EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



ways dominated the Spaniards more completely 

 than any other European people, but which has 

 wrought mischief enough in other countries than 

 Spain. To insure absolute " religious unity," 

 to insure that from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar all 

 people should think exactly alike about ques- 

 tions which are confessedly unfathomable by 

 the human mind, this seemed to the Spaniard 

 an end of such supreme importance as to justify 

 the destruction of two hundred thousand lives, 

 and the overthrow of some of the chief indus- 

 tries of the kingdom. The annals of persecu- 

 tion in other countries serve but to point the 

 same moral. Measured by the quantity of suf- 

 fering it has entailed, as well as by the whole- 

 sale disregard of moral rectitude it has involved, 

 the history of the attempt to enforce " religious 

 unity " is, no doubt, the blackest of all the 

 black chapters in the awful career of mankind 

 upon the earth. 



Yet, no doubt, the object for which all this 

 agony has been inflicted, and all this villainy 

 perpetrated, is an utterly worthless object, when 

 considered with reference to the conditions of 

 life in a civilized society. Not only is it not de- 

 sirable that all the members of the community 

 should hold the same opinions about religious 

 matters, but it is far better that they should not 

 all hold the same opinions. To the French- 

 man's sneer about the English, who have twenty 

 224 



