The Sun.
London, England, 1844-11-29 00:00:00

STATE OF SPAIN.

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[we willingly publish the following letter, because
it is only fair that an advocate of Spain hould be
heard. But, after all, dies he not confirm our state-
ment ?—]

Ti) THE EDITOR 011 THE SUN.
SlR,—Your leading article this evening on Spain
and its people is calumnious and unjust—unworthy,
besides, of the politics advocated by your paper. You
compare Spain, inhabited by fifteen millions of people,
to France, with a population of thirty. You bay
that France, in the midst of its civil dissensions, re-
pelled its foreign aggressors, put down a vile aris-
tocracy, and made itself a name, before the era of
Napoleon. You say that Spain has produced nothing
but adventurers in civil war, butchers, men who re-
cognise nothing but the law of force, with whom,
with the single exception of Espartero, no generous
man can sympathise. You take no account of the
circumstances of the two nations ; you show no side
but the bright side of the French Revolution ; you
write half a century after it ; you forget the murders,
drownings, hangings, imprisonments, denunciations,
fines, confiscations of property, assignat bank-
ruptcies, and all the atrocities that characterised that
Revolution ; and you blame the Spaniards for not
following quite so actively in this exterminating
career. You forget that the Spanish Revolution was
early checked by the infamous interference of its
powerful neighbour, under the Duke d'Angouleme.
You forget the previous career of a greater army
than that of the Duke d'Angouleme—the Imperial
Army of the great Napoleon in Spain ? Did the
Spaniards show no vigour, then, in resisting foreign
aggresion ? Is the nature of their country, too, such
that they are capable of acting together ? Are they
not separated from each other, cut up by mountains,
thinly assembled together, and incapable for this
reason of largely combined movements ? Have the
Spaniards had the advantage that France had before
her revolution, of a widely-diffused literature, a phi-
losophic spirit of inquiry, generated by free
intercourse with the rest of the nations ?
Had she not, on the contrary, the misfortune to be go-
verned by a Monarch deriving his revenue from ad-
ventitious sources of supply, and therefore able to fix
his despotic rule without the consent of his people ?
Had she not a Church absorbing all the property and
stifling the intellect of the people, for reasons peculiar
to the geographical structure of the country, and
others, which it would be too long now to enter into ?
It would be too long, indeed, to describe the great
disadvantages under which she laboured, as compared
with either England or France, from which she
started into revolution. Her career, a rough one
naturally, has been interrupted by the unlawful med-
dlings of other nations. If she is so unfortunate as
not to have elements in the higher order of society
with which to regenerate herself, she must begin from
the lower. She must take brave and loyal men like
Zurbano, if men of better breeding are corrupt and
venial. The upper order of society has produced no-
thing. The Queen, infamous, and more degraded still,
avaracious ; Narvaez, a plunderer, a cut-throat, an in-
triguer, a man loading himself with honours without
deserving them, inventing plots against his friends
who become powerful, and loading with favours mean
people who flatter him; the Finance Ministers stock-
jobbers; a Cortes sold to the highest bidder; officers
vk ho make great parade in ball-rooms, and are cowards
in the field. This is the state of things that you would
,uphold against the revolution. Spain will never be
either happy or honoured with such blood-suckers at
the helm. Delenda est Carthago. They must be got
rid of, and by rough hands. Zurbano, a man of the
people, is one of them. I wish him success. To say,
as you have said, that he is ready to sell himself to any
party, is contrary to all experience of his history to
the present time. He has ever been faithful to the
Constitution. In addition to his fidelity, he has the
rarest of all qualities, heroic bravery. Though it may
cost Spain another struggle, any struggle is better
than degradation.—Your obedient servant,
A SPANISH TRAVELLER.
London, Oct. 27.