The Intelligencer, & Petersburg Commercial Advertiser

SPAIN. A French merchant, distinguished for his talents, who recently visited Madrid on private business, has furnished the editor of the Courier Francais with a statement of the deplorable condition into which the people of Spain have fallen. 'Their wretchedness,' says the writer, 'exceeds all limit; it is frightful.' Two thirds of the population at Tolosa, Vittoria, Burgos, Alhanda, and Buytrago, are literally without trowsers, stockings, shoes and hats; a dirty cloak, consisting of a thousand filthy rags, coarsely patched together, covers their gaunt skeletons of bodies, rendered more gaunt looking by a long beard, a haggard countenance and a ferocious eye. At Irun, the soldiers, priests, public officers, all asked alms. At Briviesca, a comical figure holding in one hand a plate and a little holy sacrament, in copper, in the other asked charity for God. At Burgos I saw a horrible sight: the distribution of the dinner fragments of a convent, situated on the road leading out of the city: two hundred ragged wretches rushed promiscuously into the middle of the convent court yard, and commenced fighting with each other for bones, bread, and chick peas. The women were drawn back by the old men, and then again by the young men. The horrible cries, mixed with acclamations, 'For God's sake,' and 'The Father,' rendered the scene a spectacle of which the distribution of sausages, during the fetes at Paris, can give you a slight idea.