sell the wool from his boundless sheep-walks disgraced his caste, and was
accounted as low as a merchant. To create was the business of slaves and
miscreants: to destroy was the distinguishing attribute of Christians and
nobles. To cheat, to pick, and to steal, on the most minute and the most
gigantic scale--these were also among the dearest privileges of the
exalted classes. No merchandize was polluting save the produce of honest
industry. To sell places in church and state, the army, the navy, and
the sacred tribunals of law, to take bribes from rich and poor, high and
low; in sums infinitesimal or enormous, to pillage the exchequer in,
every imaginable form, to dispose of titles of honour, orders of
chivalry, posts in municipal council, at auction; to barter influence,
audiences, official interviews against money cynically paid down in
rascal counters--all this was esteemed consistent with patrician dignity.

The ministers, ecclesiastics, and those about court, obtaining a monopoly
of such trade, left the business of production and circulation to their
inferiors, while, as has already been sufficiently indicated, religious
fanaticism and a pride of race, which nearly amounted to idiocy, had
generated a scorn for labour even among the lowest orders. As a natural
consequence, commerce and the mechanical arts fell almost exclusively
into the hands of foreigners--Italians, English, and French--who resorted
in yearly increasing numbers to Spain for the purpose of enriching.
themselves by the industry which the natives despised.

The capital thus acquired was at regular intervals removed from the
country to other lands, where wealth resulting from traffic or
manufactures was not accounted infamous.

Moreover, as the soil of the country was held by a few great proprietors
--an immense portion in the dead-hand of an insatiate and ever-grasping