We have already observed that, whilst the brunt of taxation is borne in Spain by agriculture, that interest obtains in return scarcely any of the facilities and encouragements to which it is fairly entitled. Spain is the rash child that would run before it can walk, and consequently falls upon its face. She dashes headlong at the greatest and most costly improvements realised by other countries; forgetting that she has stood still whilst they moved onwards, and that a wise man gets a bed to lie upon before troubling himself about a silken coverlet. In all the arts of life Spain is immeasurably inferior to most other European nations. In agricultural implements, in carts and other vehicles of transport, in her methods of elaborating her products, and her means of carrying them, she is centuries behind all the world. Vast tracts of her territory are desolate for want of that irrigation for which modern ingenuity and invention have devised such great facilities: the broad waters of her mighty rivers, which in other countries would be alive with traffic and bordered with villages, are choked and desolate. "The Guadalquivir, navigable in the time of the Romans as far as Cordova, is now scarcely practicable for sailing vessels of a moderate size up to Seville."[14] Few are the boats, scanty the dwellings, upon the green waves and flower-grown shores of Tagus and Ebro. When these glorious natural arteries are thus neglected, we need not expect artificial ones. Canals are sadly wanted, and have been often planned, but they have got no farther than the want and the project. As to roads, the main lines are good, but they are few, diverging from the capital to the various frontiers; and the cross-roads (where there are any,) and the country tracks, are mostly execrable, and often impassable for wheels. But all this, we are informed by the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, is on the eve of a thorough change. "Labour, like credit," says that periodical, in its article on Spain, "has received a beneficial impulse. The roads are repaired, the means of water-conveyance are being improved or terminated, railroads are begun. The creation of a vast system (_ensemble_) of adjacent roads will soon connect all parts of the territory with these vivifying arteries." We scarcely know which is most admirable; the cleverness that contrives to condense so many misstatements into so few words, or this tone of candour, conviction, and philanthropical exultation. As regards the impulse given to Spanish credit, it is but a few days since we read, with some astonishment at the barbarity and impudence of the plan (emanating though it does from a Spanish finance minister), the arrangement by which Mr Bravo Murillo, in order to diminish the acknowledged deficit in the budget for the year 1850, mulcts the army and state functionaries of a month's pay, and pensioners and half-pay men of two months' means of subsistence, besides wiping out, in a still