the people
in their most sensitive fiber; I have made the vulture itself insult
the very corpse that it feeds upon and hasten the corruption.

"Now, when I was about to get the supreme rottenness, the supreme
filth, the mixture of such foul products brewing poison, when the
greed was beginning to irritate, in its folly hastening to seize
whatever came to hand, like an old woman caught in a conflagration,
here you come with your cries of Hispanism, with chants of confidence
in the government, in what cannot come to pass, here you have a body
palpitating with heat and life, young, pure, vigorous, throbbing with
blood, with enthusiasm, suddenly come forth to offer itself again as
fresh food!

"Ah, youth is ever inexperienced and dreamy, always running after
the butterflies and flowers! You have united, so that by your efforts
you may bind your fatherland to Spain with garlands of roses when in
reality you are forging upon it chains harder than the diamond! You
ask for equal rights, the Hispanization of your customs, and you don't
see that what you are begging for is suicide, the destruction of your
nationality, the annihilation of your fatherland, the consecration of
tyranny! What will you be in the future? A people without character,
a nation without liberty--everything you have will be borrowed, even
your very defects! You beg for Hispanization, and do not pale with
shame when they deny it you! And even if they should grant it to you,
what then--what have you gained? At best, a country of pronunciamentos,
a land of civil wars, a republic of the greedy and the malcontents,
like some of the republics of South America! To what are you tending
now, with your instruction in Castilian, a pretension that would be
ridiculous were it not for its deplorable consequences! You wish to
add one more language to the forty odd that are spoken in the islands,
so that you may understand one another less and less."

"On the contrary," replied Basilio, "if the knowledge of Castilian
may bind us to the government, in exchange it may also unite the
islands among themselves."

"A gross error!" rejoined Simoun. "You are letting yourselves be
deceived by big words and never go to the bottom of things to examine
the results in their final analysis. Spanish will never be the general
language of the country, the people will never talk it, because the
conceptions of their brains and the feelings of their hearts cannot
be expressed in that langu