Historically, newspaper hawkers have played a prominent role in the development of the press, and yet their work has been hard, badly-paid and held in very low social esteem. In a country like Spain, the misery of this occupation was long compounded by the aversion of the Catholic Church, which viewed hawkers, and mass-circulation press in general, as enemies to be combated. For their part, government authorities feared the consequences of so apparently innocuous an activity as hawking a newspaper, conscious as they were of the ease with which it could channel the expression of dissidence or propitiate public disorder.