Spanish Life in Town and Country | Page 6

the fine air and sunshine of the country for over four hundred years, one's heart beats in sympathy with the pride of the Spaniards in their Catholic Kings. But Toledo, alas! is dead; the centre of light and learning is mouldering in the very slough of ignorance, and Christianity compares badly enough with the rule of Arab and Jew.
Nevertheless, it must be said that, had matters been left as Isabella and Ferdinand left them, Spain might have benefited by the example of her conquerors, as other countries have done, and as she herself did during the Roman occupation. Philip II. was too wise to expel the richest and most industrious of his subjects so long as they paid his taxes and, at least, professed to be Christians. It was not until the reign of Philip III. and his disgraceful favourite Lerma, himself the most bigoted of Valencian "Christians," that, by the advice of Ribera, the Archbishop of Valencia, these industrious, thrifty, and harmless people were ruthlessly driven out. They had turned Valencia into a prolific garden,--even to-day it is called the huerta,--their silk manufactures were known and valued throughout the world; their industry and frugality were, in fact, their worst crimes; they were able to draw wealth from the sterile lands which "Christians" found wholly unproductive. "Since it is impossible to kill them all," said Ribera, the representative of Christ, he again and again urged on the King their expulsion.
The nobles and landowners protested in vain. September 22, 1609, is one of the blackest--perhaps, in fact, the blackest--of all days in the disastrous annals of Spain. The Marqu��s de Caracena, Viceroy of Valencia, issued the terrible edict of expulsion. Six of the oldest and "most Christian" Moriscos in each community of a hundred souls were to remain to teach their modes of cultivation and their industries, and only three days were allowed for the carrying out of this most wicked and suicidal law. In the following six months one hundred and fifty thousand Moors were hounded out of the land which their ancestors had possessed and enriched for centuries. Murcia, Andalucia, Aragon, Catalu?a, Castile, La Mancha, and Estremadura were next taken in hand. In these latter provinces the cruel blunder was all the worse, since the Moors had intermarried with the Iberian inhabitants, and had really embraced the Christian religion, so called.
Half a million souls, according to Father Bleda, in his _Defensio Fidei_, were thrust out, with every aggravation of cruelty and robbery. No nation can commit crimes like this without suffering more than its victims. Spain has never to this day recovered from the blow to her own prosperity, to her commerce, her manufactures, and her civilisation dealt by the narrow-minded and ignorant King, led by a despicable favourite, and the fanatical bigot, Ribera. With the Moors went almost all their arts and industries; immense tracts of country became arid wastes: Castile and La Mancha barely raise crops every second year where the Moriscos reaped their teeming harvest, and Estremadura from a smiling garden became a waste where wandering flocks of sheep and pigs now find a bare subsistence. Nor was this all. Science and learning were also driven out with the Arab and Jew; C��rdoba, like Toledo, vanished, as the centre of intellectual life. In place of enlightened agriculture, irrigation of the dry land, and the planting of trees, the peasant was taught to take for his example San Isidro, the patron saint of the labourer, who spent his days in prayer, and left his fields to plough and sow themselves; the forests were cut down for fuel, until the shadeless wastes became less and less productive, and the whole land on the elevated plains, which the Moors had irrigated and planted, became little better than a desert.
It was not only in the mother country that frightful acts of bigotry and lust for wealth were enacted. In Peru the Spaniards found a splendid civilisation among the strange races of the Incas, a condition of order which many modern states might envy, a religion absolutely free from fetish worship, and a standard of morality which has never been surpassed. But they ruthlessly destroyed it all, desecrated the temples where the sun was worshipped only as a visible representative of a God "of whom nothing could be known save by His works," as their tenet ran, and substituted the religion which they represented as having been taught by Jesus of Nazareth; a religion which looked for its chief power to the horrible Inquisition and its orgies called Autos da f��!
As regards the mysterious race of the Incas, who in comparison with the native Indians were almost white, and who possessed a high cultivation, it is curious to note that during the late troubles in China records came to light in