a was fully sustained by the Archbishop of Toledo, and
the whole ecclesiastical body received energetic support from Government.

Ribera had solemnly announced that the Moors were so greedy of money, so
determined to keep it, and so occupied with pursuits most apt for
acquiring it, that they had come to be the sponge of Spanish wealth. The
best proof of this, continued the reverend sage, was that, inhabiting in
general poor little villages and sterile tracts of country, paying to the
lords of the manor one third of the crops, and being overladen with
special taxes imposed only upon them, they nevertheless became rich,
while the Christians, cultivating the most fertile land, were in abject
poverty.

It seems almost incredible that this should not be satire. Certainly the
most delicate irony could not portray the vicious institutions under
which the magnificent territory and noble people of Spain were thus
doomed to ruin more subtly end forcibly than was done by the honest
brutality of this churchman. The careful tillage, the beautiful system of
irrigation by aqueduct and canal, the scientific processes by which these
"accursed" had caused the wilderness to bloom with cotton, sugar, and
every kind of fruit and grain; the untiring industry, exquisite
ingenuity, and cultivated taste by which the merchants, manufacturers,
and mechanics, guilty of a darker complexion than that of the peninsular
Goths, had enriched their native land with splendid fabrics in cloth,
paper, leather, silk, tapestry, and by so doing had acquired fortunes for
themselves, despite iniquitous taxation, religious persecution, and
social contumely--all these were crimes against a race of idlers, steeped
to the lips in sloth which imagined itself to be pride.

The industrious, the intelligent, the wealthy, were denounced as
criminals, and hunted to death or into exile as vermin, while the Lermas,
the Ucedas, and the rest of the brood of cormorants, settled more thickly
than ever around their prey.

Meantime, Government declared that the piece of four maravedis should be
worth eight maravedis; the piece of two maravedis being fixed at four.
Thus the specie of the kingdom was to be doubled, and by means of this
enlightened legislation, Spain, after destroying agriculture, commerce,
and manufacture, was to maintain great armies and navies, and establish
universal monarchy.

This measure, which a wiser churchman than Ribera, Cardinal Richelieu,
afterward