This summarises in a few words the attitude which has always been maintained by the Church, and the aristocracy attached to the Church, towards the democracy. The people must be restrained from making their voice heard in the counsels of the nation, although they have nominally possessed the suffrage for some forty years, because, if the masses are given the free use of the vote, they will disturb a social order maintained exclusively in the interests of the classes. Such sentiments were common in France before 1789, but one hardly expects to find them so badly expressed in the twentieth century. The upper classes in Spain are in the majority thoroughly materialised. Their object in life is simple--wealth and power, with all that they bring in their train, often without too nice a regard for the means whereby those ambitions are realised. Their religion consists in a diligent observance of the ordinances of the Church, and submission to the dictates of the priesthood.[3] Of any higher ideals--of any amelioration in the general lot of the poor, of any improvement in the deplorably backward state of education, of any attempt to raise the low moral tone which prevails in their own class, little or nothing is ever heard. There is, however, an increasing number of educated young men who are doing what lies in their power to promote a better state of things. They have to contend, not only against the active hostility of the clericals, but against the dead weight of middle-class apathy and ignorance, and in consequence their labour is as that of Sisyphus. Yet they patiently struggle on against all discouragements, and their circle of influence is widening every year.