=199. Economic decline in the following period.=—Astonishing as is this rapid economic development, it is less striking than the economic decline that followed. Lack of space forbids the discussion in detail of the complex causes which brought about, first, an actual decline of productive power, and then a condition so nearly stationary that Spain was passed by nearly all the other states of western Europe. One important factor, the colonial system of the Spanish kings, will be reserved for discussion later as a separate topic. In this place we shall take up some of the significant facts showing the decline, and suggest some influences that make it intelligible. The most serious symptom of decadence was an actual decrease of population. In 1723 the total population of Spain was under six million, three million less than the figures show for 1594, when the decline had probably already begun. This decrease is the more significant in that it affected largely the urban groups whose numbers reflect the prosperity or reverses of industry and trade; large cities lost half or even three quarters of their population in half a century. Before the middle of the seventeenth century the wool manufacture consisted only of a few unimportant factories of coarse materials; the silk tax of Granada brought in less than a quarter of what it had yielded under Charles V; and Spain had to rely on other countries to furnish the manufactured wares for export to her colonies. The decline affected not only the quantity of the population, but, to all appearances, its quality as well; beggary and vagrancy became a national curse. =200. Causes of decline; faulty political organization.=—The decline in population cannot be explained by emigrations to America, for the drain from that source was small, as will be shown later. Executions by the Inquisition, numerous as they were, could not alone have checked the population. More serious was the expulsion, under ecclesiastical influences, of the Moriscoes of the South, numbering perhaps a million. These people of Moorish blood, the leaders in the agriculture and industry of Spain, in 1609 followed into exile the Jews who had been the leaders in trade; the native Spanish were unfit to fill the gaps thus made in the industrial ranks.