The supervision which the Suprema was thus gradually developing was most salutary as a check upon the irresponsibility of the tribunals, whose acts were shrouded in impenetrable secrecy except when scrutinized with more or less conscientious investigation by visitors at intervals of five or ten years. The conditions in Barcelona as revealed by successive visitations, between 1540 and 1580, show how a tribunal might violate systematically the Instructions, and how fruitless were the exposures made by visitors when the inquisitors chose to disregard the orders elicited by reports of their misdoings. They were virtually a law unto themselves; no one dared to complain of them and the victims' mouths were closed by the oath of secrecy which bound them under severe penalties not to divulge their experiences. The whole system was so devised as to expose the inquisitor to the maximum of temptation with the minimum risk of detection, and it was the merest chance whether this power was exercised by a Lucero or by a conscientious judge. The consulta de fe and the concurrence of the Ordinary furnished but a feeble barrier, for the record could generally be so presented as to produce the desired impression and the consultors, proud of their position and its immunities, were indisposed to give trouble, especially as their adverse votes did not create a discordia. When Salazar, in 1566, took the unusual trouble of investigating the interminable records of the individual trials, the rebuke of the Suprema to the inquisitors of Barcelona speaks of the numbers of those sentenced to relaxation, reconciliation, the galleys, scourging, etc., after the grossest informalities in the conduct of the trials.[463] The world can never know the cruelties perpetrated under a system which relieved the tribunals from accountability, and consequently any supervision was a benefit, even that imperfectly exercised by the distant Suprema. There seems to have come a dawning consciousness of this, possibly stimulated by the revelations of Salazar's investigations into the three tribunals of the crown of Aragon, which led to the Concordia of 1568. In the same year a carta acordada of June 22nd ordered that even when sentences of relaxation were voted unanimously, the process should be sent to the Suprema for its action.[464] From this time forward its intervention, on one score or another, gradually increased. From the records of the tribunal of Toledo, between 1575 and 1610, it appears that it intervened in 228 cases out of 1172, or substantially in one out of five, while in only 82 of these cases, or one out of fourteen, was there discordia--sometimes as to arrest and trial, sometimes as to torture, but mostly as to the final sentence.[465]