fiction counts. The short-story writer is discussed, puffed, glorified and paid fabulous sums. So the Dutch, in the throes of their tulip mania, lavished fortunes on freak varieties.

The chief harm that this deluge of fiction does is in hiding the permanent elements of literature. A freshet has no past-it tumbled just now out of the clouds. So neither the novelists nor their mannikins disclose acquaintance with other standards save those of the moment. They look neither before nor after; they are intrinsically villagers. Even Mr. Henry James seems never to have explored the dark ages before Balzac began to produce fiction. The Elizabethan dramatists read everything they could lay their hands on-and educated men and women are still reading their plays. Can we suppose that posterity three hundred years hence will puzzle itself over "The Golden Bowl"? Will it not doubt, as we do, the credentials of men who propose to describe human life and yet know only so much of it as their own looking-glass shows them? But Macaulay is saturated with the past, and whether you accept his opinions or not, he gives you the satisfaction, the more intense because it is now so rare, of world contacts wherever you open his pages. No amount of psychologizing in commonplace craniums can do that!

IX.

I would not exaggerate the contrast between Macaulay's welldefined, close-knit body of opinions and the Pragmatist confusion in which we are weltering to-day; but that contrast will strike middle-aged readers who go back to him after a long interval. Living amid a shower of fads, we cannot guess whether any of them will solidify into a philosophy. He has standards derived from the culture of past civilizations. We are urged to believe that we date from this morning. He was a link in that chain of continuity which stretches back to Athens and Jerusalem. He believed in the primal virtues-in courage, in uprightness, in truth; he revered the family as the irreducible social unit. Our rebels not only doubt, but deny these fundamentals, and set up the gratification of appetites as the end of human existence. Merely as an antidote to much of the confused, febrile, anarchic opinions and emotions which honeycomb our life Macaulay should be read. Untainted by introspection, he may serve as a remedy for morbidness, the blight of those moderns who have not yet flung themselves body and soul into the pit.

His service is not merely negative, for it implies that there is stored up in him a large volume of unexhausted force. Only brutes and anarchists spurn experience. Civilized men no more throw over moral and intellectual ballast, which has steadied the keel of progress for generations, than they revert from clothes to nakedness. Progress can come only when the New, which we accept, is better than the Old which we discard. But how can we prove this unless we know the Old? In Art and Literature, as well as in Philosophy, Religion and Social Life, multitudes are clutching frantically at every novelty; but it by no means follows that because the Old has grown tedious or intolerable the latest brand of the New should be preferred to it.

So far as he goes, Macaulay bears witness to principles that not only his own time, but a long tradition, regarded as permanent. He was the last British writer in whom that tradition can be seen unblurred. Carlyle you find already seething with radical ideas. Newman, when he was not a casuist, now intentional, now self-deluding,—relapsed into theological atavism: you get from him neither the antique nor the modern, but the mediæval, that point of view which always denotes arrested development, when it is embraced as final by a modern. Arnold, classical in form, had already passed into the shadow of the Great Doubt which made the Pessimist in him predominate over the Stoic. Macaulay was too surely an optimist to need to fall back on Stoicism; in other respects he was the most Roman of British writers. The intellectual and moral traditions which flourished in him were native among the best Augustans; his writings, especially the History, are the most Roman of all modern productions. It has the massiveness and pomp and solidity, the architectonic mastery, the directness and virility of those buildings which, when we come upon their ruins to-day,-it may be a single arch or a fragment of brick wall,-conjure up for us in Italy or in Spain or in Africa "the grandeur that was Rome." That genius is not subtle and intimate and beautiful like the Greek; it is intellectual rather than spiritual, moral rather than religious: but it is one of the supreme manifestations of human faculty, and being that, it can never lose its significance. Macaulay is its modern spokesman not because he strove to imitate the master Romans, but because he had a genius akin to theirs. WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER.

SPAIN'S COMMERCIAL AWAKENING.

BY FREDERIC COURTLAND PENFIELD.

PRIOR to the Spanish-American war it would have been as much of an anomaly to write of Spain as a commercial and industrial land as to seriously describe Switzerland as a maritime Power. But an industrious and prosperous Spain is a twentiethcentury fact, paradoxical as the statement may appear.

Eleven short years ago, Spaniards believed that the glory of their country had passed forever with the transfer to Uncle Sam's flag and to independent sovereignty of her few remaining colonies. Not every Spaniard had known his king's name even, but every one of them was aware that for centuries half the world had been governed from the motherland south of the Pyrenees.

