acred tribunals of law, to take bribes from rich and poor, high and low;
in sums infinitesimal or enormous, to pillage the exchequer in, every
imaginable form, to dispose of titles of honour, orders of chivalry,
posts in municipal council, at auction; to barter influence, audiences,
official interviews against money cynically paid down in rascal
counters--all this was esteemed consistent with patrician dignity.

The ministers, ecclesiastics, and those about court, obtaining a monopoly
of such trade, left the business of production and circulation to their
inferiors, while, as has already been sufficiently indicated, religious
fanaticism and a pride of race, which nearly amounted to idiocy, had
generated a scorn for labour even among the lowest orders. As a natural
consequence, commerce and the mechanical arts fell almost exclusively
into the hands of foreigners--Italians, English, and French--who resorted
in yearly increasing numbers to Spain for the purpose of enriching.
themselves by the industry which the natives despised.

The capital thus acquired was at regular intervals removed from the
country to other lands, where wealth resulting from traffic or
manufactures was not accounted infamous.

Moreover, as the soil of the country was held by a few great
proprietors--an immense portion in the dead-hand of an insatiate and
ever-grasping church, and much of the remainder in vast entailed
estates--it was nearly impossible for the masses of the people to become
owners of any portion of the land. To be an agricultural day-labourer at
less than a beggar's wage could hardly be a tempting pursuit for a proud
and indolent race. It was no wonder therefore that the business of the
brigand, the smuggler, the professional mendicant became from year to
year more attractive and more overdone; while an ever-thickening swarm of
priests, friars, and nuns of every order, engendered out of a corrupt and
decaying society, increasing the general indolence, immorality, and
unproductive consumption, and frightfully diminishing the productive
force of the country, fed like locusts upon what was left in the unhappy
land. "To shirk labour, infinite numbers become priests and friars,"
said, a good Catholic, in the year 1608--[Gir. Soranzo].

Before the end of the reign of Philip III. the peninsula, which might
have been the granary of the world, did not produce food enough for its
own population. Corn became a regular article of import into Sp