Minorca also.  Bourbon Spain was not to be Austrian Spain,—­that was clear.  But this trimming and pruning of the Peninsular monarchy were very useful to it; and Spain, having been ploughed up by the sword for twelve successive years, was in condition to yield something beyond what it had produced since the death of Philip II.  Accordingly, under the ascendency of the Italian Alberoni, Spain became rapidly powerful; and could that remarkable statesman have confined his labors to affairs purely Spanish in their character and purpose, that country might have taken, and have continued to hold, the first place in Europe.  He, however, with all his talents, was intellectually deficient in some important respects, and so all his schemes came to nought, and he fell.  He tried to effect too much, and though fully sensible of the necessity of peace to Spain, he plunged into war.  He did, in fact, what the rulers of Spain are doing to-day:  he sought to restore the old Castilian influence by engaging the country in wars that would have been foolish, even if they had not been unjust, when he should have continued to direct all his attention to its internal affairs.  Had he been at the head of any other than a Spanish ministry, Alberoni would probably have borne himself rationally; but there is something in the politics of Spain that affects even the wisest of heads, often turning them, as it were, and rendering their owners the strangest of caricatures.  It is sometimes said that the most Irish of the people of Ireland are those who have come latest into the green island, there being something in its air and soil that soon converts the stranger into a true Hibernian in all moral respects; but the remark is more applicable to Spain than to Ireland, as in the former country foreign statesmen have more than once made Spanish policy ridiculous by taking that one step which separates that quality from the sublime.  What in the person of a Castilian is at the worst but Quixotic becomes in the foreigner, or man of foreign descent, the merest burlesque upon statesmanship.

Alberoni’s fall did not imply the fall of Spain.  The renewal of vigor that she had gained under his direction was sufficiently great to carry her well through more than seventy years, during which she stood on an equal footing with France, the Empire, and Great Britain, and for most of the time was the superior of Russia and Prussia, whose European greatness did not begin until the second half of the eighteenth century had become somewhat advanced.  It is difficult for the men of to-day to understand that Spain was really a great power under the Bourbon kings, down to the first years of the French Revolution.  We have seen her, until very recently, a country of little more European account than Portugal; and that she should, but eighty years since, have treated with England as equal with equal, after having assisted at the work of England’s humiliation, it is hard to comprehend.  But such was the fact.