epressive force
kept up to sufficient strength. Its maintenance required that the
different sections be isolated from each other so that there could
be no growth toward a common understanding and cooeperation, and its
permanence depended upon keeping the people ignorant and contented with
their lot, held under strict control by religious and political fear.

Yet it was a vast improvement over their old mode of life and their
condition was bettered as they grew up to such a system. Only with
the passing of the years and the increase of wealth and influence,
the ease and luxury invited by these, and the consequent corruption so
induced, with the insatiable longing ever for more wealth and greater
influence, did the poison of greed and grasping power enter the system
to work its insidious way into every part, slowly transforming the
beneficent institution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
into an incubus weighing upon all the activities of the people in
the nineteenth, an unyielding bar to the development of the country,
a hideous anachronism in these modern times.

It must be remembered also that Spain, in the years following her
brilliant conquests of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, lost
strength and vigor through the corruption at home induced by the
unearned wealth that flowed into the mother country from the colonies,
and by the draining away of her best blood. Nor did her sons ever
develop that economic spirit which is the permanent foundation of
all empire, but they let the wealth of the Indies flow through their
country, principally to London and Amsterdam, there to form in more
practical hands the basis of the British and Dutch colonial empires.

The priest and the soldier were supreme, so her best sons took up
either the cross or the sword to maintain her dominion in the distant
colonies, a movement which, long continued, spelled for her a form of
national suicide. The soldier expended his strength and generally laid
down his life on alien soil, leaving no fit successor of his own stock
to carry on the work according to his standards. The priest under the
celibate system, in its better days left no offspring at all and in
the days of its corruption none bred and reared under the influences
that make for social and political progress. The dark chambers of the
Inquisition stifled all advance in thought, so the civilization and
the culture of Spain, as well as her political system, settled into
ri