“If we could only kill Maura without hurting the King,” a working man said to me, “he would have been dead long ago, for he is the cause of all our troubles. But the Jesuits would make out that any act of violence on our part was directed, not against Maura himself, but against the party which is supposed to support the King; they would never admit that it was only their friend Maura whom we were attacking, and it would be made to appear that we were trying to overthrow the Monarchy. That is why Maura is still alive.” The conviction, and the rancour expressed in these words, cannot be rendered in print. The speaker could not read or write. He and some ten or twelve of his friends were in the habit of meeting quietly together after nightfall, when no priest or Jesuit was likely to see them. One of the better instructed, generally a reservist who had “got education while serving the King,” would read aloud to the rest, and all would discuss the pronouncements of their chosen newspaper and form a collective opinion on them. I have sat with many such groups, in small towns and country villages, and have taken care to notice what newspaper they read. It was invariably the _Libéral_. It often struck me, during the three months of “repression,” that Señor Maura literally owed his life to the organs of the so-called “Trust,” which he and his party accuse of working hand in hand with the anarchists; for the sentiment recorded above was expressed in my presence many times by members of the working classes in connection with Barcelona, the war, the want of education, and all their other grievances. Maura, the Jesuits, and the Carlists, are regarded as one by the mass of the nation, and the three-fold hostility is concentrated on each member of the trinity in turn. When you have some twelve or thirteen million people brooding over their grievances, and cherishing the conviction that a certain party in the State refuses to recognise or redress those grievances because by preserving the _status quo_ they put money in their own pockets, the situation becomes serious for the party to which such action, or inaction, is attributed. And it must be remembered that though the Spanish peasant can read but little of the literature disseminated by revolutionaries--anarchists and such-like--across the Pyrenees, an echo of their campaign can hardly fail to reach him sooner or later. Several little incidents occurred about this time which, though trivial in themselves, lend support to the popular view that the Carlists were at the bottom of the trouble.