But this estimate of the Spanish character differs a good deal from the pictures drawn of it by the casual tourist; and it is scarcely surprising that it should be so.  It has been well said that “the contrast between the ideal of honour and the practice of pecuniary corruption has always been a peculiar feature of Spain and her settlements.”  If we hear one thing oftener than another said of Spain, it is fault-finding with her public men; the evils of bribery, corruption, and self-seeking amongst what should be her statesmen, and, above all, her Government employees, are pointed out, and by none more than by Spaniards themselves.  There is a good deal of truth at the bottom of these charges; they are the melancholy legacy of the years of misrule and of the darkness through which the country has struggled on her difficult way.  No one looks for the highest type of character in any country among its party politicians.  The creed that good becomes evil if it is carried out under one regime, and evil good under another, is not calculated to raise the moral perception; and it is only when a politician has convictions and principles which are superior to any office-holding, and will break with his party a hundred times sooner than stultify his own conscience, that he earns the respect of onlookers.  There are, and have been, many such men among the politicians of Spain whose names remain as watchwords with her people; but they have too often stood alone, and were not strong enough to leaven the mass and raise the whole standard of political integrity.  Some of the highest and best men, moreover, have thrown down their tools and withdrawn from contact with a life which seemed to them tainted.  But because Spain has done much in overthrowing her evil rulers and is struggling upwards towards the light, we expect wonders, and will not give time for what must always be a slow and difficult progress.

In Spain, everyone is a politician.  The schoolboy, who with us would be thinking of nothing more serious than football, aspires to sum up the situation and give his opinion of the public men as if he were an ex-prime minister at least.  These orators of the cafes and the street corners are delighted to find a foreigner on whom they can air their unfledged opinions, and the traveller who can speak or understand a few words of Spanish comes back with wonderful accounts of what “a Spaniard whom I met in the train told me.”  In any case, no one ever says as hard things of his countrymen as a Spaniard will say of those who do not belong to the particular little political clique which has the extreme honour of counting himself as one of its number.  These cliques—­for one cannot call them parties—­are innumerable, called, for the most part, after one man, of whom no one has heard except his particular friends, Un Senor muy conocido en su casa, sobre todo a la hora de comer, as their saying is:  “A gentleman very well known in his own house, especially at dinner-time.”