I regret that I have not by me a certain essay dealing with this subject by Guglielmo Ferrero. I read it in some review the name of which I have forgotten, but I preserve a clear recollection of it, for it interested me greatly. Ferrero treated the subject from the historical and sociological point of view, and I, who am neither an historian nor a sociologist, intend to treat it, as is my custom, from the point of view of purely personal opinion and individual impression. (This is my custom, and yet in spite of the fact I cannot prevent people from insisting on calling me a savant and talking about my theories. I have no theories. I have only impressions and sensations.) But, since I am unable to put some quotation from Ferrero at the head of this essay--this habit of basing our assertions upon authority is the conventional way of giving them a deceptive air of objectivity--I will head it by a sentence from George Meredith, that extremely subtle English novelist. In “The Egoist” it is stated that Willoughby “abandoned London as the burial-place of the individual man.” I, to-day, am one with Willoughby in believing that great cities de-individualize, or rather de-personalize, us. This may perhaps be due to the fact that, though not an egoist like the hero of Meredith’s novel, I still remain, according to Ramiro de Maeztu, an incorrigible egotist. Great cities are levelling; they lift up the low and depress the high; they exalt mediocrity and abase superlativeness--the result of the action of the mass, as powerful in social life as in chemistry. Soon after I came to this ancient city of Salamanca which has now become so dear to me, a city of some thirty thousand souls, I wrote to a friend and told him that if after two years’ residence here he should be informed that I spent my time playing cards, taking siestas and strolling round the square for a couple of hours every day, he might give me up for lost; but if at the end of that time I should still be studying, meditating, writing, battling for culture in the public arena, he might take it that I was better off here than in Madrid. And so it has proved to be. I remember that Guglielmo Ferrero’s conclusion, based upon a review of ancient Greece, of the Italy of the Renaissance and of the Germany of a century ago, is that for the life of the spirit, small cities of a population like that of Salamanca are the best--better than very small towns or large ones of over a hundred thousand inhabitants. This depends, of course, upon the quality of the spirit in question. I am convinced that the monastic cloister, which so often atrophies the soul and reduces the average intelligence to a lamentable slavery to routine, has in certain exceptional cases exalted the spirit by its arduous discipline.