The effects produced by this phenomenon of individualism were manifold. They exist even to-day, so lasting were they. A new nobility was created--wealthy, powerful, and generally arrogant and unscrupulous, which replaced the feudal aristocracy of the middle ages. Secondly, oligarchy--or better still, _caciquismo_, an individualistic form of oligarchy--sprung up into existence, and rapidly became the bane of modern Spain; that is, ever since the Bourbon dynasty ruled the country's fate. As can easily be understood, this _caciquismo_ can only flourish there where individualism is the leading characteristic of the people. Thirdly, all hopes of the country's possessing a well-to-do middle class--stamina of a wealthy nation, and without which no people can attain a national standard of wealth--vanished completely away. Lastly the Church, which had become wealthy beyond the dreams of the Cluny monks, retained its iron grip on the country, and retarded the liberal education of the masses. To repay the fidelity of servile Catholics, it canonized legions of local prophets and martyrs, and organized hundreds of gay annual _fiestas_ to honour their memory. The ignorant people, flattered at the tribute of admiration paid to their deities, looked no further ahead into the growing chaos of misery and poverty, and were happy. The crash came--could it be otherwise? Beyond the seas an immense territory, hundreds of times larger than the natal _solar_, or mother country, stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific; at home, a stillborn nation lay in an arid meadow beside a solemn church, a frivolous, selfish throne, and a mute and gloomy brick-built convent. The Spanish Armada sailed to England never to return, and Philip II. built the Escorial, a melancholy pantheon for the kings of the Iberian peninsula. One by one the colonies dropped off, fragments of an illusory empire, and at last the mother country stood once more stark naked as in the days before Columbus left Palos harbour. But the mother's face was no longer young and fresh like an infant's: wrinkles of age and of suffering creased the brow and the chin, for not in vain was she, during centuries, the toy of unmerciful fate. * * * * * Such is, in gigantic strides, the history of Spain. The volcanic eruption in the fifteenth century has left, it is true, indelible traces in the country's soil. Nevertheless, on the very day when the treaty of Paris was signed and the last of the Spanish colonies _de ultramar_ were lost for ever, that day a Spanish nation was born again on the disturbed foundations of the old. There is no denying it: when Ferdinand and Isabel united their kingdoms a nation was born; it fell to pieces (though apparently not until a later date) when Columbus landed in America.