nation; its writers, its singers, its men of science, wherever they
dared to raise their voices in ever so faint a cry, ground down to one
dead level of unthinking acquiescence, or driven forth from their native
land, without ceasing to wonder at all at Spain's decadence from the
moment she had handed herself over, bound hand and foot, to the Church.
Wondering, rather, at her enormous inherent vitality, which at last,
after so many centuries of spasmodic effort, has shaken off the incubus
and regained liberty, or for the first time established it in the realms
of religion, science, and general instruction.

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