It matters little or nothing whether the Inquisition, with its secret spies, its closed doors, its mockery of justice, and its terrible background of smouldering Quemadero, was the instrument of the Church or of the King for the moment. Whether a religious or a political tyranny, it was at all times opposed to the very essence of freedom, and it was deliberately used, and would be again to-day if it were possible to restore it, to keep the people in a gross state of ignorance and superstition. That it was admirable as an organisation only shows it in a more baneful light, since it was used to crush out all progress. Its effect is well expressed in the old proverb: "Between the King and the Inquisition we must not open our lips."
"I would rather think I had ascended from an ape," said Huxley, in his celebrated answer to the Bishop of Oxford, "than that I had descended from a man who used great gifts to darken reason." It has been the object of the Inquisition to darken reason wherever it had the power, and it left the mass of the Spanish people, great and generous as they are by nature, for long a mere mob of inert animals, ready to amuse themselves when their country was at its hour of greatest agony, debased by the sight of wholesale and cruel murders carried out by the priests of their religion in the name of Christ.
| PEASANTS | SEVILLE CIGARRERA |
Even to-day the Spaniard of the lower classes can scarcely understand that he can have any part or parcel in the government of his country. Long ages of misrule have made him hate all governments alike: he imagines that all the evils he finds in the world of his own experience are the work of whoever happens to be the ruler for the time being; that it is possible for him to have any say in the matter never enters his head, and he votes, if he votes at all, as he is ordered to vote. He has been taught for ages past to believe whatever he has been told. His reason has been "offered as a sacrifice to God," if indeed he is aware that he possesses any.
The danger of the thorough awakening may be that which broke out so wildly during Castelar's short and disastrous attempt at a republic: that when once he breaks away from the binding power of his old religion, he may have nothing better than atheism and anarchism to fall back upon. The days of the absolute reign of ignorance and superstition are over; but the people are deeply religious. Will the Church of Spain adapt itself to the new state of things, or will it see its people drift away from its pale altogether, as other nations have done? This is the true clerical question which looms darkly before the Spain of to-day.
To return, however. The Austrian kings of Spain had brought her only ruin. With the Bourbons it was hoped a better era had opened, but it was only exchanging one form of misrule for another. The kings existed for their own benefit and pleasure; the people existed to minister to them and find funds for their extravagance. Each succeeding monarch was ruled by some upstart favourite, until the climax was reached when Godoy, the disgraceful Minister of Charles IV., and the open lover of his Queen, sold the country to Napoleon. Then indeed awoke the great heart of the nation, and Spain has the everlasting glory of having risen as one man against the French despot, and, by the help of England, stopped his mad career. Even then, under the base and contemptible Ferdinand VII., she underwent the "Terror of 1824," the disastrous and unworthy regency of Cristina, and the still worse rule of her daughter, Isabel II., before she awoke politically as a nation, and, her innumerable parties forming as one, drove out the Queen, with her camarilla of priests and bleeding nuns, and at last achieved her freedom.
For, whatever may be said of the last hundred years of Spain's history, it has been an advance, a continuous struggle for life and liberty. There had been fluctuating periods of progress. Charles III., a truly wise and patriotic monarch, the first since Ferdinand and Isabella, made extraordinary changes during his too short life. The population of the country rose a million and a half in the twenty-seven years of his reign, and the public revenue in like proportions under his enlightened Minister, Florida Blanca. No phase of the public welfare was neglected: savings banks, hospitals, asylums, free schools, rose up on all sides; vagrancy and mendicancy were sternly repressed; while men of science and skilled craftsmen were brought from foreign countries, and it seemed as if Spain had fairly started on her upward course. But he died before his time in 1788, and was followed by a son and grandson, who, with their wives, ruled by base favourites, dragged the honour of Spain in the dust. Still, the impulse had been given; there had been a break in the long story of misrule and misery; Mendizábal and Espartero scarcely did more than lighten the black canopy of cloud overhanging the country for a time; but at last came freedom, halting somewhat, as must needs be, but no longer to be repressed or driven back by the baneful influence known as palaciö, intrigues arising in the immediate circle of the Court.
