little in charity.  Very few of the swarming millions of naked and hungry throughout the land were clothed or nourished out of these prodigious revenues of the Church.  The constant and avowed care of those prelates was to increase their worldly, possessions, to build up the fortunes of their respective families, to grow richer and richer at the expense of the people whom for centuries they had fleeced.  Of gross crime, of public ostentatious immorality, such as had made the Roman priesthood of that and preceding ages loathsome in the sight of man and God, the Spanish Church-dignitaries were innocent.  Avarice; greediness, and laziness were their characteristics.  It is almost superfluous to say that, while the ecclesiastical princes were rolling in this almost fabulous wealth, the subordinate clergy, the mob of working priests, were needy, half-starved mendicants.

From this rapid survey of the condition of the peninsula it will seem less surprising than it might do at first glance that the revenue of the greatest monarch of the world was rated at the small amount—­even after due allowance for the difference of general values between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries—­of sixteen millions of dollars.  The King of Spain was powerful and redoubtable at home and abroad, because accident had placed the control of a variety of separate realms in his single hand.  At the same time Spain was poor and weak, because she had lived for centuries in violation of the principles on which the wealth and strength of nations depend.  Moreover, every one of those subject and violently annexed nations hated Spain with undying fervour, while an infernal policy—­the leading characteristics of which were to sow dissensions among the nobles, to confiscate their property on all convenient occasions, and to bestow it upon Spaniards and other foreigners; to keep the discontented masses in poverty, but to deprive them of the power or disposition to unite with their superiors in rank in demonstrations against the crown—­had sufficed to suppress any extensive revolt in the various Italian states united under Philip’s sceptre.  Still more intense than the hatred of the Italians was the animosity which was glowing in every Portuguese breast against the Spanish sway; while even the Arragonese were only held in subjection by terror, which, indeed, in one form or another, was the leading instrument of Philip’s government.

It is hardly necessary to enlarge upon the regulations of Spain’s foreign commerce; for it will be enough to repeat the phrase that in her eyes the great ocean from east to west was a Spanish lake, sacred to the ships of the king’s subjects alone.  With such a simple code of navigation coming in aid of the other causes which impoverished the land, it may be believed that the maritime traffic of the country would dwindle into the same exiguous proportions which characterised her general industry.