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ON THE PRESENT CRISIS OF SPAIN: 



ITS REAL CAUSE AND ITS MOST PROBABLE RESULTS, IN CONNEXION 

 WITH THE PRESENT STATE OF FRANCE AND EUROPE. 



DURING the last fifty years the Spanish peninsula has been, unfor- 

 tunately, the subject of many severe domestic and foreign trials, 

 and has been visited by all sorts of heavy calamities. The weakness, 

 ignorance, and superstition of its queen-governed and monk-ridden 

 monarch Charles IV., the ruinous and inconsistent dictatorship of the 

 parvenu musical Cupid, Don Manuel Godoy, prince of the peace, and 

 the brutality of the Holy Inquisition, led the way to its political de- 

 gradation and national distress. 



In 1789, when kingly despotism and spoliation, aristocratic self- 

 ishness and insolence, and ecclesiastical domination and craftiness, 

 produced that popular eruption which destroyed the French Bastille 

 and buried under its ruins the absolute monarchical institutions of 

 France, the electric revolutionary fluid from the Parisian volcano 

 soon crossed the Pyrenees, and, communicating a vivid shock to the 

 oppressed descendants of the Moors, awoke in their minds a certain 

 sense of their national honour. But as the naturally interested sup- 

 porters of all despotic governments, the priests and monks, declared 

 themselves in favour of the queen and her Cicisbeo Godoy, the reign 

 of oppression arid spoliation were permitted to continue in spite of all 

 reclamations. 



In fact, the political system of Godoy was at that epoch foolish and 

 inconsistent. Spain at first remained neutral with regard to France ; 

 afterwards its armies marched against the republicans, and then 

 Spain and France formed a league which of course involved the 

 peninsula, and caused the annihilation of the Spanish navy and the 

 loss of all the resources which the mother-country derived from its 

 American possessions. 



However, the national misfortunes and distress of Spain did not pre- 

 vent Godoy from taking great care of his own private interests, and, 

 notwithstanding the national troubles, he kept the most splendid, 



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