climate and soil, unequal and excessive in every way. The
epoch of heroic deeds once elapsed upon the glowing arena of the Middle
Ages, the Spanish people had despised labour, commerce, and industry.
The soil, neglected, had returned to its primitive sterility, and almost
entire provinces had become solitary deserts. Indolence and poverty are
evil counsellors. The Spanish people, the nation of the Cid, had
transformed her noble and fervent religion of the Middle Ages into a
degrading, and too often cruel superstition. It was unhappily the
popular sentiment of which Philip III. was the exponent when he expelled
the Moors in 1603, thus depriving Spain--poor and already
depopulated--of one hundred thousand rich and industrious families; and
it was national opinion also which had accepted and maintained the
domination of the monks and the hateful empire of the Inquisition.

France, on the contrary, had proceeded rapidly along the path of an
admirable progress. After having put an end to the sanguinary period of
the religious wars, after having repressed the formidable ambition of
the House of Austria, she had proclaimed the principles of tolerance and
justice, destined to become common to all modern communities, and she
had afforded the example of a centralisation which it was thought would
prove an element of prosperity and power. Would the establishment of
such a centralisation consort with the native energy of Spain, which
the peculiar genius of her great provinces still retained? Was it
necessary, in order to rouse that generous country from its languor,
merely to appeal to its recollections of the past, to the sentiment of
its dignity, to what remained of its antique virtues, or was it indeed
necessary to inoculate it with an infusion of some better blood?
Finally, had it not become a question whether Spain should be governed
for itself, or rather as an annexation of France, by considering it as a
simple instrument of the policy of Louis XIV.

Such were the grave questions which the accession of Philip V. had
raised. Louis XIV. had solved them in the sense most favourable to his
ambition, and if he recommended his grandson not to surround himself
with Frenchmen and to respect the national feeling, it was only to bend
the more gently the genius of Spain to his own designs. The
correspondence of Madame de Maintenon--eloquent echoes from Marly and
Versailles--openly reveals that policy. No wonder that it should do so.
T