8 ANDREW J. SHIPMAN MEMORIAL 



containing 12,142 members, which were devoted as follows: 

 294 to education ; 92 to training of missionaries ; 97 to educa- 

 tion of priests ; 62 to manual training for young men and the 

 sale of their products : and 52 to monastic and contemplative 

 life. There were 2,656 communities of women, having 42,596 

 members, divided as follows: 910 for education; 1,029 fo^ 

 hospital work and charity; 717 for a contemplative life. Some 

 of these religious communities have taken up some sections of 

 the most desolate and wild lands in Catalonia and the north, 

 lands which had never been profitable or even cultivated, and 

 erected monasteries there after the manner of the Middle Ages 

 or of our energetic missionaries in the Far West. 



Education in Spain is not, of course, as far advanced as it 

 is in the United States, or in Germany, or France. In a 

 great measure this may be explained by the fact that the great 

 majority of the Spanish population is rural. All sorts of mis- 

 leading information about education and illiteracy in Spain 

 has been given in our daily and weekly press, as well as in 

 some leading magazines. Some of them have said that there 

 was 75 per cent of illiteracy in Spain ; but these figures were 

 taken from the census of i860. Others have said that 68 per 

 cent of the people were illiterate ; but that was taken from the 

 census of 1880. The trouble with these writers is that they 

 utilized the handiest encyclopedia they could find, no matter 

 what its date was, instead of obtaining the latest available 

 figures. The census of 1910 is not yet computed, but the 

 figures for 1900 gave 25,340 public schools with 1,617,314 

 pupils, and 6,181 private schools with 344,380 pupils, making 

 a total of 31,521 schools with 1.961,694 pupils. One-ninth of 

 a population of 18,500,000 is certainly not a bad showing. In 

 1900 the central government at Madrid spent $9,500,000 on 

 education, and the local governments about three to four times 

 as much more. In 1910 the governmental budget for educa- 

 tion was 53,522,408 pesetas, or about $10,710,000. In 1900 

 the illiterates of Spain amounted to less than 30 per cent, or 

 to be exact 2,603,753 niales and 2,686,615 females, making a 

 total of 5,290,368 persons. I am informed that the age in 

 Spain at which illiterates are counted is nine years, but these 

 illiterates were for the most part persons from maturity to 

 old age. 



The pay of a school teacher is never magnificent in any 



