As for Castelar, when angrily charged with inconsistency, he said:  “Charge me with inconsistency, if you please.  I will not defend myself.  Have I the right to prefer my own reputation to the safety of my country?  Let my name perish, let posterity pronounce its anathema against me, let my contemporaries send me into exile!  Little care I!  I have lived long enough!  But let not the Republic perish through my weaknesses, and, above all, let no one say that Spain has perished in our hands!” Castelar went back to his chair of philosophy, which he had never resigned, poor as he left it, to the modest home and the devoted sister whom he loved so well—­and no one laughed!  Is there really any other country than Spain where such things can happen?  His enthusiasm, his high-mindedness, his failures, his brave acknowledgment that he had failed, were accepted by the country in the exact spirit in which he had offered himself to her service, and the memory of Castelar stands as high to-day as ever it did in the respectful admiration of his fellow-countrymen.

CHAPTER IX

POLITICAL GOVERNMENT

The Government of Spain ever since the restoration of Don Alfonso XII. has been in reality what it was only in name before—­a constitutional monarchy.  During the first years of the young King’s reign, Canovas del Castillo being Prime Minister, there was a distinctly reactionary tendency from the Liberalism of Prim and the revolutionary party of 1868.  It was almost impossible that it should be otherwise, considering the wild tumult of the varying opinions and the experiments in government that the country had passed through; and some of the difficulties of the situation to-day are no doubt due to the concessions made to the ultra-Conservative party in the re-introduction of the religious orders, which had been suppressed during the regency of Cristina, and had never been tolerated even during the reign of the piadosa, Isabel II.

Prim had, from the first moment that the success of the Revolution was assured and the Queen and her camarilla had crossed the frontier to seek asylum in France, declared for a constitutional monarchy.  “How can you have a monarchy without a king?” he was asked by Castelar.  “How can you have a republic without republicans!” was his reply.  He might have made himself king or military dictator, but he wanted to be neither; nor would he hear of Montpensier, to whom Topete and Serrano had pledged themselves.

The House of Savoy was the next heir to the Spanish throne, had the Bourbons become extinct, and to it the first glances of the Spanish king-maker were directed, but difficulties arose from the dislike of the Duke of Aosta himself to the scheme.  A prince of some Liberal country was what was wanted:  there was even some talk of offering the crown to the English Duke of Edinburgh, while one party dreamed of an Iberian