not been in vain. In 1813 the right to enclose town commons was for the first time recognized in the law of the land. The debates of the delegates indicated clearly that as soon as constitutional government became a permanent fixture in Spanish politics, the Mesta and its privileges would be entirely swept aside. Finally, there came the last desperate efforts of the reactionaries, with the encouragement and armed support offered to them in 1823-24 by France at the behest of the Holy Alliance. Exhausted Spain then turned in desperation toward liberalism. The reforms of 1834 and 1836 restored most of the liberties asserted by the revolutionary Cadiz Cortes of 1812, and among these measures were several which effectively and finally liberated the pastoral industry from the utterly useless incubus of the Mesta. On the 31st of January, 1836, the use of that name was forbidden, and in the following May the Asociación General de Ganaderos del Reino, comprising all the stock owners of the kingdom, was established and was given general charge of all pastoral industries. This trade association, for such it is in fact, is now maintained in a flourishing condition through contributions from its members and from the government. It devotes its energies to the prosecution of scientific investigations of problems connected with cattle and sheep raising, to the dissemination of the results of these studies throughout the land, to the stamping out of stock diseases and animal pests, and to the introduction of better breeding and stock raising methods.

The transhumantes have by no means disappeared as the result of this legislation. In fact, after declining during the middle decades of the nineteenth century to about half a million, their number began to increase in the course of the economic reawakening of Spain after 1890, so that by 1910 they totalled about 1,500,ooo out of the 14,000,000 sheep of Spain. Most of these no longer follow their old cañadas, which have largely been enclosed." 1 Colmeiro, ii, p. 100, n. 1; Altamira, Propiedad Comunal, p. 261.

• Colección de Leyes

de Agricultura, 1833–1866 (Madrid, 1866), pp. 69–71. • An interesting feature of the policies of the Asociación is its refusal to participate in any way in the heavily capitalized industry of raising fighting bulls for the national sport.

♦ The Asociación de Ganaderos published in 1855-58 a series of Informes indicating such cañadas and other highways as were open for the use of sheep.

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Instead they use special types of small three-decked railway cars with a capacity of about a hundred sheep each. These are op erated during the ancient semiannual periods of migration over lines that follow, in many instances, the routes of the abandoned cañadas. The Mesta, with its imposing hosts of migrating thousands, its tyranncus pasturage rights, its entregadores, and its mediaeval privileges, has disappeared. But the merino sheep which it developed and gave to the world has gone forth and enriched the pastoral industry of every continent. Today in their native Castile the merino flocks number nearly five-fold what they were in the greatest days of the Mesta.

1 See the excellent map of these railway routes and of the present distribution of the industry by André Fribourg in Annales de géographie, 15 May, 1910, plate xiv b.

CONCLUSION

THE history of the Mesta is not merely a chronicle illustrating the perennial and universal struggle between agricultural and pastoral interests. The institution had a marked effect upon the social and economic organization of the Spanish people, and even upon the physical aspect of the peninsula. Its six centuries of activity in the agrarian life of Castile aggravated the depressing problems of deforestation, rural depopulation, and agricultural stagnation. There is even reason to believe that the Mesta was a party to such unfortunate economic blunders as the expulsions of the Jews and the Moriscos. The fiscal and agricultural activities of these two classes had long been annoying and at times injurious to the sheep owners. In fact, the connection between the Mesta and the loss of valuable taxpayers was the first aspect of the migratory sheep industry that attracted the attention of Campomanes, the eighteenth-century reformer, who gave the Mesta its death blow. That great mercantilist promptly pointed to the depopulation of rural Castile as the most serious charge to be brought against the devastating sheep migrations. Furthermore, the political history of Spain would have been very different had there been no Mesta to yield large revenues and administrative power to ambitious kings. The social and economic development of Castile would have been along other lines had the class distinctions between migratory herdsmen and sedentary husbandmen not been so sharply accentuated, and had the pastoral policy of such strong monarchs as Ferdinand and Isabella not been so triumphantly successful.

With all due regard for the influence of the Mesta during the first three centuries of its history, we must avoid the dangerous pitfall into which many recent investigators have fallen, namely the assumption that the earlier triumphs of the organization went on in an ascending scale during the seventeenth century. It is true that the disastrous effects of those triumphs - deforestation, depopulation, agrarian decay-were destined to continue

for centuries. Nevertheless, so far as the Mesta itself is concerned, it must be remembered that the various unrestricted and sweeping indorsements of it which were issued by the decadent Hapsburg monarchs from 1598 to 1700 in no way indicated its actual status. No more precarious evidence could be cited to prove the continued prestige of the Mesta than the grandiose terms of a royal edict of the seventeenth century. In fact, the significance of the migratory sheep industry was on the wane a generation before the death of Philip II in 1598. From about 1560 onward the activities of the Mesta were less and less important in the agrarian history of Castile.

A notable feature of the Mesta was its influence upon that fundamental characteristic of Spanish civilization, regionalismo or separatism. This was far more than provincialism; it meant, in brief, the persistent devotion of each of the many geographic or racial sections of the peninsula to the defence of its ancient privileges and of the charters awarded to it for loyal services in the Moorish and other wars. An occasional corrective was brought to bear against this force of separatism by certain far-sighted monarchs, notably Alfonso XI, whose efforts were directed toward centralizing the life of the nation, both politically and economically.

In such a conflict the position and importance of an organization like the Mesta were obvious. The opposition of the towns to the migratory sheep owners was inevitable, not so much for agrarian reasons, since Castilian agriculture was not vigorously developed until the last decades of the Middle Ages, as for political and social ones. The Mesta flocks were intruders, violators of the sacred heritage of that independence from outside interference which had been enshrined in all town charters since the Reconquest. From the very beginnings of the Mesta, within a decade after the last Moorish strongholds in southern Castile had fallen in the triumphant crusade of 1212-62, the migratory sheep owners became the favored wards and ultimately the valued alliesboth political and financial- of the monarchy.

The annals of the Mesta represent more than a recital of the exploitation of the pastoral industry by strong kings, and the un