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cities were decimated, thousands of villages depopulated; in every year 

 myriads emigrated to Mexico and Peru — the emigration to America de- 

 priving Spain of thirty millions of inhabitants and reducing a populous 

 and admirably cultivated country to a desert. How came all this about ? 

 ]>y a process diametrically opposite to that of this country and century. 

 First by the expulsion'if the Moors, the famed cultivators of the middle 

 ages, and the state oppression of the only true sources of national wealth, 

 agriculture, industry and commerce. Sully, the greater minister of the 

 great French king, Henry IV, said of agriculture, as affecting Spain, that 

 it was the true mines and treasures of Peru, yet the Spaniards directed a 

 series of laws against it, and the blood thirsty Philip II had the incredible 

 folly to pass a law to punish with fourteen years exile the agriculturist who 

 made bread of his own corn, or sold it in the public market, and farmers 

 were prohibited from enclosing their lands, as otherwise the million sheep 

 of the nobles might not have sufficient ground to graze upon. Industry 

 and commerce shared the same fate as agriculture. Taxes were laid on 

 some classes of artizans so great that it was cheaper for them to be idle 

 than to work. All honest labor fell under the ban of prejudice, and 

 the only service considered worthy of a Spaniard, was to become one of 

 the starved ragged nobles, or to enter into the domestic service of a noble 

 house. The natural result was, that all lucrative occupations fell inlo the 

 hands of Jews and foreigners. All the wealth of Mexico and Peru— mil- 

 lions upon millions — passed through the country as water through a tub of the 

 Danaids. It swallowed every thing and deposited nothing after the fashion 

 of all idlers and spendthrifts. People took to the monastic life, not only 

 from superstition and to obtain a subsistence in a hunger stricken country, 

 but for the same reason that they took to emigration and avoided marriage 

 — in absolute despair of the future. There were nine thousand monaste- 

 ries, and nine hundred and twenty eight convents iu the kingdom, eighty 

 six thousand priests, sixty thousand monks, and thirty-three thousand 

 nuns, or out of a population of less than six millions, nearly two hun- 

 dred thousand persons were devoted to consecrated idleness and celibacy. 

 By entails and intermarriages, the accumulation of landed property iu single 

 hands was enormous, some land owners having as many as eighty thousand 

 people on their estates, who could never acquire any property on the lands 

 they cultivated, and in addition to this a fifth part of the soil was in the 

 hands of priests and monks. Can you wonder that such a country has 

 come to grief — that she has been for years the derided one among civilized 



