sion of it with his armies and deposed the imbecile king, Charles IV., it may safely be asserted that all the long centuries of despotism had done nothing towards welding the various races and principalities of the peninsula into a homogeneous nation. On the contrary, each section stood, if possible, more distinctly separated at that time from its fellows than in the days of Ferdinand and Isabella, for all those welding elements which come of civilisation and wise administration were totally wanting in the government of Spain. It was neither more nor less than a blind Eastern despotism, based upon the gloomiest superstition and maintained by terror; and the longer it swayed the destinies of Spain, the more did it tend to pulverise society and reduce it to a condition of social Ishmaelism. Practically it was so with the provinces throughout the whole period of dark tyranny. At the time of its greatest glory, Castile was hated in Arragon, and Biscay and Navarre held aloof from both. These provinces had gradually come together by marriages, in the way that Scotland came to England, and each little kingdom retained its laws more or less firmly to the last. The Cortes of Navarre met as late as 1806. Neither there nor in Biscay could the Inquisition ever get a footing; while restless Catalonia, with its daring sailors and enterprising merchants, defied the Castilian king to hamper it with his fiscal laws, and carried on its trade with France and Italy when Malaga and Carthagena by these laws were crumbling into ruins. The northern half of the peninsula was, in fact, a fortuitous agglomeration of rival nationalities and unaffiliated races, and the southern half a conquered territory over which the darkness of a hideous superstition and the grim tyranny of the fanatical Castilians brooded like exhalations from

the bottomless pit. It was there

and in the Castiles that the Inquisition held its strongest sway and did its darkest deeds; and probably no Eastern fetish worship, no Egyptian beast adoration, ever sank its votaries lower, or had worse deeds perpetrated in its name, than were done all over that vast region in the name of Christianity. With many of these deeds most of us have been familiar from our childhood; but we have seldom thought, perhaps, how these things sapped all the life out of the people, destroyed all semblance of morals, crushed out utterly all political faculty, and isolated not merely province from province, but household from household, and man from man, in a way that long generations of freedom will not wholly overcome.

And it was on a kingdom like this that Napoleon broke in; sunk to the very lowest place among the kingdoms of Europe, with all its resources exhausted, and its government a grim commentary on the national disorder and ruin-an imbecile king, a queen who ruled the land, if ruling it could be called when its sole object was plunder, through her paramour dubbed Prince of the Peace. Undoubtedly the French Revolution and the first march of its propagandist armies did something to set the blood stirring in the veins of the long slumbering races with new hopes of freedom and a fair future. What if religion was condemned and the priests scorned under the new creeds of the Contrat Social? Rousseau could not be a worse saviour of men than the Church the Spaniards had known, no devil worship could have degraded them worse than it had done. The restless ambition of Napoleon was sending him here and there all over the world to knock over that which was rotten, and leave room for what was fresh and new and vigorous to grow up, but he was going to do more for Spain. Apparently chief among his

missions was the design to supplant the Bourbons, to unite in one the so-called Latin races as the dominant power of the world, and as a step to that he placed his brother Joseph on the throne of Spain, just as he called his son King of Rome, and made the trooper Murat King of Naples. Joseph's new throne was not a very firm one. It was set up with the rotten materials which had formed the old, and so it was necessary to prop it with plenty of French bayonets. The marshals of Napoleon filled the land with French soldiers, and by treachery, from Spanish supineness and stupidity, and by fighting, possessed themselves of the fortified cities, which they sacked with the ruthlessness and greed of Attila. This occupation was rapidly drawing the Spanish people together, and welding the fragments of the nations into one with the heat of a mighty hate. The desultory guerilla bands who formed themselves on the mountains were but the precursors of such a storm of patriotism as would by-and-by have engulfed the French; and in such a patriotic effort as that Spain would have grown more than in a hundred years of civil war, declamation, and pronunciamientos. No nation broken and disorganised as Spain then was could have had a greater blessing from Heaven than that occupation of the cruel Frank was proving itself to be, had it got time to work its natural effect.

