immeasurable
barrier was raised between that kingdom and the Protestants of Europe.
The early condition of perpetual warfare with the Arabs who overran the
country had led the Spaniards to mingle religion strangely with their
politics. The effect continued when the cause had ceased. Their wars
with the European nations became religious wars. In fighting England or
the Netherlands, they were fighting the enemies of God. It was the same
everywhere. In their contest with the unoffending natives of the New
World, they were still battling with the enemies of God. Their wars
took the character of a perpetual crusade, and were conducted with all
the ferocity which fanaticism could inspire.

[Sidenote: RECEPTION OF ISABELLA.]

The same dark spirit of fanaticism seems to brood over the national
literature; even that lighter literature which in other nations is made
up of the festive sallies of wit, or the tender expression of sentiment.
The greatest geniuses of the nation, the masters of the drama and of the
ode, while they astonish us by their miracles of invention, show that
they have too often kindled their inspiration at the altars of the
Inquisition.

Debarred as he was from freedom of speculation, the domain of science
was closed against the Spaniard. Science looks to perpetual change. It
turns to the past to gather warning, as well as instruction, for the
future. Its province is to remove old abuses, to explode old errors, to
unfold new truths. Its condition, in short, is that of progress. But in
Spain, everything not only looked to the past, but rested on the past.
Old abuses gathered respect from their antiquity. Reform was innovation,
and innovation was a crime. Far from progress, all was stationary. The
hand of the Inquisition drew the line which said, "No further!" This was
the limit of human intelligence in Spain.

The effect was visible in every department of science,--not in the
speculative alone, but in the physical and the practical; in the
declamatory rant of its theology and ethics, in the childish and
chimerical schemes of its political economists. In every walk were to be
seen the symptoms of premature decrepitude, as the nation clung to the
antiquated systems which the march of civilization in other countries
had long since effaced. Hence those frantic experiments, so often
repeated, in the financial administration of the kingdom, which made
Spain the byword of the nations, and which ended in the ruin o