illustration of this degradation of labour and of its results, that in the reign of Philip twenty-five thousand individuals of these dishonoured and comparatively industrious classes, then computed at four millions in number in the Castilian kingdoms alone, had united in a society which made a formal offer to the king to pay him two thousand dollars a head if the name and privileges of hidalgo could be conferred upon them.  Thus an inconsiderable number of this vilest and most abject of the population—­ oppressed by taxation which was levied exclusively upon the low, and from which not only the great nobles but mechanics and other hidalgos were, exempt—­had been able to earn and to lay by enough to offer the monarch fifty millions of dollars to purchase themselves out of semi-slavery into manhood, and yet found their offer rejected by an almost insolvent king.  Nothing could exceed the idleness and the frivolity of the upper classes, as depicted by contemporary and not unfriendly observers.  The nobles were as idle and as ignorant as their inferiors.  They were not given to tournays nor to the delights of the chase and table, but were fond of brilliant festivities, dancing, gambling, masquerading, love-making, and pompous exhibitions of equipage, furniture, and dress.  These diversions —­together with the baiting of bulls and the burning of Protestants—­made up their simple round of pleasures.  When they went to the wars they scorned all positions but that of general, whether by land or sea, and as war is a trade which requires an apprenticeship; it is unnecessary to observe that these grandees were rarely able to command, having never learned to obey.  The poorer Spaniards were most honourably employed perhaps—­so far as their own mental development was concerned—­when they were sent with pike and arquebus to fight heretics in France and Flanders.  They became brave and indomitable soldiers when exported to the seat of war, and thus afforded proof—­by strenuously doing the hardest physical work that human beings can be called upon to perform, campaigning year after year amid the ineffable deprivations, dangers, and sufferings which are the soldier’s lot—­that it was from no want of industry or capacity that the lower masses of Spaniards in that age were the idle, listless, dice-playing, begging, filching vagabonds into which cruel history and horrible institutions had converted them at home.

It is only necessary to recal these well-known facts to understand why one great element of production—­human labour—­was but meagrely supplied.  It had been the deliberate policy of the Government for ages to extirpate the industrious classes, and now that a great portion of Moors and Jews were exiles and outcasts, it was impossible to supply their place by native workmen.  Even the mechanics, who condescended to work with their hands in the towns, looked down alike upon those who toiled in the field and upon those who, attempted to grow rich by traffic.