“If the ninety years since the French Revolution have taught anything, it is that institutions grow, and cannot be made to order,--that they grow out of an actual past, and are not to be conspired out of a conjectural future,--that human nature is stronger than any invention of man. How much of this lesson has been learned in Spain, it is hard to say; but if the young King apply his really acute intelligence, as those who know him best believe he will, to the conscientious exercise of constitutional powers and the steady development of parliamentary methods, till party leaders learn that an ounce of patience is worth a pound of passion, Spain may at length count on that duration of tranquillity the want of which has been the chief obstacle to her material development. Looked at in this light, the pomps of the wedding festival on the 23d of last month may be something more than a mere show. Nor should it be forgotten that here it is not the idea of Law but of Power that is rooted in the consciousness of the people, and that ceremonial is the garment of Authority.... “The ceremony over, the King and Queen, preceded by the Cabinet Ministers, the special ambassadors, and the grandees of Spain, and followed by other personages, all in coaches of state, drove at a foot-pace to the Palace, where their Majesties received the congratulations of the Court, and afterwards passed in review the garrison of Madrid. By invitation of the President of the Council, the Foreign Legations witnessed the royal procession from the balconies of the Presidency. It was a very picturesque spectacle, and yet so comically like a scene from _Cinderella_ as to have a strong flavor of unreality. It was the past coming back again, and thus typified one of the chronic maladies of Spain. There was no enthusiasm, nothing more than the curiosity of idleness which would have drawn as great a crowd to gape at the entry of a Japanese ambassador. I heard none of the shouts of which I read in some of the newspapers the next day. No inference, however, should be drawn from this as to the popularity or unpopularity of the King. The people of the capital have been promised the millennium too often, and have been too constantly disappointed to indulge in many illusions. Spain, isolated as in many respects she is, cannot help suffering in sympathy with the commercial depression of the rest of the world, and Spaniards, like the rest of mankind, look to a change of ministry for a change in the nature of things. The internal policies of the country (even if I could hope to understand them, as I am studying to do) do not directly come within my province; but it is safe to say that Spain is lucky in having her ablest recent statesman at the head of affairs,[71] though at the cost of many other private ambitions. That he has to steer according to the prevailing set of the wind is perhaps rather the necessity of his position than the fault of his inclination.