Transcribed from the 1819 George Smallfield edition by DavidPrice,

OBSERVATIONS
ON
THE STATE
OF
RELIGION AND LITERATURE
IN
SPAIN,

MADEDURING

A JOURNEY THROUGH THEPENINSULA

In1819.

London:

Printedby George Smallfield Hackney.

1819.

p.3OBSERVATIONS, &c.

There are in Spain, according toAntillon’s [3a] calculations, two hundred thousandecclesiastics.  They possess immense revenues and anincalculable influence over the mass of the people; though it iscertain that influence is diminishing, notwithstanding thecountenance and co-operation of a government deeply interested inpreserving their authority.

It would be great injustice to the regular clergy of Spain toclass them with the immense hordes of monks and friars, scatteredover the face of the Peninsula, some possessing rich andwell-stored convents, large estates and accumulating wealth, andothers (the mendicant orders) who prey more directly on thelabours of the poor, and compel the industrious to administer totheir holy, uninterrupted laziness.  The former, though,doubtless, by far too numerous, are for the most part intelligentand humane: dispensing benevolence and consolation in theirrespective parishes; friendly, in many instances, to liberty anddevoted to literature.  The latter, with few, but strikingexceptions, [3b] are unmanageable masses of ignoranceand indolence. [3c]  They live (as one of the Spanishpoets says) in a state of sensual enjoyment between theorgan-loft and the refectory, to which all other enjoyment is butpurgatory; [3d] the link which should p. 4connect themwith the common weal for ever broken; the ties of family andfriend dissolved; their authority founded on the barbarism anddegradation of the people, they are interested in stemming thetorrent of improvement in knowledge and liberty, which must inthe end inevitably sweep away these “cumberers of thesoil.”  No society in which the sound principles ofpolicy are at all understood, would consent to maintain anumerous body of idle, unproductive, useless members in opulenceand luxury, (at the expense of the active and the laborious,)merely because they had chosen to decorate themselves withpeculiar insignia—to let their beards grow, or to shavetheir heads; and though the progress of civilization in Spain hasbeen greatly retarded, or rather it has been compelled toretrograde under the present system of despotism, yet, that greatadvances have been made since the beginning of the lateRevolution, is happily too obvious to be denied. ...