And these people, reared with a scant regard for industry, and inordinately proud, believed in 1898 that the future held for them only the fate of sinking to a degraded unimportance that Spain, as an isolated state of Europe, could not hope to be more than a second Portugal. Sagacious financiers of Europe were inclined to look upon the Iberian Peninsula as a country of which the bankruptcy was only a matter of a few years. An unsuccessful foreign war, the loss of her island possessions, the destruction of all that was of value in the Spanish navy, and seething discontent at home were the factors which preceded King Alfonso's accession. No monarch since Franz Josef succeeded to the Hapsburg throne ever came to power under such unfavorable circumstances. The blow to the pride of Spain caused by the loss of her colonial empire had furnished an arın for Carlism to attack and irritate the régime.

It would savor of inhumanity to argue that war can bring blessings; but the proverb of the cloud with the silver lining has time and again been proven true. Never was there armed strife beVOL. CXC.-NO. 649.

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tween nations so devoid of hatred and enmity, probably, as the war between the United States and Spain. And no American can hear now of the splendid recuperation of the once unhappy kingdom without a feeling of profound satisfaction.

A prosperous country, built upon frugality and the development of energy and of the resources of the soil, is a golden fact -a Spain of enviable commercial credit is already reared upon the ruins of the nation that for centuries existed upon shadowy romance and worship of departed grandeur. And the new Spain, whose motive-force springs not from the windmills of dreamy fiction, but from honest toil, is materially better off this year than it has been in generations.

Since the war Spanish bonds have practically doubled in value, and exchange with foreign money-markets has improved in corresponding ratio; Spanish seaports on the Atlantic and Mediterranean teem with shipping; the soil is yielding a satisfactory bounty; rich deposits of minerals are being uncovered, and, all in all, the contracted Spain is more prosperous than was the nation that had to meet yearly deficits in Cuba and in the Philippines.

Deprived of every oversea territory save a few valueless possessions in northern Africa, and the Canary Islands-and the people of this tiny group are agitating for independence or autonomySpain can now expect nothing but from her own resources.

At every point of the country the soil is being improved and abandoned cultivation resumed. Sizable regions of Galicia and Estremadura, desert land until recently, are now rich with crops. Carts are seen on the slopes of Old Castile, and open furrows created at great expense with rich fertilizers are giving forth generous products; and where the traveller formerly knew only sterile solitudes he sees fields of grain and prosperous farms.

In the south, stock-raising, the principal resource of Andalusia, has taken immense strides, and during a recent three-days' fair at Seville there were sold 55,000 head of cattle. Emigration has decreased to two or three thousand souls annually. What is best of all, and thereby promises much for the country's good, is the wide-spread determination for personal betterment through systematic toil. Indeed, the nature of the people seems changing from a dolce far niente indolence to enterprise and thrift. Thus the Spaniard is fast living down the mañana curse with which he

used to be twitted. In time the habit of work should elevate from the peasantry a bourgeois class, like that of France. Spain's prosperity then would be secure.

The expansion of existing industries and the creation of new ones have, of course, had a vital influence in bringing about these changes for the better. The number of workmen in the mines of Biscay has increased from 7,000 to 13,000 in six years, augmenting in like proportion the annual commerce of the port of Bilbao. New mines are being opened everywhere, for the land is rich in minerals of many kinds, and their extraction gives employment to much foreign and home capital.

Spain has labored so valiantly and with such ardor that her credit is now a matter of national pride. Just previous to the American war foreign exchange stood at a discount of 60 per cent. In 1900 it had improved to 27 per cent., and it is now almost at a parity. This proves the country's remarkable recovery. The Spanish people harbor no hatred toward Americans. Naturally, there are many homes where loved ones lost in the war are still mourned; but nowhere in the land, from the Basque Provinces southward to the Mediterranean, does the tourist discover any dislike of the sons and daughters of the Great Republic. Undoubtedly more Spanish homes were stricken with grief in the years of futile effort to quell revolutions in Cuba and the Philippines, before humane duty compelled America to be the instrument for severing forever from Spanish rule the peoples of Porto Rico, of Cuba, and of the straggling archipelago of the Philippines. In outspoken Catalonia Americans are distinctly popular, and the people of Barcelona, Saragossa, and other trading towns blame Madrid's statesmen and self-sufficient officials for the fiasco of the war. Travelling Americans fearing incivility in the Peninsula promptly discover the lack of foundation for their apprehension.

However strange it may seem to think of Spain as a trading nation, that is to-day the best description of her. It used to be shouted from the political rostrum that, while the United States had caused the Stars and Stripes to float over the Philippines, American trade was not going to follow the flag to the islands; that, language and sympathies in the archipelago being Spanish, so would their commerce remain. And, whenever there was native resistance to American arms, it used to be said with a