A professor at one of the universities has summed up to me the present state of these centres of learning in the following words: “There is an absolute lack of any educational spirit, of any contact between teachers and pupils, of any feeling of solidarity among the students, of any organisation of games, excursions, &c., of any artistic refinement, and of any organised effort to raise the moral standard, to-day perhaps the most degraded in the world.” When we turn to the administration of the elementary schools, the part of the educational system which more directly and immediately affects the working classes, we find the same general state of inefficiency and neglect. A volume of school statistics was officially issued not long ago, of which a useful summary was published in the _Heraldo de Madrid_ in November, 1909. From this it appears that while four provinces have the full complement of Elementary schools required by the law, the supply in all the remaining 45 is deficient, the shortage per province being from 772 schools downwards, and the total deficiency amounting to 9,505 schools. The total increase of school supply between 1870 and 1908 is 2,150 schools, or an average of about 56 schools per year. At this rate it would take over 150 years to catch up even to the school provision required by the school law of 1857, without allowing for any increase of population. But in another way, about two-thirds of the school districts of Spain, or some thirty thousand towns and villages, have no Government school. In Madrid about half the schools required by law are wanting. Barcelona has a somewhat similar deficiency. And be it remembered that the school supply is calculated in accordance with the law of 1857, the requirements of which are far below those which obtain in any other country in Europe, so that even in the very few districts where there is nominally sufficient school accommodation there is actually a serious deficiency according to modern standards of what is necessary. The consequence, as the _Heraldo_ observes, is that some 12,000,000 of the population do not know their letters.