catastrophe, of course, was anything but unforeseen. The national literature, for a good many years before the event, had been made dismal by the croaking of Iokanaans, and there was a definite _défaitiste_ party among the _intelligentsia_. But among the people in general, if there was not optimism, there was at least a sort of resigned indifference, and so things went ahead in the old stupid Spanish way and the structure of society, despite a few gestures of liberalism, remained as it had been for generations. In Spain, of course, there is always a _Kulturkampf_, as there is in Italy, but during these years it was quiescent. The Church, in the shadow of the restored monarchy, gradually resumed its old privileges and its old pretensions. So on the political side. In Catalonia, where Spain keeps the strangest melting-pot in Europe and the old Iberian stock is almost extinct, there was a menacing seething, but elsewhere there was not much to chill the conservative spine. In the middle nineties, when the Socialist vote in Germany was already approaching the two million mark, and Belgium was rocked by great Socialist demonstrations, and the Socialist deputies in the French Chamber numbered fifty, and even England was beginning to toy gingerly with new schemes of social reform, by Bismarck out of Lassalle, the total strength of the Socialists of Spain was still not much above five thousand votes. In brief, the country seemed to be removed from the main currents of European thought. There was unrest, to be sure, but it was unrest that was largely inarticulate and that needed a new race of leaders to give it form and direction.