The first three classes are amusing, and not less. so is the last. Hardly one Spaniard in a hundred condescends to soil his ancient lineage by associating it with trade. They think it a shade less degrading, apparently, to whack mules or sport railway uniform, than to keep shop, though all three occupations put together make up a very puny total. Artisans number about one in eighty of these charming lotus-eaters; and miscellaneous occupations are claimed by one in forty. Everything that the census-takers can, by any stretch of indulgence, call an industry, when collected and analysed, makes less than 6 per cent of the population, or, say, one in seventeen. When we turn to the genteel modes of life, the figures grow rapidly. Liberal professions absorb nearly 3 per cent, and officials over 4 per cent. Here, manifestly, is where the shoe pinches in Spain. One person in twentyfive prefers being kept by the State to keeping himself. He will be a clerk in the post-office, a tide - waiter, a baggage - searcher in the Customhouse anything with a bit of gold lace and a salary to it, rather than forage for his own living. It is a bad choice, both for him and the country. Nine-tenths of the men who thus vegetate as officials, have brains enough and opportunities enough to treble their starvation incomes if they would only pocket their pride and throw a little more energy into the process of existence. The State, on its side, would be better served if it were rid of one-half of them.

Officialism is the curse of Spain, and the Hercules who can strangle that snake which, in everlengthening folds, coils itself round the Treasury, will be the first practical reformer in Spanish politics. His next exploit might be to annihilate the swarms of beggars who infest every public place in the Peninsula. They rank, I believe, as one of the learned professions, and in point of numbers they run the priests rather close. The agriculturist, who is the backbone of the country, must have a hard time with so many parasites hanging on to him. He forms less than a third of the population-29.87 per cent-and has to work for all. Farmers are one of the few classes of Spaniards who are better than their reputation. Report pictures them as lazy, fanciful, and erratic. They are, in fact, laborious, peaceable, and plodding. Whether toiling alone on their little farms, or working in groups at the mines or marblequarries, they are, I am assured, satisfactory workers. At the Rio Tinto they have been employed side by side with Cornishmen, and better value for the money has been got out of them. In such establishments the use of native labour is increasing, and rising in quality at the same time. Responsible duties, such as engine-driving and ore - picking, are now intrusted to Spaniards which formerly were reserved for Englishmen or Germans.

The Spanish labourer is very little to blame for the slow progress of his country. He has, at the

worst of times, done his share fairly well, and since he came under skilled leadership he has improved greatly. There is as good labour, both skilled and unskilled, to be got in most parts of Spain as anywhere else in Europe, not excepting England. There need be little fear on that score in undertaking any new enterprise in the Peninsula. The Spaniard is eminently teachable, and on piece-work he soon outgrows any tendency he may have to mooning around and counting his beads. From sunrise to sunset he can keep the hammer going, not fast but steadily. Half an hour for breakfast, two hours for dinner, five minutes for his cigarette at mid-day, and another five in the afternoon, are all the rest he needs in the longest summer day. He may lay off occasionally when he has a few pesetas to spend, but while at it he works regularly, and makes good wages. Labourers fit for heavy work like mining, quarrying, railroading, earn little if any less in Biscaya or Andalusia than in Lancashire or Yorkshire. Only of late has this great economic improvement set in, and its effects are yet in embryo; but they may soon be strong enough to help the Treasury out of its chronic deficits.

All the requisite elements of profitable industry exist in Spain; the only trouble is that they have not yet learned to co-operate effectively. Capital has been accumulating from generation to generation since it first began to flow in from the New World. Bone and sinew abound in

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every Spanish village, and brain is running to seed among the educated classes for sheer lack of employment. Enterprises are to be had in boundless variety which should weld muscle and brain together in a co-partnery of success and progress. Spain is slowly awakening to the fact that the days of knight-errantry are over, and that a new age of prosaic hard work has set in. Though the last of the ancient nations to give up castles in the air for factories and foundries on solid earth, she may not have to lag much longer in the rear. Her resources are so vast, her commercial facilities so rare, and her national character in many respects so sound, that regeneration when it begins, will flash through the land like a flood of sunlight.

HER RAILWAYS.

NEXT to the Rio Tinto mines, which were the special object of my pilgrimage, the railways of the country have received chief attention: for two reasons,-first, that Spanish railway securities are practically unknown in our English stock market; and second, that the Peninsula offers now the best field in Europe for railway enterprise. Spain has reached the industrial stage at which further progress depends mainly on two conditions -both financial. One is the rehabilitation of the national credit, and the other the development of cheap and rapid transport. She is at the critical point when foreign capital may be of invaluable help, and the question of how to get it must be of vital importance. The foundation and mainspring of all finance in a borrowing country like Spain are the Government bonds. The national Treasury, as the chief borrower, sets the tune for all private borrowers. If Spanish Four per cents could be raised to par, the market price of railway securities,