endless trailing procedure of Inquisition trials, or of books waiting on the frontier for inspection with a man hired to dust them once a month. In ordinary life it is due perhaps rather to indifference and disdain than to an innate sluggishness; in official transactions formalism, and the inability to co-operate with others often bring matters to an intricate pass of papers, from which there is no issue but by a patient and slow unravelling. Even to-day a rigid centralization carries the pettiest affair to Madrid for settlement, and lays upon the Prime Minister a crushing load of work. Etiquette is carried to excess, and there are in Spain many “formal natures,” men who would perish upon a ceremony rather than come to a quick and common-sense conclusion. But the true defect of Spanish politics is that they have a tendency to become abstract, with many excellent formulas and catchwords, but divorced from reality, a kind of up-to-date scholasticism. Sometimes they appear to be a game of dialectics, carried on by a few skilful players, sometimes a “rushing splendour of rhetoric,” carrying away many. Spaniards are fond of what Butler calls “that idle and not very innocent employment of forming imaginary models of the world and schemes of governing it.” Spanish politicians, says Señor Pérez Galdós, “live in a world of rituals and formulas, recipes and expedients. The language has filled with aphorisms and mottos and emblems. Ideas become stereotyped, and contemplated actions go seeking to embody themselves in words and cannot make their choice of them.”[30] It would seem indeed that reality has shown itself so angular and hard-featured to the Spanish that they gladly make efforts to escape from it. While no nation shows so great a courage, endurance and patient endeavour in misfortune and defeat, they are not equally successful in success, they are often spoilt by prosperity and become weak, dissolute and frivolous; they must have something to fight, and fall when they no longer press against opposition. This may account for the fact that the poorer classes are still, as in Ford’s time, “by no means the worst portion of the population.” The peasants are courteous, intelligent, patient, energetic and persevering: their praises have been sung by many writers.[31] But a pathetic fatalism and apathy prevail, and a great bitterness against those in authority. _Pobreza nunca alza cabeza_, poverty never raises its head, they say, _la cárcel y la cuaresma para los pobres es hecha_, prison and Lent are for the poor; they look for no bettering of their lot, but for _pan y paciencia y muerte con penitencia_--bread and patience and death with repentance. But it must be said that the fault is not only of those “on top,” but of those also who, brooking no superiorities of any kind,[32] thus reduce differences between man and man to the brutal divisions of wealth and poverty and make life a race for riches. It remains true, however, that the peasants of Spain are