From the recently translated and published GERONA by Benito Pérez Galdós.
Political passion, my friends! I know no baser or more contemptible sentiment than this, which drives men to hate their own countrymen with greater fury than the foreign invader. I was appalled to witness the outrages committed against some and the savage invasion of the houses of others. And we may be thankful they escaped with their lives from the hands of that idle, shrieking mob! In a word, the whole affair was among the most degrading things I have seen in my life, and if the Junta Central was worth little, the men who in Seville and afterward in Cádiz gnawed, like restless and parasitic reptiles, at its foundations, do not occupy, for all their bustling and all the various postures they assumed, any visible place in history.
Their smallness makes them vanish in the long perspectives of the past, and their echoless names awaken neither admiration nor rancour. They belong to that common herd which, common as it is, has shaped the destinies of the country from the first revolution to the present day: people without an ideal, who would be lost in the crowd like raindrops in the ocean, if the deplorable political neutrality of those Spaniards who are honest, decent, informed, and patriotic, and who are the majority, did not allow them to act in public life, treating the country as an object of exclusive property given them for their amusement.
The end of empire is always marked by national enervation. We tend to blame television, or video games, or social media, but the truth is that this torpor that permits those Galdós describes as restless and parasitic reptiles to gnaw at the societal foundations as they rule over the placid NPCs has always been a phenomenon of late-stage empire.