mount of
its population, but the kingdoms united under the crown of Castile were
estimated by contemporaries to contain eight millions, while the kingdom
of Portugal, together with those annexed to Arragon and the other
provinces of the realm, must have numbered half as many. Here was a
populous nation in a favoured land, but the foundation of all wealth was
sapped by a perverted moral sentiment.

Labour was esteemed dishonourable. The Spaniard, from highest to lowest,
was proud, ignorant, and lazy. For a people endowed by nature with many
noble qualities--courage, temperance, frugality, endurance, quickness of
perception; a high sense of honour, a reverence for law--the course of
the national history had proved as ingeniously bad a system of general
education as could well be invented.

The eternal contests, century after century, upon the soil of Spain
between the crescent and the cross, and the remembrance of the ancient
days in which Oriental valour and genius had almost extirpated Germanic
institutions and Christian faith from the peninsula, had inspired one
great portion of the masses with a hatred, amounting almost to insanity,
towards every form of religion except the Church of Rome, towards every
race of mankind except the Goths and Vandals. Innate reverence for
established authority had expanded into an intensity of religious emotion
and into a fanaticism of loyalty which caused the anointed monarch
leading true believers against infidels to be accepted as a god. The
highest industrial and scientific civilization that had been exhibited
upon Spanish territory was that of Moors and Jews. When in the course of
time those races had been subjugated, massacred, or driven into exile,
not only was Spain deprived of its highest intellectual culture and its
most productive labour, but intelligence, science, and industry were
accounted degrading, because the mark of inferior and detested peoples.

The sentiment of self-esteem, always a national characteristic, assumed
an almost ludicrous shape. Not a ragged Biscayan muleteer, not a
swineherd of Estremadura, that did not imagine himself a nobleman because
he was not of African descent. Not a half-starved, ignorant brigand,
gaining his living on the highways and byways by pilfering or
assassination, that did not kneel on the church pavement and listen to
orisons in an ancient tongue, of which he understood not a syllable, with
a sentiment of Christian self-complacency t