SPAIN AND HER FACTIONS. 67! 



bloodshed .and persecution, and liberalism exorcised with something 

 more than the ceremonies of " bell, book, and candle." Then what are 

 to become of the recollections of former days, of broken faith, traitorous 

 promises, holy perjuries, and of no less holy vengeance. Can there be 

 faith and charity in such an unnatural alliance ? We should say No. 



Let us see how an alliance may be effected between the government 

 and the apostolicals. It requires little desertion of principle, or rather 

 of opinion, on the one part ; moderation, so called, to persecution ; the 

 creed is essentially the same the distinction is in the practice. The 

 wealth of the clergy, though much deteriorated of late years, would be 

 liberally supplied to a government undertaking the re-establishment of 

 the Inquisition and the abolished immunities of the church. It was put 

 forth at the hour of common danger, the late irruption of the constitu- 

 tionalists, but the peril being past, was again withheld; .thus serving 

 both as a temptation and a warning to the ministry. The obstinate policy 

 and pride of the Court, which has been so disastrously shewn two centuries 

 ago in its operation in the Low Countries, and more lately to the present 

 time, in all the details of his colonial dismemberments, is another ob- 

 stacle to the free marching of the government. An immense number of 

 empleas, connected with the home colonial administration, which are 

 now sinecures in the strictest sense of the term, are, notwithstanding the 

 wretched state of the finance, still kept up, partly because the crazy 

 vanity of the Court cannot allow such an admission of the independence 

 of the states in question, which these unfilled appointments would war- 

 rant ; and partly because the lopping off of these salaries would convert 

 thousands of time-serving intriguers into secret and dangerous enemies. 



A word or two 011 the nobility. We have as yet said little or nothing 

 on this branch of the subject, and for a very good reason ; that it is im- 

 measurably that part of it which is of the least consequence. The 

 grandees have neither influence, character, talents, nor power. The 

 body-servants of the king, they have no voice in his councils, and are 

 regarded by the government as the mere puppets of the Court, " thickly 

 scattered to make up a show." Their influence, as a body, is a cipher : 

 few of them, around the royal family, undoubtedly exercise the occult 

 genius of their order, in their privileged science of intrigue ; but this is 

 seldom called into action for any higher purpose than the displacing of 

 a chamberlain, or the installation of a chief cook. The ambition of the 

 proud oligarchy of Spain seldom commits itself beyond the precincts of 

 the palace. The policy of Richelieu never degraded the French aristo- 

 cracy to the level of that, which is now the object of contemptuous 

 indifference to all Spaniards. It is true that they were worthy and 

 useful instruments, though unconsciously so, to the priesthood and 

 apostolicals, who made good use of the slight cast on them by the con- 

 stitution, which did not accord them an hereditary voice in the legisla- 

 ture. It was a thriving argument at a distance from the capital, where 

 the venerable institutions of the monarchy are considered as an affair of 

 divine arrangement ; but it is too well know that, notwithstanding all 

 the wrongs emanating from the constitutional regime, it accorded to the 

 grandees, when they chose to exercise the universal privilege, more 

 in the legislature than they have enjoyed either immediately before 

 or since. But they did not exercise it, as, in a plain phrase, it was not 

 in their line. Their wealth, though great, is mostly so mortgaged and 

 otherwise tied up, that from its unavailableness, it forms no item in any 



