belonged
to the ecclesiastical body. In return for this enormous proportion of the
earth's fruits, thus placed by the caprice of destiny at their disposal,
these holy men did very little work in the world. They fed their flocks
neither with bread nor with spiritual food. They taught little, preached
little, dispensed little in charity. Very few of the swarming millions of
naked and hungry throughout the land were clothed or nourished out of
these prodigious revenues of the Church. The constant and avowed care of
those prelates was to increase their worldly, possessions, to build up
the fortunes of their respective families, to grow richer and richer at
the expense of the people whom for centuries they had fleeced. Of gross
crime, of public ostentatious immorality, such as had made the Roman
priesthood of that and preceding ages loathsome in the sight of man and
God, the Spanish Church-dignitaries were innocent. Avarice; greediness,
and laziness were their characteristics. It is almost superfluous to say
that, while the ecclesiastical princes were rolling in this almost
fabulous wealth, the subordinate clergy, the mob of working priests, were
needy, half-starved mendicants.

From this rapid survey of the condition of the peninsula it will seem
less surprising than it might do at first glance that the revenue of the
greatest monarch of the world was rated at the small amount--even after
due allowance for the difference of general values between the sixteenth
and nineteenth centuries--of sixteen millions of dollars. The King of
Spain was powerful and redoubtable at home and abroad, because accident
had placed the control of a variety of separate realms in his single
hand. At the same time Spain was poor and weak, because she had lived for
centuries in violation of the principles on which the wealth and strength
of nations depend. Moreover, every one of those subject and violently
annexed nations hated Spain with undying fervour, while an infernal
policy--the leading characteristics of which were to sow dissensions
among the nobles, to confiscate their property on all convenient
occasions, and to bestow it upon Spaniards and other foreigners; to keep
the discontented masses in poverty, but to deprive them of the power or
disposition to unite with their superiors in rank in demonstrations
against the crown--had sufficed to suppress any extensive revolt in the
various Italian states united under Philip's sceptre. Still more i