Unfortunately for Spain, England at that time had a mission too, and that mission was to rush to and fro in the earth, like her titular saint of old, relieving distressed monarchies and picking fossil kingships out of the dust to be once more set a-top, riveted with British steel and glued together with British blood. The good Tories who ruled the destinies of England in those days believed in the balance of power, in the Divine right of kings, in the

VOL. VIII.-NO. XLVIII. NEW SERIES.

inviolability of shams, with all the fervency that stupidity could give; and unfortunately they had the power to act on their faith, and to drag England into all manner of useless wars, until she became in some respects a greater curse to Europe than Napoleon. Much of the work that he did was undeniably good, and not all the might of England has been able to undo it. The man himself, too, was essentially of that meteor kind which is sure to perish in its own fire. He was burning himself out; and unless he had chosen to come and flare his last in a mad attack on our shores, he might have been left to perish without us, for after Austerlitz every war in which he engaged virtually hastened his ruin, and every victory was a defeat, in that it was a snare to a man who had no hold on France and sought to have none, save by working on all surrounding nations havoc and ruin. But our rulers did not see that; and furious at the daring usurpation of the Corsican, sent England's armies to deliver Spain. And we did deliver her; but what a woeful deliverance! It is melancholy to think of it to-day, for it was as if Louis XIV. had delivered us from Cromwell to set Charles I. on the throne as a despot and split the Empire in three by his tyranny. What did Spain gain by our expenditure of blood and treasure? Nothing at all-worse than nothing.. Without us Spain might have fought herself free, and have risen to national unity and dignity in the struggle. Her population was small, but individually it was as brave as any in the world; and although at first its divisions favoured the French, their tyranny would soon have swept all that favour away. Moor and Castilian, Basque and Catalan, might, and in all probability would, have come to stand shoulder to shoulder in the one great need of being rid of the oppressor; bnt we

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did not permit them, and the real patriotism of the nation evaporated in guerilla warfare, in which each tribe fought independent of its fellow, and in rivalry often, so that the clan hatreds were deepened rather than effaced. We thus helped to feed the very spirit of proud isolation which bears such bitter fruit to-day. Whatever we may think of our Peninsular campaigns, our presence in Spain at that crisis of her history was almost an unmitigated curse. And the Spaniards clearly feel it to be so, resenting our help and ignoring our victories. We call it Castilian pride; but should we have resented such interference less had it been done for us? Certainly it would have been better for Spain and for the world had we let her alone, or at most have helped the patriotic party with means by which to organise her resistance.

For, of course, we brought the Bourbons back there, as in France. The Iron Duke' cleared the Peninsula of the French, and then amid jubilees the king came to his ain again' in the person of the abdicated Charles's son, Ferdinand VII., who announced himself as the true pill for the earthquake, as all the Bourbons do. They have been the curse of Europe for two hundred years, but they cannot be brought to believe it yet, nor does it much matter if the world can can but make up its mind to laugh and let them live on in their faith, till like our Scotch Stuarts they sink quietly into oblivion. But Ferdinand had more than the faith; thanks to us, when he went back to Spain, he had to some extent the power too, and proceeded forthwith to save society by bringing back the Inquisition and all priestly tyrannies. The beginnings of national life, the feeble national Parliament, which at Seville or Cadiz during the war had been busy hurling defiance at the French, and framing constitutions

there, were snuffed out, and everything was to go back to the pre-revolution days. It was 'as you were,' with a trifle more of the soldier added. It must be confessed that this was not a very noble outcome of all the English heroism that had been displayed in the Peninsula. Even Tories may doubt a little now, if they look at the thing calmly, whether the tyranny they set up in Spain was a better thing than the tyranny they overthrew. For our part, we feel ashamed of it. The work we did was an evil one for Spain, and has affected her destinies in a disastrous way ever since. That it has not done quite all the harm it might have done is not due to any merit in the absolutism we set up, or in us, but entirely to other causes; for had that monarchy continued to act in the spirit which Ferdinand displayed when we brought him back, Spain would have to-day been as dark and as full of the habitations of cruelty as in the days of Philip IV. Happily, to keep her as we had placed her in her ruler's hands was not possible.

