SENOR CASTELAR.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume I, Issue 51, 18 April 1874, Page 12

SENOR CASTELAR.

The ' Tablet,' in the course of an article on Spain says of Sefior Castelar :*— -" Among all the conspirators and demagogues who have reduced Spain to the disastrous plight ia which the country of the Cid, and of the most Catholic Kings, and of Cortez and Ximenes, is plunged to-day, it may be fairly, allowed that Senor Caatelar has the most creditable, or rather least disgraceful, record to exhibit. Vain, eloquent, superficial, Voltairian, the fluent and sonorous orator may almost be said, to have been betrayed into his follies and crimes through an incurable weal-ness of head rather than through natural badness of heart. He is no trebly dyed perjurer like Prim and Serrano. Be is, in all liklihood, free from the Communist connections which bind. Figueras 'and Piy Margall to the open foes of property, order, morality, and religion. He is merely a persumptuous university professor of the stamp of whi«u the world is only too familiar. -A newspaper correspondent, and a demagogue into the bargain, ho loves to see his .opinions reported in the journals and applauded by the mob. In his time he has ventilated the crudest notions upon the gravest subjects, religion, State authority, military discipline. At the same time, ijie has a natural fund of honesty and common sense which checks him in his downward-descent before reaching the lowest level: Shocked and alarmed at the instruction which the anarchical principles he use to advocate are' spreading through the country, he has had the courage to repudiate his past doctrines, aud at present passes before the public as a semi-Conservative. iais change of policy is, of course,. open to the observation that to " disdain the arts by which he " rose " is no new description of tactics in the modern JELabagas. We prefer, however, to think the beat of Senor Castelar' s repentance.