ces and he was not to be stopped, driven on as he was by his
propagandist zeal. He was fired by the old oratorical fervour, and he
spoke as at those meetings when he could scarcely continue his speech
for the applause, and the protests and surging of the multitude
obstructing the police.

The horror of the priest only seemed to excite him more.

"Philip II.," he continued, "was a foreigner, a German to the very
bones. His grave taciturnity, his slow and penetrating mind, were not
Spanish, they were Flemish. The impassibility with which he received
the reverses which ruined the nation was that of a foreigner who was
bound by no ties of affection to the country. 'It is better to reign
over corpses than over heretics,' he said, and corpses the Spaniards
really were, condemned not to think, but to lie in order to conceal
their thoughts. All the ancient offices had disappeared. Outside
the Church there was no future for any adventurous soul, except in
America--which ceased to be of any use to the nation after it became
converted into the treasure chest of the king--or to be a soldier
fighting in Europe for the rehabilitation of the Holy German Empire,
for the subjection of the Pope to the Emperor or the extinction of the
reformed religion, undertakings that in no way concerned Spain, but
were all the same very blood-letting affairs, even for those who
escaped with their lives. All the handicraftsmen disappeared, carried
away to the armies, and the towns became filled with invalids and
veterans, carrying their rusty swords, their only proof of personal
valour. All the middle-class guilds were suppressed; there only
remained nobles proud of being servants to the king and a populace
who only asked for bread and entertainments, like the Romans, and
contented themselves with the broth from the convents and the burning
of heretics organised by the Inquisition.

"After this, ruin overwhelmed us; after the great Caesars, so fatal to
Spain, came the little ones--Philip III., who gave the final blow by
expelling the Moors; Philip IV., a degenerate with literary fancies,
who wrote verses and courted nuns, and the miserable Charles II.

"Spain had never been so religious, Don Antolin," said Luna. "The
Church was mistress of everything; the ecclesiastical tribunals judged
even the king himself, but secular justice could not touch even the
hem of a garment of the lowest sacristan, even though he committed the
greatest crimes in the pu