ain, extended, with its
complicated ramifications, through all the provinces, and penetrated
every social organization in Europe and America,[59] and even to the
most distant East India possessions, binding all the several parts
together as the nervous system does the parts of the human body; or
rather by external folds, as the anaconda does its victim. The
Inquisition was emphatically the nervous system of the Spanish
monarchy. From the time of Philip II. to the last of her kings, Spain
had but one monarch that could have escaped a lunatic asylum on a
commission _ad inquirendo_, and not a single royal family in all that
time that had not at least one judicially declared idiot in the
household; and more than once it was the regular successor to the
throne. And yet this ingeniously contrived craft of priests held all
most firmly together, and made it capable of resisting every outside
pressure until the French imperial armies entered Madrid.

When French gunpowder was applied to the Holy Office, the Spanish
empire lost its nationality, and its different parts fell to pieces
like a rope of sand, and revealed to the world the sad truth that the
Spanish race, whether in the Peninsula or in the colonies, was now
incapable of self-government. The Inquisition had consumed its powers
of vitality. So long accustomed to submit to and lean upon despotic
authority, its various nationalities had lost the power of
self-support. Spain, from the earliest historical periods, had ever
been the victim of foreign colonial despotisms or imported tyrants
until Philip II., under whom the Inquisition becoming firmly
established, it thenceforward continued a Catholic province of the
Roman Church, until Rome and the Papal Spanish empire fell together by
the hands of Napoleon. From that time onward, Spain and all her former
provinces have continued the sport of military insurgents--a melancholy
evidence of the mental, physical, and moral ruin that overtakes a
country abandoned to the despotism of priests.

Though the origin of the Inquisition of Spain is familiar to all, yet
few are accustomed to look upon it in its political bearings. The
"pious" Isabella, or, as she is called by the descendants of the
Moriscoes, "Isabella the Accursed," is conceded to have been the
founder of the modern Inquisition, and yet her great piety did not
prevent her from giving a death-blow to the _Fuero_ of Castile, the
most liberal government of Europe except that