ards, of which the number was enormous. Many of these
were capable, in careful hands, of becoming ten times as valuable as
their nominal estimate, and the business in them became in consequence
very extensive and lucrative. They were often disposed of for the benefit
of servants and the hangers-on of noble families, to laymen, to women,
children, to babes unborn.

When such was the most thriving industry in the land, was it wonderful
that the poor of high and low degree were anxious in ever-increasing
swarms to effect their entrance into convent, monastery, and church, and
that trade, agriculture, and manufactures languished?

The foreign polity of the court remained as it had been established by
Philip II.

Its maxims were very simple. To do unto your neighbour all possible harm,
and to foster the greatness of Spain by sowing discord and maintaining
civil war in all other nations, was the fundamental precept. To bribe and
corrupt the servants of other potentates, to maintain a regular paid bode
of adherents in foreign lands, ever ready to engage in schemes of
assassination, conspiracy, sedition, and rebellion against the legitimate
authority, to make mankind miserable, so far as it was in the power of
human force or craft to produce wretchedness, were objects still
faithfully pursued.

They had not yet led to the entire destruction of other realms and their
submission to the single sceptre of Spain, nor had they developed the
resources, material or moral, of a mighty empire so thoroughly as might
have been done perhaps by a less insidious policy, but they had never
been abandoned.

It was a steady object of policy to keep such potentates of Italy as were
not already under the dominion of the Spanish crown in a state of
internecine feud with each other and of virtual dependence on the
powerful kingdom. The same policy pursued in France, of fomenting civil
war by subsidy, force, and chicane, during a long succession of years in
order to reduce that magnificent realm under the sceptre of Philip, has
been described in detail. The chronic rebellion of Ireland against the
English crown had been assisted and inflamed in every possible mode, the
system being considered as entirely justified by the aid and comfort
afforded by the queen to the Dutch rebels.

It was a natural result of the system according to which kingdoms and
provinces with the populations dwelling therein were transferable like
real estate by means of m