than there has ever been before. In old
times it needed the touch of a foreign hand, the threat of foreign
interference, to rouse the nation as one man. Commerce and industry and
the national emulation between province and province are doing gradually
what it once needed the avarice of a Napoleon to evoke.

The paper constitutions of Spain have been many, beginning with that of
1812, which the Liberals tried to force on Ferdinand VII., to that of
1845, which the Conservatives look upon as the ideal, or that of 1869,
embodying all that the Revolution had gained from absolutism, including
manhood suffrage. In the first Cortes summoned after the Restoration,
thanks to the good sense of Castelar, the Republican party, from being
conspirators, became a parliamentary party in opposition. Zorilla alone,
looking upon it as a sham, retired to France in disgust. By the new
constitution of 1876, the power of making laws remained, as before,
vested in the Cortes and the Crown: the Senate consists of three
classes, Grandes, Bishops, and high officers of State sitting by right,
with one hundred members nominated by the Crown, and one hundred and
eighty elected by provincial Councils, universities, and other
corporations. Half of the elected members go out every five years. The
deputies to the Congress are elected by indirect vote on a residential
manhood suffrage, and they number four hundred and thirty-one. A
certain number of equal electoral districts of fifty thousand
inhabitants elect one member each; and twenty-six large districts,
having several representatives, send eighty-eight members to the Cortes.
Every province has its provincial elective Council, managing its local
affairs, and each commune its separate District Council, with control
over local taxation. Yet, though ostensibly free, these local bodies are
practically in the power of the political wire-puller, or _cacique_.

CHAPTER X

COMMERCE AND AGRICULTURE

Commerce and industry had progressed by leaps and bounds even during the
disastrous and troublous years between the expulsion of Isabel II. and
the restoration of her son. The progress is now much more steady and
more diffused over the whole country, but it is by no means less
remarkable, especially taking into consideration the disaster of the war
with America and the loss to Spain of her old colonies.

Among her politicians in past times there were never wanting those who
considered that the loss of