The Sun. — 1844-11-29 (London, England)

EVENING'  STATE OF SPAIN.  [We willingly publish the following letter, because it is only fair that an advocate of Spain should be heard. But, after all, does he not confirm our statement ?—] TO 7'IIE EDITOR 01, TIIE SG Sia,—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 say that France, in the midst of its civil dissensions, repelled its foreign aggressors, put down a vile aristocracy, 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 recognise nothing but the law of force, with whom, with the single exception of Eapartero, no generors 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 bankruptcies, 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 aggression ? 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 philosophic spirit of inquiry, generated by free intercourse with the rest of the nations ? Had she not, on the contrary, the misfortune to be governed by a Monarch deriving his revenue from adventitious 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 meddlings 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 nothing. The Queen, infamous, and more degraded still, avaracious ; Narvaez, a plunderer, a cut-throat, an intriguer, 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 stockjobbers; a Cortes sold to the highest bidder; officers who 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