Introductory 13 
must see every man of them, irrespective of class, assembled 
within the walls of their beloved town or city, irresistibly 
attracted to street-girt abode—be it humblest 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 straggling “ villa residences,” no Laburnum Lodge or 
River-View “ ornament” the extramural solitude. Back at dusk 
all hie, crowding to the paséo, 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. Itis 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 singular 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 esthetic 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 
