of intellectual life.  In place of enlightened agriculture, irrigation of the dry land, and the planting of trees, the peasant was taught to take for his example San Isidro, the patron saint of the labourer, who spent his days in prayer, and left his fields to plough and sow themselves; the forests were cut down for fuel, until the shadeless wastes became less and less productive, and the whole land on the elevated plains, which the Moors had irrigated and planted, became little better than a desert.

It was not only in the mother country that frightful acts of bigotry and lust for wealth were enacted.  In Peru the Spaniards found a splendid civilisation among the strange races of the Incas, a condition of order which many modern states might envy, a religion absolutely free from fetish worship, and a standard of morality which has never been surpassed.  But they ruthlessly destroyed it all, desecrated the temples where the sun was worshipped only as a visible representative of a God “of whom nothing could be known save by His works,” as their tenet ran, and substituted the religion which they represented as having been taught by Jesus of Nazareth; a religion which looked for its chief power to the horrible Inquisition and its orgies called Autos da fe!

As regards the mysterious race of the Incas, who in comparison with the native Indians were almost white, and who possessed a high cultivation, it is curious to note that during the late troubles in China records came to light in the Palace of Pekin showing that Chinese missionaries landed on the coast subsequently known as Peru, in ages long antecedent to the discovery of the country by the Spaniards, and established temples and schools there.  No one who reads the minute accounts of the Incas from Garcilaso de la Vega—­himself of the royal race on his mother’s side, his father having been one of the Spanish adventurers—­can avoid the conclusion that the religion of the Incas, thus utterly destroyed by the Spaniards, was much more nearly that of Christ than the debased worship introduced in its place.  The whole story of these “Children of the Sun,” told by one of themselves afterwards in Cordoba, where he is always careful to keep on the right side of the Inquisition by pretending to be a “Christian after the manner of his father,” is fascinatingly interesting as well as instructive.

It is almost impossible to speak of the Spanish Inquisition and its baneful influence on the people without seeming to be carried away by prejudice or even bigotry, but it is equally impossible for the ordinary student of history to read, even in the pages of the “orthodox,” the terrible repression of its iron hand on all that was advancing in the nation; its writers, its singers, its men of science, wherever they dared to raise their voices in ever so faint a cry, ground down to one dead level of unthinking acquiescence, or driven forth from their native land, without ceasing to wonder at all at Spain’s decadence from the moment she had handed herself over, bound hand and foot, to the Church.  Wondering, rather, at her enormous inherent vitality, which at last, after so many centuries of spasmodic effort, has shaken off the incubus and regained liberty, or for the first time established it in the realms of religion, science, and general instruction.