written not by us, but by men of talent and skill, who have long
enjoyed unquestionable authority.

The expulsion of the Jews and the Moors was the first fruit of the
Catholic Inquisition. "Spain," says M. Roseew Saint Hilaire, "exterminated
them forever as poisonous plants from its soil, mortal to heresy. The Jews
and the Moors left it in turn, carrying with them, the former trade, the
latter agriculture, from this disinherited land, to which the New World,
to repair so many losses, vainly bequeathed her sterile treasures. And let
it not be said that Spain, in thus depriving herself of her most active
citizens, was not aware of the extent of her loss. All her historians
concur in the statement that in acting thus she sacrificed her temporal
interests to her religious convictions, and all are at a loss for words to
extol such a glorious sacrifice.

"In banishing the Jews from her territory, Spain, then acted consistently;
her conduct was logically just, but according to that pitiless logic which
ruins States in order to save a principle. From that period, therefore, a
new era begins for Castile. Until then she had been divided from the rest
of Europe only by her position; foreign, without being hostile, to the
ideas of the continent, she had not begun to wage war with those ideas;
but the establishment of the Inquisition is the first step in the career
in which she can never stop." [Saint Hilaire, vol. 6, p. 52.]

"It required," says M. Sismondi, "about one generation to accustom the
Spaniards to the sanguinary proceedings of the Inquisition, and to
fanaticise the people. This work, dictated by an infernal policy, was
scarcely accomplished, when Charles the Fifth began his reign. It was
probably the fatal spectacle of the auto-dae-fe that imparted to the
Spanish soldiers their ferocity, so remarkable during the whole of that
period, which before that time was so foreign to the national character."
[Sismondi, vol. 3, p. 265.] Who, employing these instruments, depopulated
Spain? THE INQUISITION. "To calculate," says Liorente, secretary to the
Holy office, "the number of victims of the Inquisition were to give
palpable proof of the most powerful and active causes of the depopulation
of Spain; for, if to several millions of inhabitants of which the
Inquisitorial system has deprived this kingdom by the total expulsion of
the Jews, the conquered Moors and the baptized Moorish, we add about
500,000 families entirely destroye