ainst an entirely desperate people.
As a military commander, therefore, he gained, upon the whole, no
additional laurels during his long administration of the Netherlands. Of
all the other attributes to be expected in a man appointed to deal with a
free country, in a state of incipient rebellion, he manifested a signal
deficiency. As a financier, he exhibited a wonderful ignorance of the
first principles of political economy. No man before, ever gravely
proposed to establish confiscation as a permanent source of revenue to
the state; yet the annual product from the escheated property of
slaughtered heretics was regularly relied upon, during his
administration, to replenish the King's treasury, and to support the war
of extermination against the King's subjects. Nor did statesman ever
before expect a vast income from the commerce of a nation devoted to
almost universal massacre. During the daily decimation of the people's
lives, he thought a daily decimation of their industry possible. His
persecutions swept the land of those industrious classes which had made
it the rich and prosperous commonwealth it had been so lately; while, at
the same time, he found a "Peruvian mine," as he pretended, in the
imposition of a tenth penny upon every one of its commercial
transactions. He thought that a people, crippled as this had been by the
operations of the Blood Council; could pay ten per cent., not annually
but daily; not upon its income, but upon its capital; not once only, but
every time the value constituting the capital changed hands. He had
boasted that he should require no funds from Spain, but that, on the
contrary, he should make annual remittances to the royal treasury at
home, from the proceeds of his imposts and confiscations; yet,
notwithstanding these resources, and notwithstanding twenty-five millions
of gold in five years, sent by Philip from Madrid, the exchequer of the
provinces was barren and bankrupt when his successor arrived. Requesens
found neither a penny in the public treasury nor the means of raising
one.

As an administrator of the civil and judicial affairs of the country,
Alva at once reduced its institutions to a frightful simplicity. In the
place of the ancient laws of which the Netherlanders were so proud, he
substituted the Blood Council. This tribunal was even more arbitrary than
the Inquisition. Never was a simpler apparatus for tyranny devised, than
this great labor-saving machine. Never was so