A scheme is on foot for doing away with the present unjust system, and making service compulsory on all alike. It provides for six months’ instead of three years’ service with the colours, the term to be extended, in the case of the illiterate, until they can read and write. This scheme obtained from the first the support of the whole Liberal, Radical, and Republican Press, but the opposition of the Clericalists must always be counted on in Spain, and the proposals most obviously beneficial to the nation are usually those which meet with the strongest opposition. Another popular clause in the scheme affects the officers, whose pay is small. At present the officers live where they can: they have no mess, and their quarters in barracks are so much the reverse of luxurious that a lieutenant in a smart regiment apologised for not asking me to visit him there, as he, knowing our English customs, would have liked to do, because, said he, “it is not fit for an Englishman to see.” It is now proposed, in order to reduce the cost of living in the Army, that quarters and a mess shall be provided for the officers in barracks. Most Spanish officers have to live on their pay, and even a captain in the cavalry only gets about £140 a year. On the other hand, their social expenses are very small, subscription dances, dinners, sports, and the numerous calls on the purse of a British officer being unknown in Spain. THE POLICE CHAPTER XI THE POLICE The visitor to Spain is frequently struck with the number of persons whom he meets on all sides clad in various uniforms and armed, some with cutlasses alone, others with revolvers in addition. If he asks who they are, he is told that they are the police, and then he is perplexed to find such a large number of distinct bodies, all apparently performing much the same duties. A few words of explanation as to the various police-forces of the country and their different functions may not be out of place. In the first place, every town has its body of municipal police, under the orders of the Alcalde. Their chief duty is to regulate the traffic, to maintain order in the streets, and to report to the Town Council any infraction of the municipal by-laws, and to another body of police anything or any person whom they may regard as suspicious or a possible danger to the public security. They do not themselves, as a rule, arrest malefactors, though no doubt they are empowered to do so on emergency.