The institutes give instruction to 14,872 pupils, and the colleges to almost the same number, 14,290; home or private education absorbs 4476; making a total in 1880 of 33,638; more than three times the number in 1848, and, including the episcopal seminaries, giving one pupil to every 398 inhabitants. All these pupils are admitted to the official examinations, and take their degrees equally on passing them. It is found that 13 per cent of the candidates are rejected at the examinations, 43.8 per cent. simply pass, and 43.1 gain honours of various kinds; while 9 per cent. take the degree of Bachelor from the colleges, and 37.2 proceed to take it from the universities.
The salary of the masters is from 120l. to 180l. (except in Madrid where it is from 160l. to 220l.), with a right to a portion of the fees for matriculation and degrees. The supernumerary masters receive 60l. in Madrid and 40l. in the provinces; auxiliary masters are unpaid. Pensions of 20l. are sometimes given to poor but distinguished pupils. The cost of all the institutes is 118,935l., the income, 44,818l., leaving a deficit of 74,117l. to be supplied either by the State, the provinces, or the municipalities.
The course of instruction is two-fold, general and special. The general comprises: Spanish and Latin grammar, two courses; rhetoric and poetry, geography, history of Spain, universal history, psychology, logic and ethics, arithmetic and algebra, geometry and trigonometry, physics and the elements of chemistry, natural history, physiology and hygiene, and elementary agriculture. The special courses are those of agriculture, the fine arts, manufactures and commerce.
Of public schools of primary instruction there are about 23,000 of all grades and classes, 1308 are infant schools and 1400 are for male and 100 for female adults.
The great drawback in the higher education of Spain is the disproportionate number of students in law, medicine, or pharmacy, in comparison with the few who cultivate the special branches of agriculture, industrial or commercial science. Hence the former professions are overstocked, with results productive of far-reaching evils to the country and to the administration. Notwithstanding its far inferior population the number of students in Spain who take their degrees in law and medicine is almost treble that of France and of Germany, while the total of degrees conferred in all the faculties of Spain is equal to that of France, which has double the population. Nothing more plainly shows the character of the people, and the mischief of "empleomania" than such a fact in a country whose natural riches in agriculture and mining are so great and so little developed, where there is so large a field for industrial enterprises of many kinds, and where the fruits of all these are at present almost wholly reaped by foreigners.
The primary education of Spain, though nominally everywhere alike, is really so very varied as to defy any average description. A few of her infant schools are equal to the best of those of other countries. Where the provincial deputations or the municipalities take an interest in education the primary schools are very fair, but in other parts the education is little more than nominal, and the schoolmaster's appointment is well-nigh a sinecure both in pay and labour; and probably at the present moment, notwithstanding the great improvements of late years, two-thirds of the people can still neither read nor write.
Church and Religion.
From the time of the Œcumenical Council of Nicea, A.D. 325, with the brief exception of the reigns of the Arian Visigoth kings, Spain has been the champion of orthodoxy in religion. From early times too the demarcation between Church and State has been less marked, or rather the influence of the former over the latter has been more constant and more powerful, than in perhaps any other European kingdom. The great councils of Toledo were scarcely more ecclesiastical than civil assemblies. The recognition of the sovereign, the order of succession, the validity of the laws, were either settled or sanctioned therein. Later, in the great struggle with the Moors, through the antagonism of exclusive beliefs, the war assumed the character of a religious crusade. The semi-monastic Spanish military orders, the preaching of the monks, the sanction and the bulls of the Popes—auxiliaries which the kings of Spain were forced to summon to their aid—gave a complexion to the conquest and to the national character quite different to what might have been the case had the contest been fought out by the sovereign, the lay warriors, and the civil power alone. Thus the triumph of the Christian over the Moor became in some sort also the triumph of the Roman over the national Spanish Church. The Mozarabic liturgy gave way to that of Rome. The peculiar institution of the inquisition, following on that of the Santa Hermandad in civil matters, developed in Spain a degree of power to which it never attained in other lands. The certainty and the secrecy of its proceedings, the mingled pomp and horror of its "autos de fe," the