safe keeping; and the general exhibition of alarm on the part of friars, nuns, and parish priests made them a laughing-stock to the working classes for the month during which the demonstrations continued. The Civil Guard were sent, at the request of the ecclesiastical authorities, to assist the friars in their projected self-defence and to instil courage into the trembling nuns, and the garrisons were everywhere kept in barracks in readiness for attacks which nobody dreamed of making. A Civil Guard told me, with a twinkle in his eye, that he and his companion had sat up all night in the portal of a convent, knowing all the time that they might just as well have been in their beds for all the danger the convent was in. No doubt many nuns seriously believed their houses to be in peril, although the Jesuits must have been perfectly aware of the truth, and it is not easy to find words in which to characterise the folly, to say no worse, of a policy which tries to forward its ends by permitting women cut off and completely ignorant of the world to spend hours of misery anticipating dangers which their leaders must know to be imaginary. It cannot, however, be denied that the deep-seated and chronic hostility of the people to the Religious Orders became manifest all over Spain, as reports of panic-stricken friars spread from mouth to mouth, converting their traditional dread of the Church into a feeling of contempt. The working-class Spaniards fear the underground action of the Church because they know it may mean starvation for their wives and children. But it was something new for them to see the “long skirts” fleeing from Cataluña in fear of their lives, and the spectacle led to open exhibitions of scorn, which are a new feature in the history of the Church in Spain. There were not wanting either journalists or private persons to hint that the alarm shown by the Religious Orders at the demonstrations against Señor Maura was fictitious, and a renewal of the Catalonian riots would have suited their plans. It was said that the slightest hostile action on the part of the working classes would have been made the signal for a Carlist rising, and that numbers of priests and monks, as well as civilians of that party, were armed in readiness for such a contingency.