inexpressibly heart-rending tragedy.

It is the tragic history of the eldest and most beautiful, the noblest
and most venerable, the freest and most gifted of Europe's daughters,
delivered over to the devilry that issued from the most incompetent and
arrogantly stupid of the European sisterhood, and to the cruelty,
inspired by panic, of an impious theocracy. When we use these terms to
designate the Papacy of the Counter-Reformation, it is not that we
forget how many of those Popes were men of blameless private life and
serious views for Catholic Christendom. When we use these terms to
designate the Spanish race in the sixteenth century, it is not that we
are ignorant of Spanish chivalry and colonizing enterprise, of Spanish
romance, or of the fact that Spain produced great painters, great
dramatists, and one great novelist in the brief period of her glory. We
use them deliberately, however, in both cases; because the Papacy at
this period committed itself to a policy of immoral, retrograde, and
cowardly repression of the most generous of human impulses under the
pressure of selfish terror; because the Spaniards abandoned themselves
to a dark fiend of religious fanaticism; because they were merciless in
their conquests and unintelligent in their administration of subjugated
provinces; because they glutted their lusts of avarice and hatred on
industrious folk of other creeds within their borders; because they
cultivated barren pride and self-conceit in social life; because at the
great epoch of Europe's reawakening they chose the wrong side and
adhered to it with fatal obstinacy. This obstinacy was disastrous to
their neighbors and ruinous to themselves. During the short period of
three reigns (between 1598 and 1700) they sank from the first to the
third grade in Europe, and saw the scepter passing in the New World from
their hands to those of more normally constituted races. That the
self-abandonment to sterilizing passions and ignoble persecutions which