The spada, too, is pickled down to his bones--he is in great request for the hotels, and his eyes, duly salted, are considered a sort of luxury; in some places these are the perquisite of the fishermen, yielded by their employers, who farm the fisheries, and having satisfied the king, make what terms they can with the subject.
From the brief review, in our last Number, of Spain, her commercial policy, her economical resources, her fiscal rigours, her financial embarrassments, these facts may be said to have been developed:--In the first place, that theoretically--that is, so far as legislation--Spain is the land of restrictions and prohibitions; and that the principle of protection in behalf, not of nascent, but of comparatively ancient and still unestablished interests, is recognized, and carried out in the most latitudinarian sense of absolute interdict or extravagant impost. Secondly, that under such a system, Spain has continued the exceptional case of a non or scarcely progressing European state; that the maintenance and enhancement of fiscal rigours and manufacturing monopoly, jealously fenced round with a legislative wall of prohibition and restriction, has neither advanced the prosperity of the quarter of a million of people in Catalonia, Valencia, and Biscay, in whose exclusive behalf the great and enduring interests of the remaining thirteen millions and upwards of the population have been postponed or sacrificed--nor contributed to strengthen the financial resources of the government, as proved by the prostrate position and prospects of a bankrupt and beggared exchequer; that, as the necessary and inevitable consequence, the progress of agriculture, the ascendant interest of all-powerful communities and vast territorially endowed states--of Spain, the almost one only interest and element of vitality, economical and political--has been impeded, and continues to be discouraged; that the march of internal improvements is checked or stunted, when not absolutely stayed; finally, that public morals--the social health of a great people, inheritors of glorious antecedents, of an historic renown for those qualities of a high order, the deep-seated sentiment of personal, as of national honour and dignity, the integrity, fidelity, and gallantry, which more loftily spurn contaminating approximation with action springing out of base, sordid, and degrading motives and associations--have been sapped and corrupted by the debasing influences of that gigantic system of organized illicit trade which covers Spain with hordes of _contrabandistas_, more numerous and daring than the bands of _aduaneros_ and the armies of regulars whom they set at defiance, and infests the coast of Spain with fleets of smuggling craft, which all the _guardas costas_, with the ancient armada of Spain, were it in existence, would be powerless to annihilate. And all this fine nation, of warm and generous temperament, of naturally noble and virtuous aspirations, thus desperately to be dismantled of its once-proud attributes, and demoralized in its character; its exhaustless riches of soil and climate to be wantonly wasted--per force of false legislation to be left uncultured--and for why? Shades of the illustrious Gabarrus and Jovellanos, why? Why, to enable some half dozen _fabricantes_ of Barcelona to keep less than half-a-dozen steam-engines at work, which shall turn some few thousands of spindles, spinning and twisting some few millions of pounds of yarn, by which, after nearly three quarters of a century that the cotton manufacture has been planted, "swathed, rocked, and dandled" with legislative fondness into a rickety nursling, some fifty millions of yards of cotton cloths are said to be painfully brought forth in the year; the value of which may probably be equal to the same or a larger quantity of French cottons introduced by contraband, and consumed in the provinces of Catalonia and Arragon themselves--the first being sole seat of the cotton manufacture for all Spain. And for this deplorable consummation, the superabundant harvests of the waving fields, the luscious floods of the vineyards, the full flowing yield of the olive groves of Spain--of the wine, the oil, and the corn, of which nature is more bountiful than in Egypt of old--the produce and the wealth of the millions, (which, permitted, would exchange advantageously for foreign products, and, bye all the value, add to the store of national wealth, and create the means of reproduction,) are left to run waste and absolutely perish on the ground, as not worth the cost of transport to markets without demand.