SPANISH LOANS. 173 



272,600,000 reales in the reign of his predecessor, to 630,217,000, 

 reflecting like a faithful barometer the beneficial changes of the 

 times; whilst the navy, which in 1751 counted no more than eighteen 

 ships of the line and fifteen smaller vessels, in 1785 mustered 

 seventy-four of the line besides 200 frigates and inferior craft, and 

 the army exhibited was in a proportionate increase. 

 D (But these flattering prospects this grand amelioration of the body 

 politic and industrial were stayed in their rapid course by the 

 advent of Carlos IV. to the throne upon the eve of the first French 

 revolution. The disastrous war which he undertook against that 

 many-headed hydra ; the subsequent exactions imposed by the 

 freebooters who successively figured at the head of the republic, 

 and submitted to, for the sake of a humiliating peace ; the more sys- 

 tematized and gigantic impositions of Buonaparte ; finally, the wars 

 with England into which he dragged the unhappy and half idiotic 

 monarch ; these co-operating with an administration like that of 

 Godoy, which realized in modern times all the curruption, turpitude, 

 and pusillanimity, nationally and individually, of the Roman empire 

 in the worst age of its decline and depravity, dammed up the cur- 

 rent of social progress. 



The revenue dwindled to nearly one-third, whilst the public debt, 

 to which Carlos III. notwithstanding all his wars had added but 

 804,000,000 of reales, was saddled with the onerous addition of five 

 milliards and a half, or three-fourths of the then total incumbrance 

 of Spain. Such was the rapacity of the queen, and the queen's 

 minion such moreover the exigencies of the royal household 

 that all employments from high to low, from a vice-royalty of 

 Mexico to a regidorship in a Cabildo, were put up to public auction, 

 and disposed of to the best bidder ; excepting where compensation 

 was taken in other than metallic kind ; where a temporary auxiliary 

 lover of the profligate Isabel was to be recompensed, or a Conde de 

 Jaruco regaled by the all-powerful Principe de la Paz, in barter for 

 a handsome wife, with an intendencia, or a governor generalship, an 

 office which in the case of Jaruco, to his honour be it said, however 

 revolting the mode by which acquired, he fulfilled with credit to 

 himself, and signal advantage to the people so capriciously consigned 

 to his charge. The meritorious race of public men educated under 

 the previous reign was not however altogether extinct. A gleam 

 of mind and patriotism now and then burst athwart the gloom, as if 

 to make darkness more visible. The final expulsion of the Moriscos 

 and Jews in the sixteenth century had well nigh banished the 

 mechanical arts from Spain, as well as dependent trading and com- 

 mercial enterprise ; their utter destruction was almost consummated 

 at a later period by the Ordenanzas de los Gremios, the establish- 

 ment of a class of chartered corporations, by which it was ruled that 

 the precise qualification indispensable for the exercise of artizanship 

 or trades should be not education, apprenticeship, or the possession 

 of mechanical genius, but the profession of the most holy catholic, 

 apostolic and Roman faith ; in order to exercise the honourable 

 occupations of even a cobler, a dabbler in soap-suds, a tailor, or a 

 razor-grinder, a diploma was requisite not from masters in the art, 

 but from some mendicant monk or jovial friar of orders gray. 



