For the administration of justice the country is divided into Audiencias Territoriales, Provincias, and Partidos Judiciales. The Audiencias, or courts of appeal, are fifteen, with 373 judges or procureurs. There are also 500 judges of first instance, and there is also a justice of peace or alcalde in each town or municipality. All pleadings are still conducted in writing in Spain; there is no verbal examination or cross-examination in public. Suits both civil and criminal are thus dragged out to an inordinate length. Judges are still suspected of being open to bribery, and confidence in the just administration of the law is as a consequence severely shaken. It is not uncommon for witnesses to be summoned to testify to facts which happened many years before, and it not unfrequently happens that either the principal witnesses or the criminal himself is dead before the case is decided. As a conspicuous instance, we may remind our readers that General Prim was assassinated in open day in Madrid in 1870, and the case has not yet been adjudged. The discipline of the prisons is in general extremely lax, and many crimes, especially forgeries, are there concocted with impunity. There is, however, a great difference in the treatment of the prisoners in different prisons. Up to 1840 the office of Alcaide, or governor of a prison, was sold by the Government to the highest bidder, and the purchasers made the most they could out of the wretched prisoners by starving them or by accepting bribes for illicit indulgences, and for furnishing what they were bound to provide, so that it was commonly said "that the _bagnios_ of Algiers were less terrible than the prisons of Spain." Perhaps the worst of them all, up to the year 1833, was the old prison of the city of Madrid, one dark dungeon of which was termed "El Infierno"--Hell. Almost as bad was the Prison de Corte and the famous Saladero. There was no classification, no cleanliness, and in some of the cells neither light nor ventilation. In some of the country prisons the cells were like the dens of a menagerie, and the starving prisoners thrust their hands through the bars to beg food of passers-by. At last has arisen an ardent band of philanthropists, of whom Senors Lastres and Vilalva are at the head, and the first stone of a new prison in Madrid, arranged on modern principles, was laid by the king in February, 1877.