is turned into a sort of national glory, and we cannot hope for any remedy at present.  In other countries the universities and high schools send out reformers, men fighting for progress; here the centres of learning only send out a proletariat of students who must live, besieging all the professions and public appointments, with the sole desire to open themselves a way to continuous employment.  They study (if you can call it study) for a few years, not to learn, but to gain a diploma, a scrap of paper which authorises them to earn their bread.  They learn anything that the professor teaches, without the slightest desire to inquire any further.  The professors are for the greater part doctors or barristers practising their profession, who come between whiles and sit for an hour in their chairs, repeating like a phonograph what they have said for many previous years, and then they return to their sick or their lawsuits, without caring in the least what is being said or written in the world since they got their appointments.  All Spanish culture is at second hand, purely on the surface, ‘translated from the French,’ and even this is only for the scanty minority who read, for the rest of those so-called intellectuals have no other library but the text-books they studied as children, and all they learn of the progress of human thought is from the newspapers.  The parents who are desirous of securing as soon as possible the future of their sons who are seeking a career, send them to these centres of learning when they scarcely know how to speak; the man-student of other countries, in the full plenitude of his thinking powers, does not exist here.  The universities are full of children, and in the different institutes you only see short trousers, and the Spaniard, before he shaves himself for the first time, is a licentiate and on the high road to become a doctor; the wet nurse will end by sitting by the professor.  These children who receive the baptism of science at an age when in other countries they are playing with their toys, being confirmed in the title that proclaims their scientific acquirements, study no more; these are the intellectuals who are to direct and save us, and who to-morrow may be legislators and ministers.  Come, my good man, it is enough to make one laugh!”

Gabriel did not laugh, but Silver Stick and the others applauded his words.  Any criticism against the present times delighted the priest.

“This country is drained, Don Antolin, nothing remains standing.  The number of towns which have vanished since our decadence commenced is incalculable.  In other countries ruins are carefully preserved, as so many stone pages of their history; they are cleaned, preserved, supported and strengthened, and paths opened round them so that all can examine them.  Here, where Roman, Byzantine and Arab art have passed, and also the Mudejar, the Gothic and the Renaissance—­in fact, all the styles of Europe—­the ruins in the country are hidden and disfigured by herbage and creepers, and in the towns they are mutilated and disfigured by the vandalism of the people.  They are constantly thinking of the past, and yet they despise its remains; what a country of dreams and desolation!  Spain is no longer a country, it is an ill-arranged and dusty museum, full of old things that attract all the curious of Europe, but in which even the ruins are ruined.”