to ruin himself, not only in health but in fortune, for want of proper
recompense during an arduous administration. At any rate it is very
certain that the rebellion had already been an expensive matter to the
Crown. The army in the Netherlands numbered more than sixty-two thousand
men, eight thousand being Spaniards, the rest Walloons and Germans.
Forty millions of dollars had already been sunk, and it seemed probable
that it would require nearly the whole annual produce of the American
mines to sustain the war. The transatlantic gold and silver, disinterred
from the depths where they had been buried for ages, were employed, not
to expand the current of a healthy, life-giving commerce, but to be
melted into blood. The sweat and the tortures of the King's pagan
subjects in the primeval forests of the New World, were made subsidiary
to the extermination of his Netherland people, and the destruction of an
ancient civilization. To this end had Columbus discovered a hemisphere
for Castile and Aragon, and the new Indies revealed their hidden
treasures?

Forty millions of ducats had been spent. Six and a half millions of
arrearages were due to the army, while its current expenses were six
hundred thousand a month. The military expenses alone of the Netherlands
were accordingly more than seven millions of dollars yearly, and the
mines of the New World produced, during the half century of Philip's
reign, an average of only eleven. Against this constantly increasing
deficit, there was not a stiver in the exchequer, nor the means of
raising one. The tenth penny had been long virtually extinct, and was
soon to be formally abolished. Confiscation had ceased to afford a
permanent revenue, and the estates obstinately refused to grant a dollar.
Such was the condition to which the unrelenting tyranny and the financial
experiments of Alva had reduced the country.