filled with blood. In a short time he totally annihilated every
privilege of the people, and with unrelenting cruelty put
multitudes of them to death.

The more the peasants rebelled, the crueler were the methods of
Alva. Men were tortured, beheaded, roasted before slow fires,
pinched to death with hot tongs, broken on the wheel, flayed
alive. On one occasion the skins of leaders were stripped from
their living bodies, and stretched upon drums for beating the
funeral march of brethren to the gallows. During the course of six
years Alva brought charges of heresy and treason against 30,000
inhabitants, and made the infamous boast that, in addition to the
multitudes killed in battle and massacred after victory, he had
consigned 18,000 persons to the executioner.

This unholy war with the Netherlands lasted with occasional
cessations of hostilities for eighty years, and during its
progress Spain buried 350,000 of her sons and allies in Holland,
spent untold millions in the attempted destruction of freedom, and
sunk from the first power in Europe, an empire whose proud boast
it had been that upon her possessions the sun never set, to the
level of a fourth-rate country, cruel in government, superstitious
in religion, and ever an enemy to progress.

EXPULSION OF THE MOORS.

In addition to the terrible drain upon the country from losses in
war, the expulsion of the Jews and the Moors was productive of the
direst results. In 1609 all the Moriscoes were ordered to depart
from the Peninsula within three days. The penalty of death was