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At this time President Azafia was perhaps personally less radical than President Roosevelt. After long talks with him, cigar-chewing U. S. Ambassador Claude Bowers called Azafia the greatest living Spaniard, compared his ideals with those moderate motives which inspired George Washington and the American Colonists to shake off English Kingship. In Spain the Right knew what to think when Republican Azafia proved unable to suppress political violence and murder even in the streets of Madrid, made the philosophical assertion: "Violence is deeply enshrined in the Spanish people. The time has not yet come for Spaniards to stop shooting one another." President Azafia made a still greater sensation with his dictum: "The only person whose views are always correct is Azana!"
Great Provocation. With both Left and Right convinced that the self-satisfied President had cast himself in the role of umpire and considered useless any attempt to prevent Spaniards from shooting out their political differences, the stage for Civil War was set. The Cabinet's radical Minister of Labor, only recently a jailbird, took to locking up Madrid employers and keeping them in jail until they yielded to the demands of their striking employes. The Left, feeling stronger, every day in its purpose to maneuver the Republic into a Soviet, then offered great provocation: the assassination of the leader of the Right, Don José Calvo Sotelo.
Don José, once Finance Minister under Dictator Primo de Rivera and Alfonso XIII, followed his King into exile, returned to Spain under an amnesty of the Republic. He was taken from his home and butchered by uniformed members of the Government's own Assault Guards. Though these assassins admittedly acted without President Azana's knowledge, their crime showed that the most violent Left terrorism was now operating in the shadow of the Government itself. In Right opinion, the Republic had ceased to uphold republican order or republican rights and the first broadside issued by forces of the Revolution said they were striving for a "Restoration" of the order and rights previously enjoyed by Spaniards.
Sifting of evidence as it gradually appeared made clear last week that the Revolution must have been carefully financed and planned in advance for it burst simultaneously during a single night in five cities of Spanish Morocco and at least twelve in Spain proper. At Madrid the sympathy of prominent Army figures with the Revolution was so marked that by last week distracted Premier Jose Giralt Pereira, a mild-mannered onetime apothecary, had progressively dismissed a total of 42 Spanish generals and was said to have left in his War Office not a single strategist or tactician of standing.
This did not greatly matter because the Government's forces against the Revolution were by last week in great part not Army detachments at all but civilian Socialists, Anarchists and Communists, male and female, for whose benefit the President had opened the arsenals of Spain and handed out some 500,000 rifles, pistols and small arms. In so doing Don Manuel Azana claimed to remain wholly Republican, but he also provided Spain with a problem in civilian arms-toting which it may take years to solve.