people's children-but never with sword in handconciliating, not annihilating; and whose most imperishable laurels and decisive victories are to be gained, not upon the battlefield, but in the school

room.

The statistics of Spanish education are so deplorable, that I find it a melancholy duty to have to copy even a few. In the province of Guadalajara there were, in 1896, more than two hundred and fifty schoolmasters whose salaries did not amount to five hundred pesetas (eighteen pounds) apiece. The school of Cañamares was then receiving an annual grant of forty-six pesetas-one pound, ten shillings; and the school at Estepona had been closed for many months from utter want of cash. From the Gazette of February 1st, 1898, it appeared that the province of Cuenca then owed its schools. and schoolmasters one million two hundred and fourteen thousand one hundred and forty-six pesetas ; and that of Málaga, one million two hundred and one thousand eight hundred and forty-five pesetas. Possibly this latter item has something to do with the following extract from the Imparcial, September 15th, 1900:

66 Málaga, 14th. 12 Noon.

"Two children, twelve years of age, named Juan Casas Téllez and Antonio Moreno Labau, quarrelled yesterday; and the second of them stabbed the other in the stomach. He died in a few minutes. The aggressor fled."

To continue. Not a single province in the country was completely free from debt. Madrid, including the happy capital from which to paradise is but a single step, owed six thousand one hundred

and eleven pesetas; and Navarra, the nearest to solvency, six hundred and thirteen pesetas. The total owed by the Spanish provinces for educational expenses, was nine million thirty-six thousand five hundred and three pesetas.

Since then a certain measure of reform has taken place, thanks to the efforts of the present Minister of Public Instruction-the Count of Romanones. By recent legislation introduced upon. that gentleman's initiative, the State intervenes between the municipal council, or debtor, upon the one hand; and the schoolmaster, or creditor, upon the other; pays the dominie his due; and recoups itself by wrenching the corresponding amount from the fist of the municipal authorities. In this manner a part of the nine millions of pesetas aforesaid has been liquidated; and there is reason to hope that the remainder will be cleared off within a reasonable space of time. But until a very short while ago it was almost impossible to pick up a newspaper without encountering some pathetic appeal from a starving schoolmaster; and even the reform to which I am alluding makes no attempt to better the dominie's salary, which still continues to be disgracefully inadequate. Nor is it alone the penury of his career which wears him to the bone, but the moral indignity affixed to his efforts to improve his fellow-countrymen: for there are many vocations in Spain which are useless-the judge, the monk, the bullfighter, the vendor of lottery-tickets, and monopolists and exploiters of every category. But there is only one which is derided-the maestro de escuela.

Let me conclude with a humorous anecdote, well known in the Peninsula.

In the streets of a Spanish city a policeman stumbled on the corpse of a ragged and emaciated pauper. In making out his report he asked the magistrate what he should enter as the dead man's profession.

"What did he die of?"

"Starvation."

"Put him down-a schoolmaster."

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F

CHAPTER XIII.

THE FUTURE OF THE PRESENT.

Be

OR Spain the annals of the nineteenth century were principally sad ones. ginning with a war, ending with a war, with various wars between the two, the

glory she has won from those deplorable campaigns is utterly disproportioned to the miseries they have caused her. Civil and other strife, her children without schools, tens of thousands of her sons gratuitously slaughtered, her industries and commerce paralysed, her fields and factories uncultivated and unmanned-such is the record, crimsoned with her blood, of almost all she has accomplished or omitted to accomplish in a hundred years of history.

Nothing could be further from my choice than to reopen, were it not from unimpeachable and salutary motives, a wound already due to be upon the point of healing; but, unfortunately, the moment has arrived when I discover no alternative course. The most benevolent of writers is apt at times to find himself the victim, not the arbiter, of his subject; and thus it is that, laying regretfully aside for good and all those older volumes of Spain's national life which please me, personally, more than anymemories, in many an instance, of bygone and pacific worthies whose only guerdon must be

good report-I am compelled at last to take this other chronicle in my hand and open it at a bitter page-the war with the United States of America.

I shall hardly have to remind my readers that when the war with the United States began, as well as when it ended, the Spanish Liberals were in power. In the interest of the nation they had endeavoured to quell the rebellion oversea, at first by force of arms, afterwards by gentler treatment; but the one proved ineffectual, the other tardy; and upon the signing of the Paris Treaty, the mother country found herself no longer a colonizing power.

The blow for Spain was undoubtedly a sore one, but rankled, when it ultimately fell, less than had been anticipated. Reasoning persons began to wonder whether Cuba and the Philippines and Puerto Rico had after all been so imperative to Spain's prosperity. Mere statistics were certainly unpalatable. The war had deprived her of eleven millions of her citizens, and nearly half a million square kilometres of territory. These were the evident, the superficial data, and the only consideration to be set against them was the intrinsic value of the colonies to the mother country, not from the point of view of empty numbers, but of usefulness.

For many generations Spain has demonstrated her dearth of talent as a colonizer; that though she might annex and dominate by the sword, she could not govern or retain by milder methods. Her standard system of colonial control has been a