The Fourth Estate, vol. 1

by Armando Palacio Valdés

"We do not aspire," he said, "to being the vanguard in this great battle of thought about to take place in the town of Sarrio, but we do aspire to fighting like common soldiers, for we do expect a place in the rear-guard. There we shall fight like good men, and if we finally fall vanquished, we will envelop ourselves in the sacred banner of progress."

The military allegorical style was very effective in the town, and it contributed not a little to the enthusiastic reception accorded to the paper.

In short, the article was so rich in expression, so replete with deep remarks, and the style was so concise, that the public was at a loss to attribute it to any one but the illustrious director—and in this it was right.

Then the periodical contained a long article by Sinforoso on "Woman." It consisted of two close columns of poetic prose, embroidered with all the flowers of rhetoric, describing the sweet influence of this half of the human race.

He maintained, in fervent language, that civilization can not exist apart from matrimony; conjugal love is its only basis. Everything is holy, everything is beautiful, everything is happy in the intimate union of a young married couple. The man, rendered happy by his companion, feels his faculties increase, and is capable of carrying out enterprises otherwise impossible to him. The influence of the woman presses him onward to virtue and glory; it is the sweetest and at the same time the most powerful of social forces. Sinforoso queried with surprise, "How could some beings consider woman inferior to man? She with her beauty, delicacy, grace, sweetness, perspicacity, and patience is the highest work of creation. But the mission of woman is to be a wife and mother. Without being these she is not fully evolved, she fades like a flower without perfume." The writer concluded by advising woman to bear this in mind, and for no earthly consideration to consent to be voluntarily deprived of the two conditions of her honor and glory.

This exordium on matrimony, although addressed to the fair sex in general, was written for the special edification of a certain pretty cigarette-maker of the Calle de Caborana, whom Sinforoso had courted in vain for some years. The public thought that the girl would end by accepting him, partly by reason of the poetic terms in which he made his case clear, and partly because of the fifty reales a month which the suitor now received for his work on the staff.

Then followed a contribution from the professor, Don Jeronimo de la Fuente; it was a serious, violent attack on Kepler's three great laws of the motions of the planetary bodies, or rather on two of them, for he preserved silence on the first, which treats of the elliptical orbit of the planets. He fiercely opposed the second, maintaining and demonstrating by means of a most brilliant calculation that the areas described by the radius vector are not in any degree equal to the time employed in making them, but they concord with the attractive or repulsive force of the celestial bodies. But the chief object of his attack was the third law, for Don Jeronimo rejected as antiquated and absurd the idea that the time taken for the revolutions of planets was proportionate to the cubic feet of their distances from each other; for he showed not merely by empty words, but by figures, that there was no ground for such a calculation.

He announced another article for the next number, which was to establish a new basis for the celestial mechanism which would quite smash up the old one. In it he maintained that the stars were attracted by one pole and repelled by another like electric bodies, and upon this great principle he satisfactorily explained the movements of the celestial bodies, their disturbances, and many problems which had hitherto been deemed insoluble.

Thanks to the telescope in the window of his house, Don Jeronimo had made a series of prodigious discoveries which set at naught all the existing knowledge of astronomy. It was not astonishing that the learned professor, filled with legitimate pride, exclaimed at the end of his article:

"Down with Kepler, Newton, Laplace, and Galileo from the pedestal upon which man's ignorance has placed them and all colossal standard-bearers of false science! All their calculations have vanished like smoke, and their magnificent systems are like dry leaves, fallen from the tree of science to rot and decay."