r mid-day,
when they had smoked their habitual number of cigarettes.

The crowd of office-seekers were indifferent to the fact that
the true source of national vigour is the spirit of individual
self-dependence. Constant clamour for Government employment tends
only to enfeeble individual effort, and destroys the stimulus, or
what is of greater worth, the necessity of acting for one's self. The
Spaniard (except the Basque and the Catalonian) looks to the Government
for active and direct aid, as if the Public Treasury were a natural
spring at the waters of which all temporal calamities could be washed
away--all material wants supplied. He will tell you with pride rather
than with abashment that he is an _empleado_--a State dependent.

National progress is but the aggregate of personal individual
activity rightly directed, and a nation weakens as a whole as its
component parts become dormant, or as the majority rely upon the
efforts of the few. The spirit of Caesarism--"all for the people and
nothing by them"--must tend not only to political slavery, but to a
reduction in commercial prosperity, national power, and international
influence. The Spaniards have indeed proved this fact. The best laws
were never intended to provide for the people, but to regulate the
conditions on which they could provide for themselves. The consumers
of public wealth in Spain are far too numerous in proportion to the
producers; hence not only is the State constantly pressed for funds,
but the busy bees who form the nucleus of the nation's vitality are
heavily taxed to provide for the dependent office-seeking drones. It
is the fatal delusion that liberty and national welfare depend solely
upon good government, instead of good government depending upon united
and co-operative individual exertion, that has brought the Spanish
nation to its present state of deplorable impotence.

The Government itself is but the official counterpart of the
governed. By the aid of servile speculators, a man in political
circles struggles to come to the front--to hold a portfolio in the
ministry--if it only be for a session, when his pension for life is
assured on his retirement. Merit and ability have little weight, and
the proteges of the outgoing minister must make room for those of the
next lucky ministerial pension-seeker, and so on successively. This
Colony therefore became a lucrative hunting-ground at the disposal
of the Madrid Cabinet wherein to satisfy t