these "accursed" had caused the wilderness to bloom with cotton, sugar,
and every kind of fruit and grain; the untiring industry, exquisite
ingenuity, and cultivated taste by which the merchants, manufacturers,
and mechanics, guilty of a darker complexion than that of the peninsular
Goths, had enriched their native land with splendid fabrics in cloth,
paper, leather, silk, tapestry, and by so doing had acquired fortunes
for themselves, despite iniquitous taxation, religious persecution, and
social contumely--all these were crimes against a race of idlers, steeped
to the lips in sloth which imagined itself to be pride.

The industrious, the intelligent, the wealthy, were denounced as
criminals, and hunted to death or into exile as vermin, while the Lermas,
the Ucedas, and the rest of the brood of cormorants, settled more thickly
than ever around their prey.

Meantime, Government declared that the piece of four maravedis should be
worth eight maravedis; the piece of two maravedis being fixed at four.
Thus the specie of the kingdom was to be doubled, and by means of this
enlightened legislation, Spain, after destroying agriculture, commerce,
and manufacture, was to maintain great armies and navies, and establish
universal monarchy.

This measure, which a wiser churchman than Ribera, Cardinal Richelieu,
afterwards declared the most audacious and barbarous ever recorded by
history, was carried out with great regularity of organization. It was
ordained that the Moors should be collected at three indicated points,
whence they were not to move on pain of death, until duly escorted by
troops to the ports of embarkation. The children under the age of four
years were retained, of course without their parents, from whom they were
forever separated. With admirable forethought, too, the priests took