was, indeed, still no Spain, either ethnologically or politically, for the country consisted of half a score of separate dominions each with its own laws, customs, traditions, prejudices, and racial distinctions," and much of this remains to this day.

The religious fanaticism instigated and fomented by Fernando and Isabella had for its object chiefly the unification of the Spanish people through the establishment of a great and moving sentiment which should be common to all. It was, in one respect, unfortunately only too successful. It wakened the old Iberic spirit of fanaticism which the race had in common with its African ancestors, whose descendants on the southern shore of the Mediterranean had ranged themselves under the banners of Islam, and developed the spirit of mysticism and religious exaltation which made Spain the depository in its own eyes of the only true religion, and raised it to an exaltation which demanded that it should not only carry this religion to the heathen of newly discovered America, but that it should force the heretic parts of Europe into the true way. Nor was the futility of this felt or in any great degree recognized until the stern lesson of the loss in 1588 of the missionizing fleet known as the Spanish Armada and the defeat in the Netherlands forced the conviction upon the Spanish king and nation that they were unequal to the task.

The elevation of Charles I to the imperial throne as Charles V, while flattering to pride, drew Spain into the innermost whirlpool of European politics and made her merely the money chest of widespread and interminable wars in which she had no real concern, and which brought her to the depth of ruin and poverty from which she never had the political or commercial ability to rise. She was trailed in the wake of the so-called Holy Roman Empire, hugging the delusion that she was leading when she was only dragged, bled white by the incessant demands of one who was practically a foreign ruler. Her sons and her treasure were spent in Flanders and Italy, not for the purposes of the King of Spain, but for those of the Roman emperor, who completed the ruin of the country by leaving as a heritage to Spain the Netherlands, which had come to him through his Austrian father, Philip. It was this heirship which continued to Spain her unfortunate linking with a political 1 Hume, The Spanish People, 310.

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system which was in no sense hers, and which, combined with the economic effects of the expulsion of the Moriscos under the edict of September 22, 1609, by Philip III, and the growth of the Inquisition into the most terrible national flail known in history,' gave the final blow which sank Spain into the deepest depths of political, moral, and economic ruin.

The extraordinary obliquity of mind which in the thought of many not only of the time but still for centuries to come placed Spain as a great power is illustrated by the remark of James I: "The King of Spain is greater than us all together." This was said not only when her navy had been ruined, and when she aad been defeated in the Netherlands, but at a time when she was in direst poverty, without commerce, bereft of everything but her fanaticism and spirit of adventure and of her ardor for literature and art, which last were to make her really great in the noblest fields. Jews and Moriscos had been slaughtered and driven from the country of which they were the main wealth producers; the export of gold and silver was prohibited and the use of these metals for any other purposes than as coin forbidden; certain goods could not be sent to America, as it was supposed that the American demand made them dear in Spain; articles of food were taxed an eighth of their value; and above all, trade was ruined by a tax, termed the alcabala, of ten per cent, rising later to fourteen, on every sale and which necessarily crushed commercial movement of every kind. Labor, which had been the perquisite of the Jew and of the Moor, was despised by the "Old Christian," misery and squalor stalked through the land, while the court was given over to reckless extravagance. Says Hume: "The religious fervor which first demonstrated itself in Isabel the Catholic, the exaltation induced by the Inquisition, and the ascetic mysticism which was at once the chief characteristic and the main policy of Philip II, provided for the Spanish people the direction for which their spirit yearned. Priests and friars were ever present. In court, in camp, and in every-day life the atmosphere of rigid unified religion enveloped all things and persons. Hard, severe, and ascetic as a protest against Moorish grace, cleanliness, and elegance, and equally against the sensuous beauty with which the Italians 'See Lea, History of the Inquisition in Spain, passim.

had invested their worship, the Spanish mind revelled in the painful self-sacrificing side of religion which appealed to their nature. They became a nation of mystics in which each person felt his community with God, and, as a consequence, capable of any sacrifice, any heroism, any suffering in this cause. The ruling idea was one of celestial knighthood, of daring adventure to rescue the cause of the suffering Christ even as the now-waning knightserrant had undertaken to rescue ill-treated ladies. Saint Teresa de Jesus, Saint Ignatius de Loyola and his marvellous company, and Saint Juan de la Cruz, with their visions and their ecstasies, were merely types; there was hardly a monastery without its fasting seer or its saintly dreamer, hardly a nunnery without its cataleptic miracle worker, hardly a barren hill-side without its hermit, living in filth and abject misery of the flesh, but with the exalted conviction of his personal community with God. Not churchmen alone, but laymen and soldiers too, were swayed by the strange thought, and went forth to work or war in a spirit of sacrifice, relieved by orgies of hideous immorality. Philip himself, living like a hermit and toiling like a slave in his stone cell, practising rigid mortifications, and undergoing the voluntary suffering in which he gloried, was beloved by his people, because he was moved by the same instinct that they were. He led them, it is true, but he did so because they wished to tread the same road.”1

