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 church, and much of the remainder in vast entailed estates—­it was nearly impossible for the masses of the people to become owners of any portion of the land.  To be an agricultural day-labourer at less than a beggar’s wage could hardly be a tempting pursuit for a proud and indolent race.  It was no wonder therefore that the business of the brigand, the smuggler, the professional mendicant became from year to year more attractive and more overdone; while an ever-thickening swarm of priests, friars, and nuns of every order, engendered out of a corrupt and decaying society, increasing the general indolence, immorality, and unproductive consumption, and frightfully diminishing the productive force of the country, fed like locusts upon what was left in the unhappy land.  “To shirk labour, infinite numbers become priests and friars,” said, a good Catholic, in the year 1608—­[Gir.  Soranzo].

Before the end of the reign of Philip III. the peninsula, which might have been the granary of the world, did not produce food enough for its own population.  Corn became a regular article of import into Spain, and would have come in larger quantities than it did had the industry of the country furnished sufficient material to exchange for necessary food.

And as if it had been an object of ambition with the priests and courtiers who then ruled a noble country, to make at exactly this epoch the most startling manifestation of human fatuity that the world had ever seen, it was now resolved by government to expel by armed force nearly the whole stock of intelligent and experienced labour, agricultural and mechanical, from the country.  It is unnecessary to dwell long upon an event which, if it were not so familiarly known to mankind, would seem almost incredible.  But the expulsion of the Moors is, alas! no exaggerated and imaginary satire, but a monument of wickedness and insanity such as is not often seen in human history.

Already, in the very first years of the century, John Ribera, archbishop of Valencia, had recommended and urged the scheme.