orld.
Then when the bankers lost confidence in the navy of Venice they put
their jewels and gold into saddle bags and moved the financial center of
the world to Nuremburg, because its walls were seven feet thick and
twenty feet high. Later, about 1500 A.D., the discovery of the New World
turned all the peoples into races of sea-going folk, and the English and
Dutch captains vied with the sailors of Spain and Portugal. No captains
were more prosperous than the mariners of Antwerp. In 1568 there were
500 marble mansions in this city on the Meuse. Belgium became a casket
filled with jewels. Then it was that Spain turned covetous eyes
northward. Sated with his pleasures, broken by indulgence and passion,
the Emperor Charles the Fifth resigned his gold and throne to his son,
King Philip. Finding his coffers depleted, Philip sent the Duke of Alva,
with 10,000 Spanish soldiers, out on a looting expedition. Their
approach filled Antwerp with consternation, for her merchants were busy
with commerce and not with war. The sack of Antwerp by the Spaniards
makes up a revolting page in history. Within three days 8,000 men, women
and children were massacred, and the Spanish soldiers, drunk with wine
and blood, hacked, drowned and burned like fiends that they were. The
Belgian historian tells us that 500 marble residences were reduced to
blackened ruins. One incident will make the event stand out. When the
Spaniards approached the city a wealthy burgher hastened the day of his
son's marriage. During the ceremony the soldiers broke down the gate of
the city and crossed the threshold of the rich man's house. When they
had stripped the guests of their purses and gems, unsatisfied, they
killed the bridegroom, slew the men, and carried the bride out into the
night. The next morning a young woman, crazed and half clad, was found
in the street, searching among the dead bodies. At last she found a
youth, whose head she lifted upon her knees, over which she crooned her
songs, as a young mother soothes her babe. A Spanish officer passing by,
humiliated by the spectacle, ordered a soldier to use his dagger and put
the girl out of her misery.

THE HORRORS OF THE INQUISITION

Having looted Antwerp, the treasure chest of Belgium, the Spaniards set
up the Inquisition as an organized means of securing property. It is a
strange fact that the Spaniard has excelled in cruelty as other nations
have excelled in art or science or invention. Spain's cruel