History of the United Netherlands, 1607a | Page 9

subtly end forcibly than was done by the honest
brutality of this churchman. The careful tillage, the beautiful system of
irrigation by aqueduct and canal, the scientific processes by which
these "accursed" had caused the wilderness to bloom with cotton, sugar,
and every kind of fruit and grain; the untiring industry, exquisite
ingenuity, and cultivated taste by which the merchants, manufacturers,
and mechanics, guilty of a darker complexion than that of the
peninsular Goths, had enriched their native land with splendid fabrics
in cloth, paper, leather, silk, tapestry, and by so doing had acquired
fortunes for themselves, despite iniquitous taxation, religious
persecution, and social contumely--all these were crimes against a race
of idlers, steeped to the lips in sloth which imagined itself to be pride.
The industrious, the intelligent, the wealthy, were denounced as
criminals, and hunted to death or into exile as vermin, while the Lermas,
the Ucedas, and the rest of the brood of cormorants, settled more
thickly than ever around their prey.
Meantime, Government declared that the piece of four maravedis
should be worth eight maravedis; the piece of two maravedis being
fixed at four. Thus the specie of the kingdom was to be doubled, and by
means of this enlightened legislation, Spain, after destroying
agriculture, commerce, and manufacture, was to maintain great armies
and navies, and establish universal monarchy.
This measure, which a wiser churchman than Ribera, Cardinal
Richelieu, afterwards declared the most audacious and barbarous ever
recorded by history, was carried out with great regularity of
organization. It was ordained that the Moors should be collected at
three indicated points, whence they were not to move on pain of death,
until duly escorted by troops to the ports of embarkation. The children
under the age of four years were retained, of course without their
parents, from whom they were forever separated. With admirable
forethought, too, the priests took measures, as they supposed, that the
arts of refining sugar, irrigating the rice-fields, constructing canals and
aqueducts, besides many other useful branches of agricultural and
mechanical business, should not die out with the intellectual,
accomplished, and industrious race, alone competent to practise them,
which was now sent forth to die. A very small number, not more than

six in each hundred, were accordingly reserved to instruct other
inhabitants of Spain in those useful arts which they were now more
than ever encouraged to despise.
Five hundred thousand full-grown human beings, as energetic,
ingenious, accomplished, as any then existing in the world, were thus
thrust forth into the deserts beyond sea, as if Spain had been
overstocked with skilled labour; and as if its native production had
already outgrown the world's power of consumption.
Had an equal number of mendicant monks, with the two archbishops
who had contrived this deed at their head, been exported instead of the
Moors, the future of Spain might have been a more fortunate one than it
was likely to prove. The event was in itself perhaps of temporary
advantage to the Dutch republic, as the poverty and general misery,
aggravated by this disastrous policy, rendered the acknowledgment of
the States' independence by Spain almost a matter of necessity.
It is superfluous to enter into any farther disquisiton as to the various
branches of the royal revenue. They remained essentially the same as
during the preceding reign, and have been elaborately set forth in a
previous chapter. The gradual drying up of resources in all the wide-
spread and heterogeneous territories subject to the Spanish sceptre is
the striking phenomenon of the present epoch. The distribution of such
wealth as was still created followed the same laws which had long
prevailed, while the decay and national paralysis, of which the
prognostics could hardly be mistaken, were a natural result of the
system.
The six archbishops had now grown to eleven, and still received
gigantic revenues; the income of the Archbishop of Toledo, including
the fund of one hundred thousand destined for repairing the cathedral,
being estimated at three hundred thousand dollars a year, that of the
Archbishop of Seville and the others varying from one hundred and
fifty thousand dollars to fifty thousand. The sixty-three bishops perhaps
averaged fifty thousand a year each, and there were eight more in Italy.
The commanderies of chivalry, two hundred at least in number, were
likewise enormously profitable. Some of them were worth thirty
thousand a year; the aggregate annual value being from one-and-a-half
to two millions, and all in Lerma's gift, upon his own terms.
Chivalry, that noblest of ideals, without which, in some shape or

another, the world would be a desert and a sty; which included within
itself many of the noblest virtues which can adorn mankind--generosity,
self-denial, chastity, frugality, patience, protection to the feeble, the
downtrodden, and the oppressed; the love of daring adventure, devotion