"One should not be surprised to see the Catholic South at the beginning of the nineteenth century being already surpassed by the industrious North in matters of material welfare. Spain, Portugal, and Italy were considered by Northerners to be countries of mere archeological interest full of loafing monks, romantic ruins, and lovers playing the guitar. For the tourists coming from England, Holland, or the Baltic countries, the Mediterranean parts of Europe were nothing else but large agglomerations of illiterate beggars, bravos, and unshaven toreros. The other Catholic countries were considered to be tainted similarly by the stigma of inferiority; Austria-Hungary, which enjoyed Gladstone's special wrath, figured as a deplorable survival from the Middle Ages and France was only respected in so far as she harbored atheistic elements. The fate of Poland, the decay of the clergy in Hungary and Mexico, the drunkenness of the Irish and the pronunciamentos in South America — they all served to complete the picture of a rotten and "backward" Catholicism. Belfast prospered while Dublin was just dear, dirty Dublin. It was pointed out that the French Protestants — hardly a million people — possessed a full eighth of the French national wealth."