SPAIN AND HER FACT TONS. 661 



able prostration of the polity to which they were linked; the tide set in 

 too strongly and too rapidly, to allow them time for an organization of 

 open resistance. They found themselves unprepared, in the presence of 

 their spoilers : they submitted and conspired. 



It is difficult to determine, whether the liberals could have maintained 

 possession of the government, even had the French not entered Spain. 

 There are eminent opinions on both sides of the question ; but it must in 

 truth be confessed, that the asserters of the affirmative, have generally 

 national pride, as well as political prejudice, to swerve their judg- 

 ment from what is possibly the fact. It is certain, that the apostolicals 

 and the terrorists had, at the period of the invasion, reduced the country 

 to a state of anarchy, of which the people were heartly tired ; and it is 

 no less true, as was proved in the sequel, that they were already willing 

 to submit to the most absolute from of government, in order to get rid of 

 the petly warfare that was desolating the land. 



rfoi/The great error of the Cortes, was their obstinate refusal to introduce 

 any alteration in the constitution. They had had the experience of its 

 unfitness, even at the time of its promulgation in 1812; and, in spite of 

 that experience, with the daily additional proofs, not simply of its 

 legislative inadequateness, but of its positive inimical tendencies to many 

 interests in the country, to deny any change, even of the minutest 

 description, on account of one of its provisions declaring that no altera- 

 tion should be introduced for a certain number of years, which had not 

 yet expired, was a sad instance of either shallow policy, or factious 

 obstinacy ; it might be both. 



y;<f This has been the fundamental misfortune of Spain. What \vere its 

 concomitant? ? A legislature and an executive at war with each other ; 

 both without experience, and each divided and subdivided into adverse 

 and factious parties. An aristocracy and an hierarchy, smarting under 

 a sense of degradation, from the abolition of all the privileges and 

 distinctions of their order, save those which were merely nominal or 

 ridiculous, per se ; excluded by the constitution from any share in the 

 legislature, excepting through the ordeal of popular election, in the 

 operation of which their rights were recognized as no more than co- 

 equal with those of the meanest citizen in the state. A numerous and 

 exasperated clergy, in all but open warfare with the authorities, and 

 employing every means, from the declamation of the pulpit, to the ex- 

 hortation of the confessional, to enlist the fanatic sympathies of the mob, 

 in the cause of a mutilated and suffering church. A people immersed 

 in almost barbarian ignorance, strongly attached to their ancient mo- 

 narchical and clerical institutions, and, moreover, especially devoted to 

 their national prejudices, which combine a hatred and contempt for all 

 things foreign, for no other reason, than because they are not Spanish. 

 A discontented nation and an exhaused treasury; but what proved, 

 perhaps, more hostile to the repose and prosperity of the country, than 

 any of the calamitous ingredients we have enumerated, were the political 

 clubs, whose restless turbulence and factious intrigues excited the mis- 

 chievous propensities of the mob, misled or wearied the people, and 

 domineered the government.* 



* The excesses of these clubs are almost beyond credence. The principal ones 

 were the Society of the Friends of Order, the patriotic clubs assembling at the 

 Cafe's Loranzini and the Fontana de Oro, the Comunevos, the Landabarun, the 

 Annillo Society, and that of the Order of the Hammer (Martillo). The death of 