whispers and the shudder with which men told of the tortures of its hidden processes, deeply impressed and captivated the imagination of a people singularly greedy of, and susceptible to, strong and vivid emotions. The chivalrous respect for women, heightened by the reserve and half-seclusion which the Spanish knights had learned from the Moors, was transformed in the sphere of religion into an almost ardent passion of devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Centuries before the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception was proclaimed by Pius IX. the cry of the Spanish beggar heard at every door throughout her vast dominions was, "Ave Maria purisima, sin pecádo concebida." Spain had been the champion of Christendom against the Jews and against the Moors; she had without remorse violated every compact she had sworn with the latter, and she became equally the champion of Roman Catholicism against the Reformation. Though Philip II. failed in his great armed struggle with the northern powers, and wasted and destroyed therein all the real resources of Spain, yet Spanish theologians were among the most eloquent and the most learned in the Council of Trent; and it was the Jesuits of Spain who headed the reaction of the seventeenth century, and who won back all but the Teutonic and Scandinavian races to the allegiance of Rome. This glory of Catholicism is never absent from the heart of a Spaniard. His whole literature is steeped in it; it inspires Spain's greatest painters. It is this deep but unconscious feeling that Protestanism is un-Spanish which is the real stronghold of Catholicism in Spain, and which, in spite of spoliation and political subjection, still gives the clerical party there a greater power than they possess in other countries. Yet the few Spaniards who embraced the reformed doctrines in the sixteenth century were not inferior to those of other lands in earnestness, in learning, in eloquence, or in high position, both in Church and State. There was just a moment when the court of Charles V. hovered on the verge of protest against Rome. When, as before related, the liberties of Spain fell beneath the iron rule of the Austrian sovereigns, it was the Church, by the hand of one of its greatest ornaments, Cardinal Ximenes, which became the willing instrument of despotism. In return for the servility of the court, and the presence and the sanction of the sovereign at the "autos," the inquisition lent its aid to the monarchy, and its assistance was called in to suppress the trade in horses, so senselessly forbidden, on the northern frontier. In the seventeenth century, however, the Spanish court fell under the influence of the French encyclopædists. The Jesuits were banished in 1767. We need not detail again the various vicissitudes of the abolition and re-establishment of the inquisition, of the suppression of tithes, of the sale of Church property, the destruction of the monasteries, and the exile of the monks, the effects of which have been sufficiently indicated above.
Since the Concordat of 1851, Spain is ruled ecclesiastically by nine archbishops; those of Toledo (the primate of all Spain), Burgos, Saragossa, Tarragona, Valencia, Granada, Seville, Valladolid, and Compostella, under whom are forty-six bishops, with their chapters, and about 35,000 clergy. The mode of episcopal appointment is this: the king presents three names to the Pope, of which his Holiness selects one, who is forthwith nominated to the vacant see. Since 1868, theological education is entirely under the hands of the bishops, who have a seminary in each diocese. The clergy are paid by the State; but the stipends of the country priests are said to be frequently in arrear. In some parts of Spain, as in the manufacturing towns of Barcelona, religion has to a great extent lost its hold upon the people; in other parts, as in the Basque Provinces, the majority are still devout. Since 1871 a reaction from extremes of scepticism and advanced socialistic views is manifest in many of the most popular writers. A small but increasing body of Protestants has been established since 1868; but the vicissitudes of revolution and reaction, and the present ambiguous state of the law have acted unfavourably on the movement. The pastors have honourably distinguished themselves by their zeal for the education of the classes utterly neglected by the dominant Church. On the whole, the clerical party in Spain, considered as a political body, seems gradually sinking into a like condition to that of France. It is powerful enough to thwart and check the policy of its opponents, but impotent to carry out its own measures. The extreme Ultramontane party, for whom the Comte de Chambord is too liberal and Pope Leo XIII. too comprehensive, has lately adopted the banner of the Carlists. Whatever the future of Spain may be, it is not probable that the Church will ever attain again the political influence and the exclusive control of education which it possessed in the past, in spite of the undoubted talents and virtues of many of its upholders.