Local government in the smaller towns of the Peninsula is generally said to be very good, and to work with great smoothness and efficiency hand-in-hand with centralised authority in Madrid.  The fusion of the varying nationalities is gradually gaining ground, and the hard-and-fast line between the provinces is disappearing.  There is more nationality now in matters of every-day life than there has ever been before.  In old times it needed the touch of a foreign hand, the threat of foreign interference, to rouse the nation as one man.  Commerce and industry and the national emulation between province and province are doing gradually what it once needed the avarice of a Napoleon to evoke.

The paper constitutions of Spain have been many, beginning with that of 1812, which the Liberals tried to force on Ferdinand VII., to that of 1845, which the Conservatives look upon as the ideal, or that of 1869, embodying all that the Revolution had gained from absolutism, including manhood suffrage.  In the first Cortes summoned after the Restoration, thanks to the good sense of Castelar, the Republican party, from being conspirators, became a parliamentary party in opposition.  Zorilla alone, looking upon it as a sham, retired to France in disgust.  By the new constitution of 1876, the power of making laws remained, as before, vested in the Cortes and the Crown:  the Senate consists of three classes, Grandes, Bishops, and high officers of State sitting by right, with one hundred members nominated by the Crown, and one hundred and eighty elected by provincial Councils, universities, and other corporations.  Half of the elected members go out every five years.  The deputies to the Congress are elected by indirect vote on a residential manhood suffrage, and they number four hundred and thirty-one.  A certain number of equal electoral districts of fifty thousand inhabitants elect one member each; and twenty-six large districts, having several representatives, send eighty-eight members to the Cortes.  Every province has its provincial elective Council, managing its local affairs, and each commune its separate District Council, with control over local taxation.  Yet, though ostensibly free, these local bodies are practically in the power of the political wire-puller, or cacique.

CHAPTER X

COMMERCE AND AGRICULTURE

Commerce and industry had progressed by leaps and bounds even during the disastrous and troublous years between the expulsion of Isabel II. and the restoration of her son.  The progress is now much more steady and more diffused over the whole country, but it is by no means less remarkable, especially taking into consideration the disaster of the war with America and the loss to Spain of her old colonies.