Spain was poor; not individuals, not classes, but the nation was sunk in abject poverty, the result of centuries of cruel misgovernment. It was a rich country rendered in many parts so desolate as to be without inhabitants or the power of sustaining them were they to be found. When Ferdinand assumed the government, the treasury was empty, the State bankrupt. That bankruptcy has continued a chronic disease ever since, and it has been the sheet anchor and salvation of the liberties of Spain. Once and again Spain has tried to fill the treasury by borrowing, and sometimes a little money has thus been obtained; but whenever a Government of the corrupt kind that we restored to Spain can get money to carry on its tyrannies with, it is a curse to the country, and it has been well that Spain but seldom got what it asked.

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Impecuniosity broke the neck of Ferdinand's power, as it has broken the neck of many another evil thing in Spain. His all-essential army could not get paid. His courtiers and needy nobles could not get adequate plunder by hanging-on about his Court. So his throne rocked feebly to and fro on the top of the waves for a few years, and then plunged headlong into the abyss. Here also we had helped matters, but this time on the other side and without meaning it. When Spain and France went hand in hand in the days before Charles IV. abdicated, and while yet he and the Spanish Court were fascinated by the glitter of the great Emperor, we had annihilated the Spanish fleet. The first consequence of this was that Spain lost her hold of her South American colonies. These imbibed revolutionary ideas of independence, and being almost let alone had so far developed in the interval as to refuse one after the other to have anything to say to King Ferdinand when he came back. By 1818 at latest they had all declared their independence in spite of the resistance which he made. Now nothing could have been so galling as this to a Spanish Bourbon. If there was anything he would pride himself upon, even while walking, so to say, in the rags of indigence, it would be that he had colonies-that while England lost her hold, to all appearance, in America, he held fast all the old sources of the fabulous wealth of Spain. And certainly Ferdinand felt it a sore insult.

He fulminated his wrath against the base vassals who had dared to defy his authority. They must be punished, armies must be assembled to go and chasten the rebels, and so it was decreed. But it was a good deal easier said than done. In these modern times the words of august majesty have fallen sadly cheap, but thews and sinews have grown dear. Still creditors could be ignored, within limits ex

tortion could be resorted to, lies could be told, and by dint of the exercise of all his powers Ferdinand did get some sort of scratch army together, and placed it under the command of Count Absibal, an Irish O'Donnel, but not much of an honour to Ireland. It assembled at Cadiz, and got no farther. Poor Ferdinand had no ships to send it across the sea in. England had long ago captured or sunk the navy of Spain; and much though England had done for Spain since then, she had never made good that terrible loss. And so Ferdinand's army lay at Cadiz defying the colonies across the Atlantic; and, tiring of that, mutinied. Had they but got well out of the country, the chances were that he would never have seen them again. They would have plundered the colonists and lived comfortably, just as the Spanish troops now do in Cuba, and a good many of them might

have settled in the New World. But

left idling at Cadiz, what could they do except ask for pay; and not geting it, what else but mutiny? And it being Absibal's way to follow the current he found himself in, he helped them. The rebellious troops were victorious, and they proclaimed the constitution of 1812, making Ferdinand a constitutional king in spite of himself.

This happened in 1820, and from that date absolutism pure and simple may be said to have come to an end. The Cortes assembled once more, but rather as a sort of mimicry of constitutionalism in other countries than from any power it had to rule or guide. It was the play of factions which kept the old despotism down henceforth, and the continual popping up and down of ministers in the seething vortex for many years showed little but that the Court had taken to play at factions, and consented to leave the nation alone to go pretty much its own way. Not but that any one of these factions would