Another source was, not to say is, Gibraltar, that hot-bed of contraband, that nursery of the smuggler, the _prima materia_ of a robber and murderer. The financial ignorance of the Spanish government calls him in, to correct the errors of Chancellors of Exchequers:--“trovata la legge, trovato l’inganno.” The fiscal regulations are so ingeniously absurd, complicated, and vexatious, that the honest, legitimate merchant is as much embarrassed as the irregular trader is favoured. The operation of excessive duties on objects which people must, and therefore will have, is as strikingly exemplified in the case of tobacco in Andalucia, as it is in that, and many other articles on the Kent and Sussex coasts: in both countries the fiscal scourge leads to breaches of the peace, injury to the fair dealer, and loss to the revenue; it renders idle, predatory and ferocious, a peasantry which, under a wiser system, and if not exposed to overpowering temptation, might become virtuous and industrious. In Spain the evasion of such laws is only considered as cheating those who cheat the people; the villagers are heart and soul in favour of the smuggler, as they are of the poacher in England; all their prejudices are on his side. Some of the mountain curates, whose flocks are all in that line, deal with the crime in their sermons as a conventional, not a moral, one; and, like other people, decorate their mantelpieces with a painted clay figure of the sinner in his full _majo_ dress. The smuggler himself, so far from feeling degraded, enjoys the reputation which attends success in personal adventure, among a people proud of individual prowess; he is the hero of the Spanish stage, and comes on equipped in full costume, with his blunderbuss, to sing the well-known “_Yo! que soy contrabandista! yo ho!_” to the delight of all listeners from the Straits to the Bidasoa, custom-house officers not excepted.