“Francisco Mengano used to have a very good business. He employed nine men to work for him. But he hated the friars, and he used to talk against them to a man who pretended to think as he did and came to sit with him every day, and encouraged him to say he would never let his daughters go to confession because he was afraid the priest would make love to them, and many other things. That vile man always talked in the same sort of way himself, and poor Francisco looked upon him as a friend. But when his eldest girl was old enough for her first Communion and Francisco refused to let her go to confession, he discovered that the man he trusted was himself a Jesuit, and had told the Jesuits everything Francisco had said. They waited to be sure his daughter was not going to confession, and then set to work to ruin him. It was quite simple. He was a cart-builder and wheelwright, and depended on the landowners in the neighbourhood for most of his work. The Jesuits merely sent word round that he was charging too much and doing bad work, and his trade was ruined and he became what you see--a poor old jobbing carpenter, who cannot even afford to employ a boy to do his heavy work.” When I heard this story I recollected that about a year earlier, when passing Francisco’s workshop in company with a gentleman reputed to be friendly with the Jesuits, he had remarked, _apropos des bottes_, “Don’t employ Francisco if you should want any carpentering done; his work is bad and he overcharges abominably.” It naturally did not occur to me that this observation could have any other object than to save me, as a foreigner, from being cheated, and, all unconscious of what I afterwards discovered to be its injustice, I gave my work elsewhere. Not only do the people accuse the Religious Orders of depriving them of employment by underselling them and destroying their trade by slanders, but they also bring grave charges of indifference, if not actual brutality, to the poor who ask them for help of any kind. It seems to be a fact that no assistance was volunteered by any Religious House during the epidemic of typhus in Madrid in 1909. In another town, where a seminary for priests was temporarily converted into a hospital for the sick and wounded from Melilla, the cisterns ran dry one night owing to the unusual quantity of water used for the invalids. Not a man or a boy among the seminarists would take the trouble to pump more water, though a quarter of an hour’s work would have done all that was needed for the time, so workmen had to be fetched in the middle of the night to supply what was immediately required for the sufferers. This I heard from one of the men who did the work.