A locksmith or a wheelwright who could prove four descents of western, blood called himself a son of somebody—­a hidalgo—­and despised the farmer and the merchant.  And those very artisans were careful not to injure themselves by excessive industry, although not reluctant by exorbitant prices to acquire in one or-two days what might seem a fair remuneration for a week, and to impress upon their customers that it was rather by way of favour that they were willing to serve them at all.

Labour being thus deficient, it is obvious that there could hardly have been a great accumulation, according to modern ideas, of capital.  That other chief element of national wealth, which is the result of generations of labour and of abstinence, was accordingly not abundant.  And even those accretions of capital, which in the course of centuries had been inevitable, were as clumsily and inadequately diffused as the most exquisite human perverseness could desire.  If the object of civil and political institutions had been to produce the greatest ill to the greatest number, that object had been as nearly attained at last in Spain as human imperfection permits; the efforts of government and of custom coming powerfully to the aid of the historical evils already indicated.

It is superfluous to say that the land belonged not to those who lived upon it—­but subject to the pre-eminent right of the crown—­to a small selection of the human species.  Moderate holdings, small farms, peasant proprietorship’s, were unknown.  Any kind of terrestrial possession; in short, was as far beyond the reach of those men who held themselves so haughtily and esteemed themselves so inordinately, as were the mountains in the moon.

The great nobles—­and of real grandees of Spain there were but forty-nine, although the number of titled families was much larger—­owned all the country, except that vast portion of it which had reposed for ages in the dead-hand of the Church.  The law of primogeniture, strictly enforced, tended with every generation to narrow the basis of society.  Nearly every great estate was an entail, passing from eldest son to eldest son, until these were exhausted, in which case a daughter transferred the family possessions to a new house.  Thus the capital of the country—­meagre at best in comparison with what it might have been, had industry been honoured instead of being despised, had the most intelligent and most diligent classes been cherished rather than hunted to death or into obscure dens like vermin—­was concentrated in very few hands.  Not only was the accumulation less than it should have been, but the slenderness of its diffusion had nearly amounted to absolute stagnation.  The few possessors of capital wasted their revenues in unproductive consumption.  The millions of the needy never dreamed of the possibility of deriving benefit from the capital of the rich, nor would have condescended to employ it, nor known how to employ