stirred up trouble so that to escape from it some remedy might be found; I have placed obstacles in the way of trade so that the country, impoverished and reduced to misery, might no longer be afraid of anything; I have excited desires to plunder the treasury, and as this has not been enough to bring about a popular uprising, I have wounded the people in their most sensitive fiber; I have made the vulture itself insult the very corpse that it feeds upon and hasten the corruption.

“Now, when I was about to get the supreme rottenness, the supreme filth, the mixture of such foul products brewing poison, when the greed was beginning to irritate, in its folly hastening to seize whatever came to hand, like an old woman caught in a conflagration, here you come with your cries of Hispanism, with chants of confidence in the government, in what cannot come to pass, here you have a body palpitating with heat and life, young, pure, vigorous, throbbing with blood, with enthusiasm, suddenly come forth to offer itself again as fresh food!

“Ah, youth is ever inexperienced and dreamy, always running after the butterflies and flowers!  You have united, so that by your efforts you may bind your fatherland to Spain with garlands of roses when in reality you are forging upon it chains harder than the diamond!  You ask for equal rights, the Hispanization of your customs, and you don’t see that what you are begging for is suicide, the destruction of your nationality, the annihilation of your fatherland, the consecration of tyranny!  What will you be in the future?  A people without character, a nation without liberty—­everything you have will be borrowed, even your very defects!  You beg for Hispanization, and do not pale with shame when they deny it you!  And even if they should grant it to you, what then—­what have you gained?  At best, a country of pronunciamentos, a land of civil wars, a republic of the greedy and the malcontents, like some of the republics of South America!  To what are you tending now, with your instruction in Castilian, a pretension that would be ridiculous were it not for its deplorable consequences!  You wish to add one more language to the forty odd that are spoken in the islands, so that you may understand one another less and less.”

“On the contrary,” replied Basilio, “if the knowledge of Castilian may bind us to the government, in exchange it may also unite the islands among themselves.”

“A gross error!” rejoined Simoun.  “You are letting yourselves be deceived by big words and never go to the bottom of things to examine the results in their final analysis.  Spanish will never be the general language of the country, the people will never talk it, because the conceptions of their brains and the feelings of their hearts cannot be expressed in that language—­each people has its own tongue, as it has its own way of thinking!  What are you going to do with Castilian, the few of you who will speak it?  Kill off your own originality,