lacking in real ability.

The Jesuit manages the women, which is not a very difficult thing to do,
as he holds the leading strings of the sexual life in his hands. In
addition he influences the men.

He assists the young who are of good social standing, who belong to
distinguished families, and brings about desirable matches. The poor can
do anything they like. They are at liberty to eat, to get drunk, to do
whatever they will except to read. These unhappy, timid, torpid clerks
and hangers-on imagine they are free men whenever they get drunk. They
do not see that they are like the Redskins, whom the Yankees poisoned
with alcohol so as to hold them in check.

I inspected a club installed in a house in the older part of the city
some years ago.

A sign on one door read "Library." When it was opened, I was shown,
laughing, a room filled with bottles.

"If a Jesuit could see this, he would be in ecstasy," I exclaimed. "Yes,
replacing books with wines and liquors! What a business for the sons of
Saint Ignatius!"

In spite of all its display, all its tinsel, all its Jesuitism, all its
bad taste, San Sebastian will become an important, dignified city within
a very few years. When that time comes, the author who has been born
there, will not prefer to hail from some hamlet buried in the mountains,
rather than from the capital of Guipuzcoa. But I myself prefer it. I
have no city, and I hold myself to be strictly extra-urban.