"State of Alarm"

The Spanish Republic divides the transition from tranquility to martial law into three steps. Last December punctilious, white-haired Premier Alejandro Lerroux declared a "state of prevention." Last week he took the second step by declaring a "state of alarm." Still ahead was a "state of martial law."

"Prevention" had notably failed to prevent. The Socialist and Syndicalist labor unions had learned the power of the strike. Their representatives in the Cortes had broken two Lerroux Cabinets. As regu- larly as clocks in a clock shop, the workers struck. By last week the plunging bronze horses on the pinnacle of Madrid's Banco de Bilbao were no more restless than Spanish Labor. Eighty thousand building workers threw down their tools because a handful of contractors was holding out against a 44-hour week. Over a thousand men walked out of a tobacco factory because one "Conservative" porter had been hired. Last week Premier Lerroux pieced together a third Cabinet and tried "alarm." To prevent it from alarming too much, the Minister of the Interior explained that the new7 state was "not because of any dangerous conditions, but because of the possibilities that attempts may be made against the public order"--i. e., strikes. Grimly he added, "The Government's authority to intervene in labor disputes will be fully respected before the state of alarm is lifted." Premier Lerroux spread his state of alarm fast last week. He jailed great batches of union leaders, shut up their newspapers & headquarters, along with those of Fascists and Communists. Since even the newsboys on the streets were going for one another's throats. Fascist against Communist, he forbade the newsboys to hawk their papers by name. Hereafter they may shout only "morning pa- per" or "evening paper." Finally he got the Cortes to allow him 27,000 more Civil and Assault Guards and got a vote of con- fidence for his Cabinet, 148 to 24. To Alfonso Bourbon y Asturias, no longer King of Spain but still an Austrian Archduke. Duke of Burgundy and Count of Habsburg. all this was but a faint rumor. Last week he was deep in the Sudan, hunting lion and buffalo. He had a bad moment when a native police patrol mistook his party for Abyssinian bandits. Alfonso stopped their fire by shouting in English. Meanwhile in London his lawyers won him -L-11.000 ($55,880) worth of securities he had deposited in 1920 in the Bank of Westminster. Alfonso's eldest son, the easy-bleeding Count of Covadonga who renounced his rights to Spain's empty throne last year by marrying a Cuban girl, lay ill with influenza in Paris last week. To his bedside and to meet his wife-nurse for the first time went his mother, Victoria, and his two sisters.

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