The three hundred years after Philip II, which so altered most of Europe, wrought but slow changes in Spain, harrowed as was its people by poverty, misrule, and frequent anarchy. Democratic in its impulses as are all its kindred races, the theocratic rule of centuries fitted that of Spain but illy to adjust itself to the realities of democracy as developed in other European countries. Intensely provincialized both by reason of ignorance and by the barriers set by nature between the various kingdoms of Spain; with difficult and infrequent communications; segregated from the rest of Europe by a lofty mountain range; holding with overweening pride the conviction of a superiority of race which, it was felt, only accident had thwarted; unable by race characteristics to develop a sane and wholesome polity, Spain, almost equally with Turkey, had become a synonym for ineptitude Hume, The Spanish People, 375-376.

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in government and for maladministration in such governmental systems as the nation was able to form.

It was this inability or slowness of adaptation to the world's new conditions which caused the century just ended to be darkened with struggles in Spain's American dependencies, for what appeared to Anglo-Saxons for generations inherent rights. These dependencies, less enthralled as to thought in the last hundred years than the mother country, demanded more than, unhappily, the mother country could see its way to give. The practical political knowledge which should have developed in Spain as elsewhere in Europe came a century too late, and was acted upon only when the last of the numerous brood to which she had given birth had snapped the ties which had so long been weakening through the misrule which did not vary, in principle or in practice, during a period of three hundred and fifty years.

A notable Spaniard himself says: "If some day a mature judgment of our decadence and fall (vencimiento) be written, there will be placed as first of all their causes the evident inferiority of our aptitude for administration and government. One will then see how small are the matters which fix the attention of historians and statisticians in the incapacity and small emotions which have been so largely the peculiar attribute of our governors. At the moment when vast territories and complicated interests demand elevated intelligence and large ability we appear before the world with the admirable court of artists, captains, mystics, colonists, navigators, and even political writers of value, but without lighting upon a single man skilled in government; a Cromwell, Sully, Richelieu, Colbert, Louvois, etc., in whom the ancient personal strength has happened to be cast in the new moulds of modern nations." 1

But it has not been a Cromwell or Richelieu that has been needed; it has been chiefly a want of political aptitude in the race itself, without which the individual leader is of but small avail.

Great leadership is but the exponent of national feeling and aspiration. There was a nucleus of such in Spain a hundred years since and in its encouragement was Spain's need and safety. But

'Don Pablo de Alzola, quoting Don Fernando de Silvela, Revista Contemporanea, V, 111 (1898).

this encouragement was denied her. Spanish effort in the earlier part of the nineteenth century to keep step with the spirit of democracy awakened by the French revolution was stifled, not by Spaniards but by the France of Louis XVIII and the Holy Alliance. The utmost evils which could be attributed to the Napoleonic designs of 1808 and the sufferings from the savage devastation of Spanish cities and the shameless rapacity of French generals at this melancholy period, could not equal in unhappiness to the Spanish people the results of the atrocity of the French invasion of 1823. This invasion, the only reason for which was the suppression of the liberal movement and the constitution, re-established absolutism in the person of an incapable and degraded monarch, Fernando VII, and dealt Spanish liberalism a blow which rent the country with anarchic strife, stunted the moral and material growth of the kingdom, and fastened upon Cuba the despotic régime embodied in the king's decree of 1825.

It must thus be recognized that the vast evils befalling Spain and her island dependencies throughout the nineteenth century, evils so great that no qualifying words can express their enormity, were not all of her own making. France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia were the culpable partners in a crime which, more than all things else together, fastened woe upon a brave people and made certain the continuance of the evil elements of the country.

Without this action Spain, with her more liberal forces free to develop, might in some degree at least have advanced politically with the rest of Europe. Cuba might have been to-day a Spanish Canada and the Philippines a Spanish India. But these things were not to be. Racial peculiarities, regionalism, religious bigotry, and the ignorance which went hand in hand with fanatical subservience to priestly rule were possibly sufficient to have prevented such a change; but the French invasion, or to speak more truly, the invasion by the Holy Alliance, made this change impossible, and by its reinstallation of absolutism made certain anarchy at home and loss of empire abroad. Spanish history when truly written will recognize this great fact.