24 Unexplored Spain 
thus under canvas—whether on the sierras and marismas of 
Spain, on high fjeld or dark forest in Scandinavia, or on Afric’s 
blazing veld. 
Should some remarks (here or elsewhere in this book) appear 
self-contradictory the reason will be found rather in our inadequate 
expression than in any confusion of idea. We love Spain 
primarily because she is wild and waste ; but, loving her, are 
naturally desirous that she should advance to that position among 
nations that is her due. Such material development, nevertheless, 
need not—and will not—imply the total destruction of her wild 
beauties. Development on those lines would not consist with 
the peculiar genius of the Spanish race, and, while we trust the 
development will come, we fear no such collateral results. Take, 
for instance, the corn-lands. There the great bustard is alike the 
index and the price of vast, unwieldy farms unfenced and but 
half tilled, remote from rail, road, or market. That condition we 
neither expect nor hope to see exchanged for smug fields with a 
network of railways. For “three acres and a cow” is not the 
line of Spanish regeneration ; it is rather a claptrap catch-word 
of politicians—a murrain on the lot of them ! 
True, the plan seems to answer in Denmark, and if the Danes 
are satisfied, well and good—that is no business of ours. But no 
such mathematical and Procrustean restriction of vital energies 
and ambitious will subserve our British race, nor the Spanish. 
In Spanish sierra may the how! of the wolf at dawn never be 
replaced by blast from factory siren, nor the curling blue smoke 
of the charcoal-burner in primeval forest be abolished in favour 
of black clouds belching from bristling chimneys that pierce a 
murky sky. Either in such circumstance would be misplaced. 
Similarly, when the engineer shall have been turned loose in 
the Spanish marismas, he can, beyond all doubt, destroy them 
for ever. His straight lines and intersecting canals, hideous in 
utilitarian rectitude, would right soon demolish that glory of 
lonely desolation—those leagues of marshland, samphire, and 
glittering /ucio. And all for nothing! Since the desecration 
will not ‘‘ pay” financially—the reason we give in detail elsewhere 
—and you sacrifice for a shadow some of the grandest bits of wild 
nature that yet survive—the finest length and breadth of utter 
abandonment that still enrich a humdrum Europe. Should 
“progress ” only advance on these lines no scrap of that continent 
