I pass over small squabbles, which were of daily occurrence at the Palace of the Congress, to come to the sitting of the 21st March, 1873, which deserves to be handed down to history. On that day the Bill for the Abolition of Slavery in Porto Rico was introduced by Castelar, in a speech over which all Madrid went into raptures. The "inimitable tribune," as his admirers call him, surpassed himself. He led off in the usual oratorical style by pretending that he was not going to be oratorical--"the bench on which he sat was one for actions, not words"--and then, in the usual oratorical style, he contrived to say so many words that the official paper next morning was full of them.
His first speech, made when he was but twenty-one, in the year 1854, was on the very same subject, as he reminded his hearers. The Christian religion, he said in the course of his remarks, was the religion of the slave, and the Apocalypse the poem of the slave. Christ was the descendant of enslaved kings, a bondsman of Roman conquerors. But I must give up the attempt to follow the "inimitable tribune;" his lengthened and dazzling chain of eloquence was too elaborate to be picked up link by link. He was historical, passionate, and poetical by turns, but always intensely rhetorical, keeping a close watchfulness for effect, for Señor Castelar does not argue so much as declaim. He had the good taste to defend the Radical Ministry from the charge of having acted in favour of emancipation because the influence of the United States was brought to bear upon it. Such a course, he asserted, would be unworthy of the dignity and independence of the country.
I must tell you that the way to make Spain recoil from doing an act she admits to be good and needful is to counsel her to do it--she will not be advised by others. It would not be Spanish. If a Spaniard has a notion of getting himself re-vaccinated, take care, if you are a friend of his, how you talk to him on the subject. If you recommend him to have the operation performed, he will change his mind at once. He will not be bidden, he will risk small-pox in preference. It may happen that he will die, but at all events he will have the satisfaction of having had his own way.