EMILIO CASTELAR. FROM THE "FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW" OF JUNE AND JULY, 1878 As there is some reason to hope that this remarkable man will visit England in the course of the present year, and as few Englishmen have any very clear notions about him, it may perhaps not be amiss to put together a sketch of his life and writings. Most people are aware that he is the most prominent of Spanish republicans, that he is a great orator, and was for a short time invested with dictatorial powers; but not many have realised that he is extremely unlike most of the distinguished republicans about whom they have heard so unlike as almost to mark the end of an old and the commencement of a new era. No one can read many pages of his writings without finding out that he is a democrat of the democrats, the mortal enemy of kings and aristocracies and priests. In the world of which he dreams, and for the advent of which he steadily labours, there will be none of these things. He has ever before him the vision of a time When the Monarch and the Anarch alike shall pass away, But towards this consummation he will only work, at least in this his maturer phase, by peaceful methods. Whatever may have been the case earlier in his life, he is now convinced that spasmodic efforts, street-fighting, barricades, and scaffolds do not help on but retard the transformation to which, as he holds, all things are tending in this old Europe of ours. "No cause loses so much," he says in one of his latest books, "by violence and excesses, as the party which represents Liberty and Right. A stain of blood is not visible upon the purple of kings; but it is only too visible on the immaculate banner of William Tell and of Washington." This way of thinking he has succeeded to a great extent, it would seem, in making that of his party. And one hears, while moving about in Spain, the echoes of his moderate counsels coming back from many quarters. "It is you whom we should imitate in your political methods," said to me a prominent partisan of Señor Castelar's at Valencia last autumn; "you English understand the art of political progress. We English must not, however, make to ourselves any illusions. Señor Castelar will wait long and patiently; he will rely only upon the written and spoken word; but "Delenda est Carthago" is his message to all that is not republican. It is his very moderation that makes him most formidable to all those who think that kings and aristocracies and priests will be essential to human wellbeing through all the future. The coarse and raging iconoclast, who flies in the face of history and denounces the most cherished recollections of a nation Scares off his clients and bawls down his cause; but it is more difficult to deal with one who allows, to the fullest extent, all that reasonable persons can claim for kings and aristocracies and priests in the past, who meets panegyrics upon them by saying "That is all true enough, but " The old order changeth, yielding place to new, It is a good deal easier, for those who wish to stand on the old paths, to answer the regulation democrat of the Continent, who believes that the world was created, for all practical purposes, in 1789, that Christianity in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, were mere devices of the powerful to gull the weak, than to find arguments equally available against an orator who intersperses his most powerful denunciations of the connection between Church and State with such passages as the following, which occurs in a grand speech delivered in the Cortes of 1876, in favour of perfect religious freedom: I, gentlemen, although I belong to the party of philosophy, of democracy, of liberty, have been a pilgrim amongst the valleys of Umbria at the monastery of Assisi; I have seemed to hear, amongst the sculptures in the transept of the Cathedral of Toledo, the Te Deum sung for the victory of Navas de Tolosa. I have beheld, seated in the gardens of Sallust, on the stones of the ruins, in the shade of the cypresses, the sun go down like a consecrated wafer behind the Basilica of St. Peter. I have descended into the Catacombs, and have touched, in the darkness, the stones graven with religious symbols by the hands of the martyrs; and if I am not capable of sharing, I am at least capable of understanding and admiring your faith. But while Señor Castelar is distinguished from the oldfashioned democrat by his perfect fairness to the past, he is distinguished from most if not from all the statesmen of Europe who have already attained positions of supreme eminence in their respective countries not only by his youth but by having grown up under the influences of the new time. M. Dufaure, Mr. Gladstone, Lord Beaconsfield, Prince Bismarck, Prince Gortchakoff, and indeed every European statesman who has been at the very head of affairs, were reared in a world totally different from that in which we now live. The influences which moulded them were very various, but they were alike in this-they were not those which have most shaped the thoughts of the men who are now in middle life. I shall have to return to this feature in Señor Castelar before I have done, but for the present it is enough just to notice it, and I will now proceed to give a brief account of his history and to call attention to his principal works. Emilio Castelar was born at Cadiz on the 8th of September, 1832. His father was a mercantile man and a strong Liberal, who had officiated as commandant of the National Militia and as Secretary to the Revolutionary Junta of Cadiz at the time of the entry of the Duke of Angoulême. He died, however, when his son was not quite seven years old, and his widow having soon after transferred her residence from Andalusia to Murcia, it is that somewhat backward province that has a right to claim the honour of having educated the most brilliant of living Spaniards. He was brought up at Elda, a village not very far from the famous Elche-Elche of the Palms-and his latest works still bear traces of his affection for the Murcian landscape, which it may be observed in passing is as unlike that which Lewis has sung in his "Spanish Exile" as sun and rock can make it. From Elda young Castelar passed to Alicante to continue his studies in that provincial capital. Here he remained till he was sixteen, a studious boy with little inclination for the ordinary amusements of youth, fond of the classics, passionately attached to history, and giving early proof of imagination and literary power. In October, 1848, he went to Madrid, where he spent six years, attracting great attention by his splendid abilities, and beginning to try his wings in newspapers and reviews. His biographers mention as amongst his more successful performances certain articles which appeared in the Eco Universitario, a novel called "Ernesto," &c. &c. His political début was made in 1854. That year, famous in Europe for the invasion of the Crimea, is famous in what someone called that portion of Africa which begins with the Pyrenees for one of its numerous revolutions. In the month of June, the Court having become, as it periodically did during the reign of Queen Isabella, wicked over much, a military insurrection broke As the present writer has said elsewhere: out. The last months of 1853 and the first of 1854 passed uneasily. Every day the scandals of the Court and of the Ministry became more flagrant, and the measures of repression more severe. General after general was sent out of Madrid, and the persecutions of the Government fell, be it observed, not on the Progresistas, who were keeping quite aloof from public affairs, but upon all the sections of the Moderado party, except the immediate followers of Sartorius. Accusations of the grossest pecuniary corruption against many persons in high places were bruited about and almost universally believed. The crisis came in June, 1854. "Will you not come with us?" cried General Dulce to the Minister of War, as he rode in the gray of the morning out of Madrid, to try, as was supposed, a new cavalry saddle. "I should like nothing better," answered General Blaser, "but I am too busy." In a few hours it was known that Dulce had been joined by O'Donnell, and that the long-expected revolt had broken out. An indecisive action took place between the Queen's troops and the revolted generals at Vicalvaro, whence the name Vicalvarist, which is now very generally given to the followers of O'Donnell; and that commander issued a proclamation at Manzanares, explaining that the pronunciamento was made in favour of constitutional government and of morality. Up to this point the rising, it cannot be too distinctly understood, was a Moderado rising, and Narvaez himself, as afterwards appeared, was deeply implicated in the conspiracy. But on the |