Spain's intellectual decline kept steady pace with its political and industrial decay. No more is she the center of Europe's learning. No more does her intellect shed luminous rays all over the world. The Moor and the Jew have fled her provinces, and darkness covers her lands, the shadows of night again brood stiflingly over her people. Her poverty has made her ignorant, her ignorance has made her intensely fanatic, and her fanaticism is, to this day, the enemy of all social and intellectual advance. For two centuries and more investigation likely to stimulate thought was positively prohibited. In the measure that her sister countries advanced intellectually she declined, and in proportion as they shook off the fetters of the Church, she cheerfully submitted to have them drawn tighter about her. Until the eighteenth century Madrid did not possess a single public library, and to-day the number of volumes in all the Spanish libraries cannot reach 500,000. The library of Cordova in the tenth century, before the printing press was discovered, counted over 600,000 volumes. The Government library of Paris and that of London count respectively over 1,500,000 and over 2,000,000 volumes. So late as the year 1771 the University of Salamanca, the most ancient and most famous seat of learning in Spain, publicly refused to allow the discoveries of Newton to be taught, and assigned as a reason that his system was not consonant with revealed religion. Buckle quotes from Spanish sources, an epistle which will illustrate the abysses of ignorance into which the Spanish intellect had sunk. About a century ago some bold men proposed that the streets of Madrid should be cleansed. The proposal was met with excited indignation. The question was submitted by the government to the medical profession. They reported unfavorably. They had no doubt that the dirt ought to remain. To remove it was a new experiment, and of new experiments it was impossible to foresee the issue. Their fathers having lived in it, why should they not do the same? Their fathers were wise men, and must have had good reasons for their conduct. The filth shall remain. And it did remain. And it did make Spain the alas, too frequent victim of plague and cholera, and we now no longer wonder that a year ago, when the cholera raged in Spain, the people arose against the physicians for being asked to resort to medicines and cleanliness and not to Relics and Holy Water.