of the Church for so many years, with the example ever held up
for admiration of the patron saint, Isidro, who knelt all day at his
prayers, and left the tilling of his fields to the angels! It would seem
that these ministers of grace are not good husbandmen, since the land
became the arid waste it now is, while successive Isidros have been
engaged in religious duties, which they were taught were all that was
necessary.

As an example of what irrigation means in the sunlit fields of Spain, an
acre of irrigable land in Valencia or Murcia sells for prices varying
from L150 to L400, according to its quality or its situation, while land
not irrigable only fetches sums varying from L7 to L20. In Castile, land
would not in any case fetch so high a price as that which has been under
irrigated cultivation for centuries past; but in any district the value
of dry land is never more than a twelfth of what it is when irrigable.
In truth, however, there is more than irrigation needed to bring the
lands of Castile and Estremadura into profitable cultivation, and it
cannot be done without the expenditure of large sums of money at the
outset in manures, and good implements in place of the obsolete old
implements with which the ground is now scratched rather than ploughed.
Given good capital and intelligent farming, as in the irrigated
districts, and two, and even three, crops a year can be raised in
unceasing succession; lucern gives from ten to twelve cuttings in one
year, fifteen days being sufficient for the growth of a new crop.

I have pointed out what one day's sun can do in raising grass seed in
Madrid, which stands on the highest point of the elevated table-land
occupying the centre of Spain. Seeing that the principal item of the
revenue is derived from the land tax, and that it is calculated on the
value of the land, it would appear to be the first interest of an
enlightened government to foster irrigation in every possible way, and
encourage agriculture and the planting of trees.

Although the people of Spain have hated their more immediate neighbours
with an exceeding bitter hatred,--as, indeed, they had good cause to do
in the past,--her public men have had a strange fancy for importing or
imitating French customs. One that militates more than anything else
against agricultural prosperity is the law of inheritance, copied from
the French. By this the State divides an estate amongst the heirs
without any reference to the