When you have excepted the vice of intoxication, and a great exception it is, you have said all that can be said in favor of the moral habits of the Spanish people. They do not steal from one another, that I know of, any more than other people do. But they certainly commit murders more frequently than other nations do, unless the slayer is maddened by drink. In estimating the comparative morality of peoples, this matter of intemperance holds the balance. It is the prolific parent of the greater part of the crimes of a people where it is the prevailing vice, yet very few moralists are disposed to reckon it the crime of crimes. In Spain the women are said to be almost universally corrupt. As a matter of course, the men must be just as bad. I have been assured here in Granada, by those who ought to know, having long resided here and become thoroughly acquainted with the state of things, that there is no social morality among men and women in Spain: that from the highest to the lowest they have all gone out of the way, and that they are known—the women are—as divided into four classes, with different degrees of refinement in vice, but all four classes lost to virtue and without conscience of sin. It is quite probable that such a statement is to be taken with many grains of allowance. But making all deductions that one’s good nature demands, there still remains a sediment of truth that one shudders to admit. In this plane of inquiry we are met with the truth that Austria, Italy, France, and Spain are the Roman Catholic countries where the vice of licentiousness corrupts the moral of social life. The Protestant countries of Europe are in colder climes, and intemperance is the vice that among the poorer people breeds misery more ruinous to their health and prosperity. At the railway station, when we were leaving Seville for the Alhambra by the way of Malaga, a group of natives in the costume of Andalusia presented a picturesque and not unpleasing appearance. In the _cities_ of Europe it is rare to see any thing national and peculiar in the dress of the people. Fashion is an empire that extends over every nation, and reigns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Madrid with resistless sway. The seat of government is in Paris, and her edicts are obeyed in free America as well as in France. But when you get into the rural districts, the people cling to an ancient _régime_; a fashion, indeed, who sat on the throne long years ago, and has never been put aside by any revolutions of modern invention. These rural Andalusians, in breeches and sandals, with red belt or sash, and loose jacket, and conical hat and wide rim turned up all around, are dressed as their great-grandfathers were, and as their own great-grandchildren will be, and others, for generations to come. They had been to the city _on an excursion_, and were now going home again, none the better, but a deal the worse for the change of life they had suffered in town.