Although the climate and soil of Galicia are the best in Spain, it is mainly from Galicia that the emigration takes place. A small proportion of Spaniards from south of the Peninsula emigrate annually to Morocco, where most of them keep the idle habits of their old home, standing about at street corners from morning to night. Some travellers attribute the innate laziness of the Spaniards to the effect of their brilliant sunshine. Even the energetic Borrow, when he was in Seville, wrote: “I lived in the greatest retirement during the whole time that I passed at Seville, spending the greater part of each day in study, or in that half-dreaming state of inactivity which is the natural effect of the influence of a warm climate.” It has sometimes been stated that the Spaniard is too proud a fellow to work hard in his own country among his own people, but that once he finds himself in a new country in the midst of strangers he will work as well as any fellow in the world. However that may be, it is undoubtedly a fact that the Gallegan wakes up wonderfully in South America, and when he returns home in comfortable circumstances he is loud in his expressions of dissatisfaction at the stagnation and lack of progress so patent in Galicia. Ford, writing in the fifties of the nineteenth century, said, with regard to emigration: “They have ascribed the depopulation of Estremadura (the province to the south of Galicia) to the swarm of colonist adventurers and emigrants who departed from this province of Cortes and Pizarro to seek for fortune in the new world of gold and silver; and have attributed the similar want of inhabitants in Andalusia to the similar outpourings from Cadiz which, with Seville, engrossed the traffic of the Americas. But colonisation never thins a vigorous, well-conditioned mother-state--witness the rapid and daily increase of population in our own island, which, like Tyre of old, is ever sending forth her outpouring myriads.... The real permanent and standing cause of Spain’s thinly peopled state, want of cultivation, and abomination of desolation, is bad government, civil and religious.... But Spain, if the anecdote her children love to tell be true, will never be able to remove the incubus of this fertile origin of every evil. When Ferdinand III., captured Seville and died, being a saint he escaped purgatory, and Santiago (St. James) presented him to the Virgin, who forthwith desired him to ask any favours for his beloved Spain. The monarch petitioned for oil, wine, and corn--conceded;--for sunny skies, brave men, and pretty women--allowed;--for cigars, relics, garlic, and bulls--by all means;--for a _good government_;--‘Nay, nay,’ said the Virgin, ‘that never can be granted; for, were it bestowed, not an angel would remain a day longer in heaven.’”