Spain and the War

Like other neutral nations of Europe, Spain has been tremendously affected by the war. Though she has not been brought into such close contact with the great struggle as have Holland and the Scandinavian countries, because of her distance from the battlefields and the comparative insignificance of her commercial interests, she has nevertheless felt and is still feeling a great strain, the chief characteristics of which are economic. The cost of living in Spain has increased several fold. This is due in part to the difficulty in obtaining both manfactured articles and coal for her own industries and in part to the great scarcity of agricultural products: the result of the short-sighted policy followed up to the present of exporting food products which should have been retained at home. Though possessed of a greater arable area in proportion to her population than any other country in Europe except Russia, the methods of agricultural production in Spain are wofully deficient. As a result of her own backwardness and her failure to develop either her industrial or her agricultural resources, Spain is now suffering, to a lesser degree possibly, the same inconveniences which are disturbing Germany, France and England: namely, a scarcity of food; and she does not possess the artificial stimulus which those countries have to aid in overcoming it.