their country’s good at heart, and the reason is that owing to the continual increase in taxation, the Spanish labourer cannot make a living at home. Of all the taxes which crush him, the most oppressive is the _consumo_, or octroi. Little is heard of this outside Spain, because those who profit by it have every reason to keep silence, while those who suffer have not hitherto dared to raise their voice against the powerful interests which profit by the system. Any statesman who could abolish this iniquitous tax would gain thereby an amount of popular support to which ministers of the Crown in Spain have long been strangers. But he would have to contend with an organised opposition in the monied classes which would be hard to overcome, and hitherto, although the reform is constantly talked of, little or nothing has been done to bring it about. Next to bread the chief desire of the Spaniard is education for his children. He is thoroughly conscious of the disadvantages of his own ignorance, which he bitterly resents, and the blame for which he lays at the door of the Church. The Inquisition is not forgotten, and if there is no priest or “pious” person within sight, an interested listener may hear strange tales told in explanation of the popular detestation of the religious Orders. Some of these tales are no doubt traditional, handed down from the time when the Holy Office was an ever-present terror. It is not easy for more advanced nations to realise the influence of tradition among a people necessarily dependent on oral teaching for everything they know, or the extent to which it colours their thoughts and affects their actions in every direction. Although the working classes in Spain are of course aware that the Inquisition no longer exists, the effects of the nightmare of three hundred years continue, and the fear and hatred with which that tribunal was regarded are now transferred to the priests, and especially the Religious Orders. The Church has ruled in Spain, with one short interval, ever since Isabella and Torquemada revived the Holy Office, and, like all autocracies, it has come to look upon the nation over which it rules as a tool to be used for its own ends, an insentient thing, a mere machine to be driven hither and thither as the interests of the Church dictate. And now the inevitable is happening. The machine has become sentient, and instead of submitting to be driven it is beginning to take its own course and carry its quondam drivers into regions unknown. The crucial question to-day in Spain is the religious question. Not the belief or disbelief of the people in their religion, but the relations of the Church--_i.e._, that of the priests and, far more, of the Religious Orders--to the nation.