Jan. 15, 1875.] dvJi [Delmar. 



THE RESOURCES, PRODUCTIONS AND SOCIAL CONDITION 



OF SPAIN. 



By Alexander D elmar, 



LATE DIRECTOR OF THE BUREAU OF STATISTICS OF THE UNITED STATES, ETC. 



{Bead before the American Philosophical Society, January 15, 1875.) 

 Introduction. 



Until very lately there were few or no histories or works of reference 

 in the English language relating to Spain which contained any informa- 

 tion with regard to that country later than for the period I800-6I ; and 

 a survey of the condition of Spain from the stand-point thus afforded 

 presented but a gloomy prospect. During the sixty-one years ending 

 with the latest date to which these works bring the student, the popula- 

 tion of Europe and America had nearly doubled, and this increase in the 

 numbers of the foremost races of the world was, as it always is, merely 

 the type of that vast and almost universal material progress which ren- 

 ders such increase possible. 



During the same momentous period, serfdom and slavery had been 

 condemned or abolished in both continents, and with it the feudal system 

 and the corvee. During the same time mankind had armed itself with 

 the titanic powers of steam and electricity, and rushed with renewed 

 strength into that perpetual struggle with nature, which is its heritage, 

 but in the maintenance of which, at about the beginning of the period 

 referred to, it had become well-nigh exhausted, for lack of suitable 

 weapons and appropriate agencies. This epoch, too, had witnessed 

 in many countries the separation of Church and State, the obliteration 

 of castes, the spread of popular education, the establishment of j)opular 

 representation, the mobilization of proprietary rights, the development 

 of great scientific progress, and a brilliant series of discoveries in every 

 department of thought. 



During all this time, marked by the mightest strides of material 

 progress which the world had ever seen, that country of Europe which, 

 while the rest of the Continent was shrouded in the darkness and 

 bigotry and superstition of the Middle Ages, once held aloft the lamp of 

 science and built up with the hands of its Semetic occupiers a civilization 

 several centuries in advance of its time; that country from which subse- 

 quently went forth the imperial dicta that controlled one -half of the 

 Continent, and all of the newly discovered world beyond the Western 

 Ocean, lay inert and motionless. 



The country of Abderrahman, of Alfonso el Sabio, of Ximenes, had 

 made no sensible progress for centuries. The numbers of the people were 

 substantially the same, the institutions were the same, the lives they led 

 were the same. So late as the year 1855 but one-fifth of the surface of Spain 

 was cultivated; the rest had been blasted by a ruinous system of exploita- 

 A. p. S. — VOL. XIV. 2m 



