Spanish people, the original stock (unmodified by courtly usages, or foreign sentiments, or city habits) of the Spanish peasantry and petty rural proprietors.  This class, as distinguished from the aristocracy, was the class he relied on; and he agreed with us in looking upon the Spanish aristocracy as traitors—­that is, as recreants and apostates—­from any and every cause meriting the name of national.  If he found a moral grandeur in Spain, it was amongst that poor forsaken peasantry, incapable of political combination, who could not make a national party in the absence of their natural leaders.  Now, if we adopt the mild temperament of some Spanish writers, calling this “a schism in the natural interests,” how shocking that such a schism could have arisen at so dreadful a crisis!  That schism, which, as a fact, is urged, in the way of excuse, merely as a possibility, is already itself the opprobrium for Spain never to be washed out.  For in Spain, what was the aristocracy?  Let us not deceive ourselves, by limiting this term to the feudal nobility or grandees; the aristocracy comprehended every man that would naturally have become a commissioned officer in the army.  Here, therefore, read the legend and superscription of the national dishonour.  The Spanish people found themselves without a gentry for leading their armies.  England possessed, and possesses a gentry, the noblest that the world has seen, who are the natural leaders of her intrepid commonalty, alike in her fleets and in her armies.  But why?  How and in what sense qualified?  Not only by principle and by honour—­that glorious distinction which poor men can appreciate, even when less sternly summoned to its duties; not only by courage as fiery and as passively enduring as the courage of the lower ranks, but by a physical robustness superior to that of any other class taken separately; and, above all, by a scale of accomplishments in education, which strengthen the claim to command, even amongst that part of the soldiery least capable of appreciating such advantages.  In France again, where no proper aristocracy now exits, there is, however, a gentry, qualified for leading; the soldiers have an entire reliance on the courage of their officers.  But in Italy, in Spain, in Portugal, at the period of Napoleon, the soldiers knew to a certainty that their officers could not be depended on; and for a reason absolutely without remedy, viz. that in Spain, at least, society is not so organized by means of the press locally diffused, and by social intercourse, as that an officer’s reputation could be instantaneously propagated (as with us) whithersoever he went.  There was then no atmosphere of public opinion, for sustaining public judgments and public morals.  The result was unparalleled; here for the first time was seen a nation, fourteen millions strong, so absolutely palsied as to lie down and suffer itself to be walked over by a body of foreigners, entering in the avowed