bit of silver that it is in our
time in Spain, Naples, Rome, or America, but even should an elaborate
calculation be made as to the quantity of beef, or bread or broadcloth to
be obtained for that bit of silver in this or that place in the middle of
the sixteenth century, the result, as compared with prices now prevalent,
would show many remarkable discrepancies. Thus a bushel of wheat at
Antwerp during Philip's reign might cost a quarter of a dollar, in
average years, and there have been seasons in our own time when two
bushels of wheat could have been bought for a quarter of a dollar in
Illinois. Yet if, notwithstanding this, we should allow a tenfold value
in exchange to the dollar of Philip's day, we should be surprised at the
meagreness of his revenues, of his expenditures, and of the debts which
at the close of his career brought him to bankruptcy; were the sums
estimated in coin.

Thus his income was estimated by careful contemporary statesmen at what
seemed to them the prodigious annual amount of sixteen millions of
dollars. He carried on a vast war without interruption during the whole
of his forty-three years' reign against the most wealthy and military
nations of Christendom not recognising his authority, and in so doing he
is said to have expended a sum total of seven hundred millions of
dollars--a statement which made men's hair stand on their heads. Yet the
American republic, during its civil war to repress the insurrection of
the slaveholders, has spent nominally as large a sum as this every year;
and the British Empire in time of profound peace spends half as much
annually. And even if we should allow sixteen millions to have
represented the value of a hundred and sixty millions--a purely arbitrary
supposition--as compared with our times, what are a hundred and sixty,
millions of dollars, or thirty-three millions of pounds sterling--as the
whole net revenue of the greatest empire that had ever existed in the
world, when compared with the accumulated treasures over which civilized
and industrious countries can now dispose? Thus the power of levying men
and materials in kind constituted the chief part of the royal power, and,
in truth, very little revenue in money was obtained from Milan or Naples,
or from any of the outlying European possessions of the crown.

Eight millions a year were estimated as the revenue from the eight
kingdoms incorporated under the general name of Castile, while not more
than s