used to crush out all progress. Its
effect is well expressed in the old proverb: "Between the King and the
Inquisition we must not open our lips."

"I would rather think I had ascended from an ape," said Huxley, in his
celebrated answer to the Bishop of Oxford, "than that I had descended
from a man who used great gifts to darken reason." It has been the
object of the Inquisition to darken reason wherever it had the power,
and it left the mass of the Spanish people, great and generous as they
are by nature, for long a mere mob of inert animals, ready to amuse
themselves when their country was at its hour of greatest agony, debased
by the sight of wholesale and cruel murders carried out by the priests
of their religion in the name of Christ.

[Illustration: PEASANTS]

[Illustration: SEVILLE CIGARRERA]

Even to-day the Spaniard of the lower classes can scarcely understand
that he can have any part or parcel in the government of his country.
Long ages of misrule have made him hate all governments alike: he
imagines that all the evils he finds in the world of his own experience
are the work of whoever happens to be the ruler for the time being; that
it is possible for him to have any say in the matter never enters his
head, and he votes, if he votes at all, as he is ordered to vote. He has
been taught for ages past to believe whatever he has been told. His
reason has been "offered as a sacrifice to God," if indeed he is aware
that he possesses any.

The danger of the thorough awakening may be that which broke out so
wildly during Castelar's short and disastrous attempt at a republic:
that when once he breaks away from the binding power of his old
religion, he may have nothing better than atheism and anarchism to fall
back upon. The days of the absolute reign of ignorance and superstition
are over; but the people are deeply religious. Will the Church of Spain
adapt itself to the new state of things, or will it see its people drift
away from its pale altogether, as other nations have done? This is the
true clerical question which looms darkly before the Spain of to-day.

To return, however. The Austrian kings of Spain had brought her only
ruin. With the Bourbons it was hoped a better era had opened, but it was
only exchanging one form of misrule for another. The kings existed for
their own benefit and pleasure; the people existed to minister to them
and find funds for their extravagance. Each succeeding monarch was rule