Socialist Blood

As ''The Day of the Race," sometimes known as Columbus Day,was celebrated last week in the world's 19 Spanish-speaking nations, Mother Spain concluded a sharp lesson to its 18 onetime daughters in how to suppress a revolution.

Suppressor was Premier Alejandro Lerroux, sole old-style Republican in Spain's Rightist Cabinet of Catholics. Monarchists and Fascists. Like Britain's Ramsay MacDonald, he is famed for his old wars on tyranny, for his soft and gentlemanly heart and. to the mind of Labor, for his betrayal of democracy. He was backed last week solidly by the Army, Navy, Civil Guards, retired Army officers, noblemen and women of Spain.

Chief revolter was Francisco Largo Caballero, who claims to be a purer Marxist than Stalin. As allies Largo Caballero had beguiled the pinkish Socialists of onetime Premier Manuel Azana and the sectional patriots of perennially seceding Catalonia. Senor Lerroux first smashed the Catalan revolt (TIME, Oct. 15). Last week he turned on the pure class war provided by Largo Caballero. As fast as Lerroux jailed anarchist committees, new ones arose. Revolt kept ducking for cover, popping out in a new place, like a prairie gopher. It made soldiers and police trigger-nervous but they remained stanch for Lerroux. At week's end they had jailed Largo Caballero, silenced the rebels' guns everywhere except in the northern province of Asturias, where revolt traditionally dies hard.

Short of milk and weary of bloodletting, Madrid came out into the sun of "The Day of the Race." Strikers trickled back to work. The banks contributed a bonus for the Army. And Premier Lerroux handsomely declared that stories of atrocities by rebels were "exaggerated and unconfirmed."

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