Events

A decade ago this office asked its readers what could be called a free election when scarcely sixty-five thousand men in a country of twelve million were trusted with the ballot. The nation has grown since. The count of the trusted has not kept pace with it. At the last reckoning, of Spain's fourteen million souls, a hundred and forty-eight thousand held a vote. Wider than the circle this office once mocked, but still a minority of the people.

The Cortes now debates whether to widen it again, allowing the factory owner to vote, yet also giving the aristocrat more power than ever. This office is not surprised that a government which has spent a decade counting votes by the deed has finally noticed the mill alongside the field. What interests this office rather more is who stands to gain nothing from the change.

Eleven years ago, in Barcelona, a crowd burned the Vapor Bonaplata to the ground in a single night. It was the first steam-driven mill Spain had ever seen, and by every account of the men who ran it, a marvel. Technological marvel of proportions that Spain had never seen. But with it came the removal of good men from the floor, their job taken from them by a machine with no soul, it owned by someone else, answerable to no one they had ever met.

Landed Voting answers that grievance by giving the owner of the machine a vote he did not have. But the men who protested it, who increasingly are loosing their voice to the machines owned by the soulless, nothing. This office will not oppose a reform that widens the franchise even by this much. But the Cortes should not be surprised, that mere years from now, to find those same men standing outside the polls asking the question again.