If the troublous existence of the metropolitan state could be reduced to the simplicity of a formula, that formula would also explain the troublous history of a score of American republics, just as the deep root will reveal the germ of the vicious development of a tropical tree. But nothing would be more impossible than to reduce to an abstract and enforced unity the disturbed evolution of Spain, full as it is of anarchy and bloodshed. The Peninsula, divided into hostile regions, the refuge of inimical races, presents in its past such contradictions as defy synthesis. Amid this theocratic people the development of municipal liberties was premature. While feudality still imposed its authority upon the rest of Europe, Spain saw the rise of the free cities. Beside the eternal Quixotism which renounces the vulgar kingdom of the useful in order to give itself only to the ideal the wise refrains of the people express a dense, prosaic, positive realism. The Catholic nation _par excellence_ furnished the Duke of Alba with the troops that were to conquer Rome. After long years of absolute monarchy the old democratic spirit was reborn in the Peninsular _juntas_ which opposed the {31} French invasion. From Cantabria to Cadiz we discover, beneath the unity of Castile, a splendid variety of provincial types. The Asturian hardness contrasts with the rhythm of Andalusia, the impetuosity of Estremadura with the dryness of Catalonia, the tenacity of the Basques with the proud idleness of the Castilian. From this territorial complexity arises a turbulent life: the secular struggle in favour of national unity, the generous epic of the Catholic crusade against Islam, and the gloomy pursuit of religious unity by means of inquisitorial holocausts. European history is transformed south of the Pyrenees. Feudality is arrested; the crusade against the infidel lasts eight centuries; religion and empire are established in magnificence like that of the Oriental theocracies. In the wealth of this national development persist the racial characteristics which we wish to determine: individualism, democracy, the local spirit so inimical to great unities, and the African fanaticism which is satisfied only with excessive sensations and extreme solutions--in short, the heritage of a grave and heroic race, in a state of perpetual moral tension, proud in the face of God and king and fate. Individualism is the fundamental note of the Spanish psychology. An Iberian characteristic, it has all the force of an imperious atavism. It exalts any form of action, of self-affirmation; it inspires an unreasonable confidence in self and the powers of self; it tends to develop human energy, to preserve the national independence from external pressure, to defend it against the rigour of the law, the moral imperative, and the rigidity of duty; and it creates in exalted spirits an ardent desire of domination.