certain rugged nobility of character which cannot but command our
admiration. The general manners and customs of the time are, for the
most part, marked by great decency and purity; women justly merited the
respect which was shown them, and the family was recognized as a
necessary factor in national strength. As an interesting bit of
information which will show, indirectly at least, that women were held
in high regard, it may be noted that a number of old coins have been
found, coming from this early day, which bear upon one side a woman's
head.

The prosperity which came with the advent of the Romans was the result,
in great part, of the unexampled peace which the whole peninsula now
enjoyed. The mines were worked, the olive groves yielded a rich harvest
of oil, the fields were tilled and much Spanish wheat was sent abroad,
and, in everything but the mining, the women worked side by side with
the men. Flax had been brought to Spain long before by the
Phoenicians, and no special attention had been given to its culture;
but now matters were quite changed, and the finest linen to be found in
all the Western world came from the dexterous hands of the Spanish
women. This time of peace and comfort cannot be considered as an unmixed
blessing, however; for with the decline of war the sterner virtues
languished, and much of that primitive simplicity of an earlier day lost
its freshness and naivete and gave way to the subtle vices and corrupt
influences which never failed to follow in the wake of Latin conquest.
The strength and virility of the nation had been sapped by the Romans,
as thousands of Spaniards were forced into the Roman legions and forced
to fight their oppressors' battles in many distant lands, and very few
of them came home even to die. With this enormous depletion of the male
population, it was but natural that there should be a certain mixture of
races which was not always an aid to public morals. Marriage between
Roman citizens and the women of the so-called barbarian nations was
rarely recognized by law; many of the Spanish women, as prisoners of
war, were sold into slavery; and with such a social system imposed by
the conquerors, it is easy to see that contamination was inevitable.

With the gradual decay of Roman power, the colonial dependencies of this
great empire were more and more allowed to fall into the almost absolute
control of unscrupulous governors, who did not miss an occasion to levy
extortion