His Credulity Regarded It As Divine, And Worthy Of Blind Adoration, And His Heart Went Out To It With The Sympathy Of Perfect Love.

In these centuries of war there was no commerce, no manufactures, no settled industry of importance among the Spaniards.

There was consequently no wealth, none of that comfort and ease which is the natural element of doubt and discussion. Science did not exist. The little learning of the time was exclusively in the hands of the priesthood. If from time to time an intelligent spirit struggled against the chain of unquestioning bigotry that bound him, he was rigorously silenced by prompt and bloody punishment. There seemed to be no need of discussion, no need of inculcation of doctrine. The serious work of the time was the war with the infidel. The clergy managed everything. The question, "What shall I do to be saved?" never entered into those simple and ignorant minds. The Church would take care of those who did her bidding.

Thus it was that in the hammering of those struggling ages the nation became welded together in one compact mass of unquestioning, unreasoning faith, which the Church could manage at its own good pleasure.

It was also in these times that Spanish honor took its rise. This sentiment is so nearly connected with that of personal loyalty that they may be regarded as phases of the same monarchical spirit. The rule of honor as distinguished from honesty and virtue is the most prominent characteristic of monarchy, and for that reason the political theorists from the time of Montesquieu have pronounced in favor of the monarchy as a more practicable form of government than the republic, as requiring a less perfect and delicate machinery, men of honor being far more common than men of virtue. As in Spain, owing to special conditions, monarchy attained the most perfect growth and development which the world has seen, the sentiment of honor, as a rule of personal and political action, has there reached its most exaggerated form. I use this word, of course, in its restricted meaning of an intense sense of personal dignity, and readiness to sacrifice for this all considerations of interest and morality.

This phase of the Spanish character is probably derived in its germ from the Gothic blood of their ancestors. Their intense self-assertion has been, in the Northern races, modified by the progress of intelligence and the restraints of municipal law into a spirit of sturdy self-respect and a disinclination to submit to wrong. The Goths of Spain have unfortunately never gone through this civilizing process. Their endless wars never gave an opportunity for the development of the purely civic virtues of respect and obedience to law. The people at large were too wretched, too harried by constant coming and going of the waves of war, to do more than live, in a shiftless, hand-to-mouth way, from the proceeds of their flocks and herds. There were no cities of importance within the Spanish lines.

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