The primary education of Spain, though nominally everywhere alike, is really so very varied as to defy any average description. A few of her infant schools are equal to the best of those of other countries. Where the provincial deputations or the municipalities take an interest in education the primary schools are very fair, but in other parts the education is little more than nominal, and the schoolmaster's appointment is well-nigh a sinecure both in pay and labour; and probably at the present moment, notwithstanding the great improvements of late years, two-thirds of the people can still neither read nor write. _Church and Religion._ From the time of the OEcumenical Council of Nicea, A.D. 325, with the brief exception of the reigns of the Arian Visigoth kings, Spain has been the champion of orthodoxy in religion. From early times too the demarcation between Church and State has been less marked, or rather the influence of the former over the latter has been more constant and more powerful, than in perhaps any other European kingdom. The great councils of Toledo were scarcely more ecclesiastical than civil assemblies. The recognition of the sovereign, the order of succession, the validity of the laws, were either settled or sanctioned therein. Later, in the great struggle with the Moors, through the antagonism of exclusive beliefs, the war assumed the character of a religious crusade. The semi-monastic Spanish military orders, the preaching of the monks, the sanction and the bulls of the Popes--auxiliaries which the kings of Spain were forced to summon to their aid--gave a complexion to the conquest and to the national character quite different to what might have been the case had the contest been fought out by the sovereign, the lay warriors, and the civil power alone. Thus the triumph of the Christian over the Moor became in some sort also the triumph of the Roman over the national Spanish Church. The Mozarabic liturgy gave way to that of Rome. The peculiar institution of the inquisition, following on that of the Santa Hermandad in civil matters, developed in Spain a degree of power to which it never attained in other lands. The certainty and the secrecy of its proceedings, the mingled pomp and horror of its "autos de fe," the whispers and the shudder with which men told of the tortures of its hidden processes, deeply impressed and captivated the imagination of a people singularly greedy of, and susceptible to, strong and vivid emotions. The chivalrous respect for women, heightened by the reserve and half-seclusion which the Spanish knights had learned from the Moors, was transformed in the sphere of religion into an almost ardent passion of devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Centuries before the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was proclaimed by Pius IX. the cry of the Spanish beggar heard at every door throughout her vast dominions was, "Ave Maria purisima, sin pecado concebida." Spain had been the champion of