I happened to be returning from a ride with a companion when, quite accidentally, we came upon this excavation, and even passed down the new road before we realised where we were.  The Quemadero had evidently been in the shape of an immense basin.  There in the banks at each side were the stratified layers of human ashes; between each auto-da-fe it was evident that the remains had been covered with a thick layer of earth; finally, at the top of all these smaller bands of black, horrible ashes, came one huge deposit, which marked the awful scene of the last gigantic auto.  This ghastly bonfire was sixty feet square, and seven feet high, as history records, when one hundred and five victims were slowly tortured to a frightful death in the name of Christ, while the King, Charles II., and his Court and the howling rabble of Madrid looked on with savage enjoyment.  Nothing can ever obliterate the impression of that scene, nor make one forget the deadly clinging of those ghastly black ashes, which the wind scattered about, and which it was impossible to escape or to get rid of.  The fell work of the “religious” authors of the holocaust had been well done—­nothing was left but ashes; and the next day, by order of the Government, sand or soil had been thrown over all that could bear witness to this horrible episode in the history of the Church in Spain, while the people who inhabit the houses built over the spot probably know nothing of the records of human agony and brutal bigotry that still lie beneath their homes.

We hear of these things and read of them in history, but one needs to have seen that awful memorial to realise what share the Inquisition has had in transforming a naturally heroic and kindly people into the inert masses which nothing, or almost nothing, would move so long as they had pan y toros (bread and bulls).  Thanks to the horrors of the Inquisition and the Autos-da-fe, the whole people have acquired a character which assuredly they do not deserve.  The blind bigotry and cynical cruelty of Philip II. and his lunatic successors have been identified with the races over which, unfortunately for Spain, they ruled for so many years.  When one remembers that this is the view taken of the Inquisition, and of the domination of the Church in effacing all kinds of culture, by the liberal and educated Spaniard of to-day, and that there is, even now, an extreme party which would fain see the “Holy Office” re-established, with all its old powers, it is easy to understand at what a critical point the clerical question has arrived in Spain; nor need one wonder at the feeling which in all parts of the kingdom has been aroused by the recrudescence of the religious orders, more especially of the determined struggle of the Jesuits to retain and even to reassert their power.