arance of inevitable phenomena. The horrible monotony
of his career stupefies the mind until it is ready to accept the
principle of evil as the fundamental law of the world.

His robberies, like his murders, were colossal. The vast, system of
confiscation set up in the Netherlands was sufficient to reduce
unnumbered innocent families to beggary, although powerless to break the
spirit of civil and religious liberty or to pay the expenses of
subjugating a people. Not often in the world's history have so many
thousand individual been plundered by a foreign tyrant for no crime, save
that they were rich enough to be worth robbing. For it can never be too
often repeated that those confiscations and extortions were perpetrated
upon Catholics as well as Protestants, monarchists as well as rebels; the
possession of property making proof of orthodoxy or of loyalty well-nigh
impossible.

Falsehood was the great basis of the king's character, which perhaps
derives its chief importance, as a political and psychological study,
from this very fact. It has been shown throughout the whole course of
this history, by the evidence of his most secret correspondence, that he
was false, most of all, to those to whom he gave what he called his
heart. Granvelle, Alva, Don John, Alexander Farnese, all those, in short,
who were deepest in his confidence experienced in succession his entire
perfidy, while each in turn was sacrificed to his master's sleepless
suspicion. The pope himself was often as much the dupe of the Catholic
monarch's faithlessness as the vilest heretic had ever been. Could the
great schoolmaster of iniquity for the sovereigns and politicians of the
south have lived to witness the practice of the monarch who had most laid
to heart the precepts of the "Prince," he would have felt that he had not
written in vain, and that his great paragon of successful falsehood,
Ferdinand of Arragon, had been surpassed by the great grandson. For the
ideal perfection of perfidy, foreshadowed by the philosopher who died in
the year of Philip's birth, was thoroughly embodied at last by this
potentate. Certainly Nicholas Macchiavelli could have hoped for no more
docile pupil. That all men are vile, that they are liars; scoundrels,
poltroons, and idiots alike--ever ready to deceive and yet easily to be
duped, and that he only is fit to be king who excels his kind in the arts
of deception; by this great maxim of the Florentine, Philip was ever
guide