Although the people of Spain have hated their more immediate neighbours with an exceeding bitter hatred,—­as, indeed, they had good cause to do in the past,—­her public men have had a strange fancy for importing or imitating French customs.  One that militates more than anything else against agricultural prosperity is the law of inheritance, copied from the French.  By this the State divides an estate amongst the heirs without any reference to the wishes of the proprietor at his death.  Not only are all large estates broken up and practically dissipated, so that it is to no one’s interest to improve his property or spend money on it, but the small farms of the peasant proprietor are broken into smaller fragments in the same way; and it is no uncommon thing to see a field of a few acres divided into six or eight furrows, none of them enough to support one man.  While he has to go off seeking work where he can get it, his strip of land clings to him like a curse, for he must lose his work if he would try to cultivate it, and at his death it will again be subdivided, until at last there is nothing left to share.  Meanwhile, the land, which is not enough to be of any value to anyone, has been allowed to go almost out of cultivation; or if it bear anything at all, it is weeds.

Until some remedy be found for this enervating system, it would seem as if Spanish agriculture is doomed to remain in its present unsatisfactory condition over a great part of the kingdom.  The improvement of agriculture is practically a question of private enterprise, and under the existing law of inheritance neither enterprise nor interest can be expected of the small proprietor; nor indeed of the large landowner, who knows that, whatever he may do to improve his estate, it is doomed to be cut to pieces and divided amongst his next of kin until it is eventually extinguished.  Whether, in some future time, an enlightened scheme of co-operation could work the arid lands into cultivation again, if the Government would give the necessary aid in the form of irrigation, remains among the unanswered riddles of the future.  Prophecy in Spain is never possible; it is always the unexpected which happens in that country of sharp contradictions.  All one can do is to note past progress and the drift of the present current, which, whatever government is at the nominal head of affairs, seems to be towards widespread—­in fact, quite general—­advance both in knowledge and industrial activity.

The greatest hope for the future lies in the fact that it is no longer foreign money or foreign labour that is working for the good of the country; the impulse is from within, and every penny of capital that is sunk in public works, manufactures, or industrial enterprise, is so much invested in a settled state of affairs.  When the individual has everything to lose by revolutionary changes, when the commerce of the country is becoming too important to be allowed to be upset easily, and it is everybody’s interest to support and increase it, the main body of the people are ranged on the side of peace and progress.  They have had enough of civil war, enough of tyranny; they have achieved freedom, and want nothing so much as to taste of it in quietness.