34$
THE MESTA
conducted with that rare insight into the fundamentals of the
problem which has marked Campomanes as one of the most dis-
tinguished of European economists. It is to be hoped, indeed,
that justice may soon be done to the great Spaniard, and that he
may be given his proper ranking very close to the exalted posi-
tion of his distinguished contemporary, Adam Smith, with whom
he had much in common.
The results of these proceedings were inevitable: posesion was
abolished in 1786 ; the artificial determination of pasturage prices
upon the basis of older rates was made illegal; and the office of
alcalde entregador, which had been so constantly useful in the
campaigns of the Mesta in the defense of its pasturage privileges,
was extinguished.! Thus with a series of sharp and accurate
blows the battered shell of the Mesta’s empty pretensions of
mastery over agrarian Castile was brought down in ruins.
During the last decades of the Mesta’s long history, only rem-
iniscent echoes were heard of the past conflicts over pasturage.
The regular oscillations of Spanish political leadership from spas-
modic reactionary monarchism to radical parliamentarism in-
evitably affected the affairs of the Mesta. In such periods of
attempted autocracy as the reigns of Charles IV and Ferdinand
VII, the hopes of some of the old clique of sheep owners rose high,
and the old methods were revived. For example, in 1793, a sub-
sidy of i,000,oo□ reales was voted to Charles IV out of the Mesta’s
treasury “ for the urgent needs of the French war.” 2 Similar sub-
sidies, though of smaller amounts, were voted to Ferdinand VII,
notably one in 1815, when he presided in person over the Mesta
and later presented to it a portrait of himself as a memorial
of the occasion.3 The royal concessions which were naturally
called for by these subsidies demonstrate clearly the hopeless
stagnation of Spanish agrarian conditions. It would seem
that nothing had been accomplished, no permanent advance
made for the past two hundred years. Everything that
* See above, p. 134.
2 Arch. Mesta1 Expediente formado sobre la cobranza (imp. Madrid, 1817).
2 This portrait, a full length, life size representation, now hangs in the assembly
room in the Madrid house of the Asociacidn General de Ganaderos, where the
meeting of 1815 took place.
COLLAPSE OF THE PASTURAGE PRIVILEGES 347
Charles III and Campomanes had patiently striven for and
achieved seemed swept aside by such edicts as those of 1796,
x814, and 1824. These laws revived parts of the notorious prag-
mâtica of 1633 and gave the President of the Mesta and his as-
sistants (subdelegados) the right to regulate all extensions of
arable land. A decree promulgated in 1799 granted extensive
moratoria to migrant herdsmen for the settlement of pasturage
accounts, while those of 1804 and 1814 fixed pasturage rentals
upon the basis of those paid in 1652 and 1692.1
Once more it is necessary, however, to recall the now familiar
distinction between the written laws and their actual application,
for these documents of 1796-1824 by no means reflected the actual
situation. Like many of their predecessors of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, they were simply the effusions of vain
and incompetent autocrats, who were doubtless flattered by the
confidence of the Mesta officials and found some empty comfort
in the resounding phrases of these decrees regarding the reëstab-
Iishment of the old regime.
The propaganda for bettered agrarian conditions, which had
been so ably begun in the educational campaign of Campomanes,
was renewed with vigor and equal ability by Melchor de Jove-
llanos. This brilliant theorist kept alive the interests of the people
in the agrarian question, notably by his great classic, the In-
forme sobre la Ley agraria, first published in the Memorias of the
Sociedad Economica de Madrid in 1795. This and later publica-
tions of the same society enunciated for the first time in Spain the
idea of a system of liberated agrarian development, unrestricted
by all the ancient trappings of mediaeval gild regulations and
antiquated privileges. If the migratory pastoral industry was
economically sound, Jovellanos declared that it would survive
without such obsolete and artificial support. If it must have its
ancient paraphernalia in order to survive, then the country could
not afford to be encumbered by it.
When the first rays of parliamentary liberalism shone forth
from the sessions of the Cortes at Cadiz in 1812, it became evident
that the educational labors of Campomanes and Jovellanos had
ɪ Brieva, ColeccUn, pp. 266, 295,321,338,446; Nov. Recop., lib. 7, tit. 25, ley 13.