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; Córdoba, 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