It is always assumed, as a matter of course, that the whole administration of the country is corrupt. When an unexpected deficit appears in public accounts, governmental or municipal, when a sum of money voted for a certain purpose has evidently not been spent as intended, when, as frequently happens, money owing by the State or the Municipality is not paid--in short, whenever there is anything in the national or local administration of the public funds which calls for explanation, it is taken for granted that some one in office has been stealing. Whether this assumption is justified or not I do not pretend to say. All I know is that it is universally made. I asked a Spaniard on one occasion why a certain public building had never been finished. “No doubt the Alcalde uses the money to keep up his carriage,” was the reply. The man certainly did not know the facts, but this was to him the most plausible explanation. When a few years ago Admiral Cervera was ordered to fight the United States with ships armed with obsolete guns and shells that did not fit them, every one said, and still says, if the subject is spoken of, that officials in the Government stole the money that ought to have been spent on the Navy. The system extends, or is said to extend, from the highest ranks of officialdom downwards, and if this is true, it must necessarily operate in substantially reducing the total funds available for the Treasury. A minor matter, which I only mention because, it goes to illustrate once more the system of over-taxation with no adequate result, is the postal service. A letter in Spain does not cost a penny, as it does everywhere else; it costs twopence: of this three-halfpence are paid by the sender and a halfpenny by the receiver. In exchange for this, the Government gives a service which is indifferent in the large towns, and infamously bad in the smaller towns and the rural districts, where there is no security whatever that any given letter will reach sender or receiver, and where, to my own knowledge, a very large number are lost.