There has been a Ministerial crisis in Spain of a
curious kind. The party which wants to expel the Ministry at any price, partly because it desires power, partly because it dislikes the plunder threatened against the foreign creditor, and partly because it wants to control the next elections, by a most unprincipled move placed the Government in a minority. S. °cheat, a leading Carl- it, proposed that all who wished to curtail the liberty of founding and conserving convents should be declared to have violated the Constitution. The Government, accepting this proposal as a censure on their ecclesiastical policy, made it a Cabinet question, whereupon numbers of the Progressists actually voted for it, and Government was defeated by 173 to 118. Thereupon Admiral Malcampo, the Premier, read a decree proroguing the Cortes, which will not now meet till February. In the interim it is be- lieved the Ministry will be modified, and the project of a tax on the External Debt given up, but it is useless to forecast the course
of Spanish politics. •
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