ure, or in the
towns is devoted to usury as in past times; the most daring venture
to invest in public stock; Government continues the mismanagement,
certain of always finding someone to lend, and pointing to this credit
as a proof of the country's prosperity. There are in Spain two million
hectares of uncultivated land, twenty-six millions of unirrigated
arable land, and only one million irrigated. This cultivation of
unirrigated land, which has come to be almost our only agriculture
is a concession that Spanish indolence makes to hunger, a perpetual
demonstration of the fanaticism that trusts in prayer or in the rain
from heaven more than in human progress. The rivers rush to the sea
through scorched-up provinces overflowing in winter, not to fertilise,
but to carry away everything in the volume of the inundation; there is
plenty of stone for churches and new convents, but none for dykes and
reservoirs; they build belfries and cut down the trees that attract
the rain. And do not tell me again, Don Antolin, that the Church is
poor and in no ways in fault; the poor are yourselves, you of the old
and traditional Church, you of the religion 'a la Espanola,' for in
this as in everything else there are fashions, and the faithful
follow the most recent; for here are the Jesuits, the most modern
manifestation of Catholicism, the 'latest novelty,' with their Sacred
Heart of Jesus and other French idolatries, building palaces and
churches in all directions, diverting the money that formerly went to
the Cathedrals, the only evidence of wealth in the country. But let us
return to our progress. Worse even for agriculture than the drought
is the ignorance and routine of the labourers, every new invention or
scientific appliance repels them, thinking it evil. 'The old times
were the good ones, our ancestors cultivated in this way and so ought
we'; and so ignorance is turned into a sort of national glory, and
we cannot hope for any remedy at present. In other countries the
universities and high schools send out reformers, men fighting for
progress; here the centres of learning only send out a proletariat
of students who must live, besieging all the professions and public
appointments, with the sole desire to open themselves a way to
continuous employment. They study (if you can call it study) for a few
years, not to learn, but to gain a diploma, a scrap of paper which
authorises them to earn their bread. They learn anything that the