d their
progenitors--this was the People; and it was these paupers and outcasts,
nearly the whole nation, that paid all the imposts of which the public
revenue was composed. The great nobles, priests, and even the hidalgos,
were exempt from taxation. Need more be said to indicate the inevitable
ruin of both government and people?

And it was over such a people, and with institutions like these, that
Philip II. was permitted to rule during forty-three years. His power was
absolute. With this single phrase one might as well dismiss any attempt
at specification. He made war or peace at will with foreign nations. He
had power of life and death over all his subjects. He had unlimited
control of their worldly goods. As he claimed supreme jurisdiction over
their religious opinions also, he was master of their minds, bodies, and
estates. As a matter of course, he nominated and removed at will every
executive functionary, every judge, every magistrate, every military or
civil officer; and moreover, he not only selected, according to the
license tacitly conceded to him by the pontiff, every archbishop, bishop,
and other Church dignitary, but, through his great influence at Rome, he
named most of the cardinals, and thus controlled the election of the
popes. The whole machinery of society, political, ecclesiastical,
military, was in his single hand. There was a show of provincial
privilege here and there in different parts of Spain, but it was but the
phantom of that ancient municipal liberty which it had been the especial
care of his father and his great-grandfather to destroy. Most patiently
did Philip, by his steady inactivity, bring about the decay of the last
ruins of free institutions in the peninsula. The councils and legislative
assemblies were convoked and then wearied out in waiting for that royal
assent to their propositions and transactions, which was deferred
intentionally, year after year, and never given. Thus the time of the
deputies was consumed in accomplishing infinite nothing, until the moment
arrived when the monarch, without any violent stroke of state, could feel
safe in issuing decrees and pragmatic edicts; thus reducing the ancient
legislative and consultative bodies to nullity, and substituting the will
of an individual for a constitutional fabric. To criticise the expenses
of government or to attempt interference with the increase of taxation
became a sorry farce. The forms remained in certain provinces af