More prophetic of spiritual action was the work of a professor and scholar, Francisco Giner de los Ríos.[37] Don Francisco was the friend of the makers of the brief republic. But instead of holding office, he founded a school. (His _Institución libre de Enseñanza_ stands still in Madrid, environed by convents.) And instead of delivering orations, he gathered about him the intelligent discontent of Spain. He was a leader and nourisher of men. And the sons of his spirit have written the dynamic books of the age. Giner’s weapon for awakening Spain was Europe. He sent his followers to France, Italy, Germany and England--to bring home seed and leaven. He saw the problem of his land as a simple one of retardation. Spain for organic reasons had lagged. Let her catch up. While his school flourished--a little hearth of Europe at which the Spanish intellectual might warm his hand--a young diplomat, Angel Ganivet,[38] published a work that was the antiphony of this Modern hymn. The _Idearium Español_ looms large in the tale of Spain’s renascence. Ganivet was a poor historian and a weak logician. His little book bristles with arguments, æsthetic and ethnic, which no one can accept. Yet it holds a deep philosophy of Spain’s career. To Ganivet, Spain is not of Europe: the trend of her growth must be toward Africa as it has been from Africa. All of the adventure in America and Europe was a false step. The “Age of Gold” was an age of madness. The effort to adopt the pragmatic materialist culture of the West was doomed to failure. Spain is Christian; not Roman; Christian in the way of the Spanish Stoic, Seneca, of the African patrists, Origen and Augustine, of the Semitic spirit of Don Quixote. Ganivet scorns the standards and success of modern Europe. He senses the heroism--the need of heroism--in the Spanish soul: its peculiar way of sudden climaxes followed by periods of sleep. The down leveling of Europe is as alien and abhorrent to him as it was to Nietzsche. He fears the _aurea mediocritas_ of England as a poison to the Spanish blood. He looks with equanimity on Spain’s colonial disasters since Spain colonized “not for coal but for souls”; and on the nadir of Spain’s culture, since from it shall rise again such sudden giants as were Cervantes, Velázquez, Góngora, Lope. He pleads for the acceptance, in the spirit of a religious sacrifice, of Spain’s difference from the brilliant capabilities of France and England. His book, appearing in 1896, urged the relinquishment of the last Colonies. Two years later, Cuba and the Philippines were gone. But though his book was a Jeremiah’s prophecy, Ganivet lacked the strength to face the apathy of his people. In that same year, he died by his own hand.