Introductory 



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must see every man of them, irrespective of class, assemUed 

 within the walls of their beloved town or city, irresistibly 

 attracted to street-girt abode — be it Immblest cot or sumptuous 

 palace (and one stands next door to the other). Even suburban 

 existence is eschewed. There are no outer fringes to a Spanish 

 town. No straQ-grlinor " villa residences," no Laburnum Lod£{e or 

 Eiver-View " ornament " the extramural solitude. Back at dusk 

 all hie, crowding to the 'paseo, to club or casino, to social 

 gathering and games of chance or (more rarely) of skill. That 

 ubiquitous term " animacion,'^ which may be translated gossip, 

 chatter, light-hearted intercourse, fulfils the ideals of life. Its 

 more serious side — reading, study, scientific pursuit — have little 

 place ; seldom does one see a library in any Spanish home, urban 

 or rural. 



None can accuse the authors of desiring to use a comparison 

 (proverbially odious) to the detriment of our Spanish friends. 

 The above is merely a record of patent facts that must quickly 

 become obvious to the least observant. It is but a definition of 

 divergent idiosyncrasies as between different human genera. 

 And remember that we in England have recently been told that 

 our rural system is fraught with unseen and unsuspected evil. 

 Into those wider questions we have no intention of entering. 

 But at least our impressions are based upon personal experience 

 of both lines of life, while much of the vituperation recently 

 poured upon rural England is derived from a view of but one, 

 and not a very clear view at that. 



Where the owner — big or little, but the more of them the 

 better — lives on the land, that land and the country at large 

 benefit to a degree that is demonstrated with sin ovular clearness 

 by seeing the converse system as it is practised in Spain to-day. 

 Here no one, owner or tenant — still less the hireling — takes any 

 living interest (to say nothing of pride) in his possession or 

 occupation beyond that very short-sighted " interest " of squeezing 

 the utmost out of it from day to day. Ancient forests are cut 

 down and burnt into charcoal, and rarely a tree replanted or a 

 thought given to the resulting effects on rainfall or climate. As 

 to beauty of landscape — what matter such aesthetic notions when 

 the owner lives a hundred miles away ? The collateral fact that, 

 to a great extent, nature's beauty and nature's gifts are analogous 

 and interdependent is ignored. Such simple issues are too 



