all hopes of the country's possessing a well-to-do middle
class--stamina of a wealthy nation, and without which no people can
attain a national standard of wealth--vanished completely away.

Lastly the Church, which had become wealthy beyond the dreams of the
Cluny monks, retained its iron grip on the country, and retarded the
liberal education of the masses. To repay the fidelity of servile
Catholics, it canonized legions of local prophets and martyrs, and
organized hundreds of gay annual _fiestas_ to honour their memory. The
ignorant people, flattered at the tribute of admiration paid to their
deities, looked no further ahead into the growing chaos of misery and
poverty, and were happy.

The crash came--could it be otherwise? Beyond the seas an immense
territory, hundreds of times larger than the natal _solar_, or mother
country, stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific; at home, a
stillborn nation lay in an arid meadow beside a solemn church, a
frivolous, selfish throne, and a mute and gloomy brick-built convent.

The Spanish Armada sailed to England never to return, and Philip II.
built the Escorial, a melancholy pantheon for the kings of the Iberian
peninsula.

One by one the colonies dropped off, fragments of an illusory empire,
and at last the mother country stood once more stark naked as in the
days before Columbus left Palos harbour. But the mother's face was no
longer young and fresh like an infant's: wrinkles of age and of
suffering creased the brow and the chin, for not in vain was she, during
centuries, the toy of unmerciful fate.

* * * * *

Such is, in gigantic strides, the history of Spain.

The volcanic eruption in the fifteenth century has left, it is true,
indelible traces in the country's soil. Nevertheless, on the very day
when the treaty of Paris was signed and the last of the Spanish colonies
_de ultramar_ were lost for ever, that day a Spanish nation was born
again on the disturbed foundations of the old.

There is no denying it: when Ferdinand and Isabel united their kingdoms
a nation was born; it fell to pieces (though apparently not until a
later date) when Columbus landed in America.

Anarchy, misrule, and oppression, ignorance and poverty, now frivolity
and now austerity at court, fill the succeeding centuries until the
coronation of Alfonso XII. During all those years, but once did
Spain--no longer a nation--shine forth in history with an even gre