There seems much truth in the view that socialism, spite of the alarm its spread caused to the Spanish Government in 1872, is really a disease of a more advanced stage of industrial development than yet exists in Spain, and therefore unlikely to grow immediately into anything very formidable there. The country has few large industrial centres. Two-thirds of the people are still engaged in agriculture; and though it is among the agricultural classes socialism has broken out, the outbreak has been local, and confined to provinces where the conditions of agricultural labour are decidedly bad. But these conditions vary much from province to province. In the southern provinces the cereal plains and also the lower pasturages are generally possessed by large proprietors, who work them by farmers on the _metayer_ principle, with the help of bands of migratory labourers in harvest time; but in the mountainous parts of these provinces the estates belong for the most part to the communes. They are usually large, and as every member of the commune has an undivided right of using them, he is able to obtain from them the main part of his living without rent. Many of the inhabitants of such districts engage in the carrying trade, to which they conjoin a little cattle-dealing as opportunities offer; and as they are sober and industrious, they are usually comparatively well off. In the northern provinces the situation is in some respects better. Land is much subdivided, and though the condition of the labouring class is not as a rule unembarrassed, that result is due more to their own improvidence and indolence than to anything else. A man of frugal and industrious habits can always rise without much difficulty from the position of day labourer to that of _metayer_ tenant, and from tenancy to proprietorship, and some of the small proprietors are able to amass a considerable competency. Besides, even the improvident are saved from the worst by the communal organization. They have always a right of pasturage on the commons, and a right to wood for fire, house and furniture, and they get their children's education and medical attendance in sickness gratuitously on condition of giving six days' labour at the roads of the commune. The most active and saving part of the population, north and south, is the class of migratory workmen, who stay at home only during seed-time and harvest, and go for the rest of the year to work in Castile, Andalusia, or Portugal, as masons or carpenters, or waiters, and always come back with a store of money. Sometimes they remain abroad for a year or two, and sometimes they go to Cuba or Mexico for twenty years, and return to settle on a property of their own in their native village. This class forms the _personnel_ of the small property in Spain, and they give by their presence a healthy stimulus to the neighbourhoods they reside in. The small property is in Spain, as elsewhere, too often turned from a blessing to a curse by its