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HISTORY]

public aspirations for the reduction and control of the excessive number of orders and religious orders, without impairing their independence in spiritual matters," and in introducing a bill for the amendment of the law of 1887 Señor Canalejas declared that the government, “inspired by the universal spirit of liberty of conscience,” had given to article xi. of the constitution “the full sense of its text.”1

“Liberty of conscience,” a principle condemned by the Syllabus of 1864 and sneered at in the encyclical Pascendi gregis of 1905, was hardly a phrase calculated to conciliate the Spanish clergy, still less the Vatican. A cry went up that to allow dissident churches to announce their presence was to insult and persecute the Catholic Church;2 at Rome the decree was attacked as unconstitutional, and a breach of diplomatic propriety all the more reprehensible as negotiations for a revision of the concordat were actually pending. A violent clerical agitation, encouraged by the Vatican, was started, 72 Spanish archbishops and bishops presenting a joint protest to the government. Fuel was added to the fire by the introduction of a bill—known as the Cadenas bill—forbidding the settlement of further congregations in Spain until the negotiations with the Vatican should have been completed. This was denounced at Rome as a unilateral assertion on the part of the Spanish government of an authority which, under the concordat, belonged to the Holy See as well. As a preliminary to negotiation, the government was required to rescind all the obnoxious measures. This demand broke the patience of the prime minister, and on the 30th of July Serior de Ojeda, Spanish ambassador at the Vatican, was instructed to hand in his papers. In Vatican circles dark hints began to be dropped of a possible rapprochement with Don Jaime, who had succeeded his father Don Carlos, on the 18th of July 1909, as the representative of Spanish legitimacy and Catholic orthodoxy. The pretender, indeed, disclaimed any intention of stirring up civil war in Spain; his mission would be to restore order when the country should have wearied of the republican regime whose speedy advent he foresaw. The fulfilment of the first part of this prophecy seemed to some to be brought a step nearer by the overthrow of the monarchy in Portugal on the 5th of October 1910. For Spain its immediate effect was to threaten a great increase of the difficulties of the government, by the immigration of the whole mass of religious congregations expelled from Portugal by one of the first acts of the new regime.

Kings of the Visigoths, having relations with Spain, but not established within it:—

Kings of the Visigoths established in Spain:—

Early kings of the Christian north-west of Spain, of uncertain chronology and relationship:—