Spain at this epoch had probably less than twelve millions of inhabitants, although the statistics of those days cannot be relied upon with accuracy.  The whole revenue of the state was nominally sixteen or seventeen millions of dollars, but the greater portion of that income was pledged for many coming years to the merchants of Genoa.  All the little royal devices for increasing the budget by debasing the coin of the realm, by issuing millions of copper tokens, by lowering the promised rate of interest on Government loans, by formally repudiating both interest and principal, had been tried, both in this and the preceding reign, with the usual success.  An inconvertible paper currency, stimulating industry and improving morals by converting beneficent commerce into baleful gambling—­that fatal invention did not then exist.  Meantime, the legitimate trader and innocent citizen were harassed, and the general public endangered, as much as the limited machinery of the epoch permitted.

The available, unpledged revenue of the kingdom hardly amounted to five millions of dollars a-year.  The regular annual income of the church was at least six millions.  The whole personal property of the nation was estimated in a very clumsy and unsatisfactory way, no doubt—­at sixty millions of dollars.  Thus the income of the priesthood was ten per cent. of the whole funded estate of the country, and at least a million a year more than the income of the Government.  Could a more biting epigram be made upon the condition to which the nation had been reduced?

Labour was more degraded than ever.  The industrious classes, if such could be said to exist, were esteemed every day more and more infamous.  Merchants, shopkeepers, mechanics, were reptiles, as vilely, esteemed as Jews, Moors, Protestants, or Pagans.  Acquiring wealth by any kind of production was dishonourable.  A grandee who should permit himself to sell the wool from his boundless sheep-walks disgraced his caste, and was accounted as low as a merchant.  To create was the business of slaves and miscreants:  to destroy was the distinguishing attribute of Christians and nobles.  To cheat, to pick, and to steal, on the most minute and the most gigantic scale—­these were also among the dearest privileges of the exalted classes.  No merchandize was polluting save the produce of honest industry.  To sell places in church and state, the army, the navy, and the sacred tribunals of law, to take bribes from rich and poor, high and low; in sums infinitesimal or enormous, to pillage the exchequer in, every imaginable form, to dispose of titles of honour, orders of chivalry, posts in municipal council, at auction; to barter influence, audiences, official interviews against money cynically paid down in rascal counters—­all this was esteemed consistent with patrician dignity.