Such was the prophecy: but bitter its fulfilment. With the expulsion of the Jews and Moors large bodies of industrious and expert agriculturists and skilled mechanics were suddenly withdrawn, and there was no one to fill their place. The cultivation of rice, cotton and sugar, and the manufacture of silk and paper was destroyed at a blow, and most of it was destroyed forever, for the Spanish Christians, still intoxicated with their military and financial and social greatness, considered such pursuits beneath their dignity. To fight for the king and to enter the Church was honorable, but everything else was mean and sordid. Whole districts were deserted and have never been repeopled to the present day. The brigands soon occupied the places formerly so beneficially filled by honest toilers. In less than fifty years 16,000 looms of Seville, giving employment to 130,000 persons, had dwindled away to less than 300, and its population to one quarter of its former number. The mines stood idle until foreigners took pity of some of them. The others are idle still. A little over one hundred years ago the Spanish government being determined to have a navy, found it necessary to send to England for shipwrights; and they were obliged to apply to the same quarter for persons who could make ropes and canvas, the skill of the natives being unequal to such arduous achievements; and early in the eighteenth century they were obliged to import laborers from Holland to teach the Spaniards the art of making wool, an art for which in their glorious past they were especially famous.
The consequences of this industrial and agricultural standstill could not fail. Famine set in. The grandees murmured aloud against the State for expelling the Jews and Moors. The citizens of Madrid fell down in the streets famished and perished where they fell—so had famished and died the Jewish exiles—anarchy prevailed. Peaceful citizens organized themselves into bands and going in search of bread, broke open private houses, and robbed and murdered the inhabitants in the face of day—thus had been murdered the Jewish exiles. Verily God's prophecy was fulfilled: "And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee, in thee shall the families of the earth be blessed."[45]
Spain's intellectual decline kept steady pace with its political and industrial decay. No more is she the center of Europe's learning. No more does her intellect shed luminous rays all over the world. The Moor and the Jew have fled her provinces, and darkness covers her lands, the shadows of night again brood stiflingly over her people. Her poverty has made her ignorant, her ignorance has made her intensely fanatic, and her fanaticism is, to this day, the enemy of all social and intellectual advance. For two centuries and more investigation likely to stimulate thought was positively prohibited. In the measure that her sister countries advanced intellectually she declined, and in proportion as they shook off the fetters of the Church, she cheerfully submitted to have them drawn tighter about her. Until the eighteenth century Madrid did not possess a single public library, and to-day the number of volumes in all the Spanish libraries cannot reach 500,000. The library of Cordova in the tenth century, before the printing press was discovered, counted over 600,000 volumes. The Government library of Paris and that of London count respectively over 1,500,000 and over 2,000,000 volumes. So late as the year 1771 the University of Salamanca, the most ancient and most famous seat of learning in Spain, publicly refused to allow the discoveries of Newton to be taught, and assigned as a reason that his system was not consonant with revealed religion. Buckle quotes from Spanish sources, an epistle which will illustrate the abysses of ignorance into which the Spanish intellect had sunk. About a century ago some bold men proposed that the streets of Madrid should be cleansed. The proposal was met with excited indignation. The question was submitted by the government to the medical profession. They reported unfavorably. They had no doubt that the dirt ought to remain. To remove it was a new experiment, and of new experiments it was impossible to foresee the issue. Their fathers having lived in it, why should they not do the same? Their fathers were wise men, and must have had good reasons for their conduct. The filth shall remain. And it did remain. And it did make Spain the, alas, too frequent victim of plague and cholera, and we now no longer wonder that a year ago, when the cholera raged in Spain, the people arose against the physicians for being asked to resort to medicines and cleanliness and not to Relics and Holy Water.
Intellectually Spain sleeps on, dreams on, receiving no impressions from the rest of the world and making none upon it. "There she lies," says the historian, "at the further extremity of the continent, a huge and torpid mass, the sole representation now remaining of the feelings and knowledge of the middle ages. And what is the worst symptom of all, she is satisfied with her own condition. Though she is the most backward country in Europe, she believes herself foremost. She is proud of everything of which she should be ashamed. She is proud of the antiquity of her opinions; proud of her orthodoxy; proud of the strength of her faith; proud of her immeasurable and childish credulity; proud of her unwillingness to amend either her creed or her customs; proud of her hatred of heretics, and proud of the undying vigilance with which she has baffled their efforts to obtain a full and legal establishment on her soil."
But since Buckle penned these forcible lines, she has made a change. She has recalled the Jews, some five years ago, after 400 years of banishment. Her eyes have been opened at last, and she now seeks to repair her wrongs to the people she afflicted most. And prosperity will follow the re-entrance of the Jews. Spain will again be blest; it may take time, church tyranny will first have to be crushed and ignorance and superstition rooted out, but crushed and rooted out they will be. Her harbors on the Atlantic and Mediterranean will again command the commerce of both hemispheres. Her cities will again teem with people. Her towns will again flourish, her manufactures will again be skillful, the produce of her exuberant soil will again gladden the heart of mankind. Her inexhaustible mines, rich in all the precious and all the useful metals, her quarries of marbles and her beds of coal will again set the wheel of industry into busy motion. She will be blest again. She must be blest again, for such is the word of God. She has held out the hand of friendship to His anointed people, and they that bless them will be blest.
The Moors, Spain no more can recall. The Arab-Moors, such as they were in Spain, exist no longer. Their descendants roam as benighted Bedouins over those regions of Africa which their ancestors once illumined by the light of learning. Gone is most of their literature. The beautiful accents of the classic Arabic tongue are heard no more. Darkness, deep darkness, rules over the Arabian peninsula now. The history that their sires in Spain have made our civilization their debtor, reads indeed, to-day, like unto a fairy tale.
But the Jews live, and fulfill the glorious mission for which they have been scattered throughout the world. The people chosen by the Eternal Jehovah to be His priest people cannot die. The people that has seen the tidal waves of Babylon, Persia, Greece, Egypt, Rome roll over it and instead of engulfing it has lived to see them engulfed; the people that live after a thousand struggles, after deeds of heroic courage that Rome, and Athens, and Sparta, and Carthage have never equaled, outliving them all; the people that still lives, after eighteen centuries of persecution, and still is united, though scattered the wide world over, and though not held together by the ties of any fatherland, was never destined to be annihilated by any Church or by any race of men. The Jew is older than both, and will outlive them both. Time and death wield no power over him. Emerson spoke truly:
"This is he who, felled by foes,
Sprung harmless up, refreshed by blows: