Castelar's was a brilliant and sustained effort; but it read more like an essay by Macaulay than a diplomatic holograph. It was splendid, but it was not official. It lacked crispness, and dealt in excessive rhetoric from the phrase in an opening paragraph where it spoke of Spain assuming a place in the Amphictyonic council of Europe, to the closing sentence. The fall of the Monarchy was traced to the hour when the institution solemnly ceded its own country to the foreigner (alluding to the pitiful abdication of Charles IV. in favour of his "friend and ally" Napoleon, at Bayonne in 1808). True, attempts had been thrice made since to revive the old system with a new spirit, but they had failed; in 1812, the Democratic Monarchy; in 1837, the Parliamentary Monarchy; in 1869, the Elective Monarchy. The former order of things disappeared through inherent domestic causes; the Republic appeared of its own virtue, by the law of necessity. In 1869 the Constituent Cortes had proclaimed a Monarchy for three fundamental reasons: firstly, because it corresponded with the traditions of the Spanish people; secondly, because they believed it would secure liberal principles; and thirdly, because it would harmonize their form of government with that existing in nearly every part of Europe. The trouble was where to find the monarch. They had no dynasty typifying religious and national principles united to modern spirit like that of England, no princes like those who had built up the unity of Italy and of Germany on battlefields; their sovereign houses presented no stability. They had to look outside for a king, at the double risk of disturbing the peace of Europe and wounding the national sentiment. They found him in the scion of an illustrious line, united to France by the war of 1859, to Prussia by the war of 1866, to Great Britain by the establishment of parliamentary rule in Italy. But the national sentiment of Spain was against him. It left him in a solitude that was asphyxia. At last he renounced a crown of which he only felt the weight on his brow and not the dignity in his soul. When he left, this Government came not by violent revolution, but by logical evolution. The Republic was not provisional, but definitive. (As if there were any finality in politics!) The Cortes which had proclaimed it were the most permanent estate in the nation, inasmuch as when others melted away they remained. It was the same Cortes which undertook the national defence in the epic years from 1808 to 1814, which abrogated the rights of Don Carlos to the ancient crown, and which sanctioned the dethronement of the Bourbons. Spain owed the change she had effected to no cosmopolitan influences or agitations. She sought autonomy, not Utopianism; she coveted no conquest, but she wished to show that she was living, not dead; that she was still great, but not with the greatness of ruin, like the empires buried under the valleys of Asia.