it can be done without obstacles arising from political disturbances, and from the ignorance and malevolence of the people. If the electric telegraph were to await the completion of the "vivifying arteries" of railroad promised by the more sanguine friends of Spain, the German company would do well to offer its services elsewhere; but evidently there is some notion of carrying the posts and wires across country, over sierras and _despoblados_, with boards, no doubt, affixed here and there, requesting the public, to "protect the telegraph." How long the posts would stand--how long the wires might escape injury from the superstitious peasantry, or from robbers and smugglers, interested in retarding the transmission of their misdeeds, is another question. Really, to use a popular comparison, the establishment of electric telegraphs on Spanish soil seems to us about as necessary and sensible as to affix a gilt handle to the door of a pig-stye. Not that we would, in any way, assimilate to the unclean beast our friends the Spaniards, whom we greatly esteem, and desire to see more prosperous: but thus it is with them ever. They would fain pass over the rudiments, and attain at a bound that height of civilisation which other nations have reached only by a toilsome and patient progress. [14] FORD, p. 26. The dearness of most manufactured goods in Spain, and especially of the commonest and, as Englishmen would consider, most essential articles of clothing, is, we are fully convinced, a grave impediment to the moral and physical progress of the lower classes of Spaniards. If, quitting certain frontier districts, where smuggling gains diffuse a fallacious appearance of prosperity, we penetrate into the interior of the country, we behold a rural population sunk in filth and sloth, wrapped in squalid woollen rags, basking listlessly in the sun, dwelling oftentimes in community with their domestic animals. Yet, give him but the means, and no man more than this self-same Spanish peasant loves clean linen and neat attire. If he is dirty and shirtless, and afflicted with vermin and impurities, it is because he has never had the means of being otherwise. How can he, out of his scanty earnings, supply himself with the calico shirt and clean jacket of jean or flannel which, in the countries of their manufacture, are within the reach of the poorest labourer, but whose price is trebled, before they reach him in Spain, by exorbitant smuggling premiums or import-duty, and by an expensive and defective system of transport. We cannot agree with those who assert the Spaniard of the lower class to be a born idler, who will never willingly do more work than procures him the day's frugal meal. We have too great faith in his natural good qualities to receive this opinion otherwise than as a calumny. At any rate, before deciding thus harshly, give him a chance, which he has never yet had; show him the possibility, which he has never yet seen,