designs of both clerical avarice and royal ambition. Episcopal piety was grieved by the infidel possession of cities whose revenues would sustain with ease the pecuniary burdens of an extensive bishopric. The worthy prelate saw with horror and indignation the performance of Moslem rites in sumptuous mosques protected by the unwonted indulgence of a Christian prince, and longed for the day when the wealth of these splendid establishments might be confiscated for the benefit of the Church of Christ and the treasury of a corrupt and sensual priesthood. With military success and expanding power the public opinion of the age tended more and more to the disregard of treaties contracted with an enemy who was daily becoming less capable of resistance. The constant and universal excitation of theological odium contributed mainly to the adoption of this false and pernicious principle of political ethics. Secular ignorance came in time to sincerely believe the odious doctrine defended by ingenious casuists and promulgated by ecclesiastical hypocrisy and hatred from motives of personal interest. For its acceptance and pursuit to an inevitable conclusion, the degradation of Spain from the high position it occupied under the first sovereigns of the Austrian dynasty is to be chiefly attributed. No people can systematically repudiate its contracts, even with an adversary incapable of resenting his injuries, without forfeiting the respect and confidence of the other members of the great community of nations. The diplomatic perfidy inaugurated by religious malice and royal subserviency in the Moorish wars of the Peninsula was subsequently repeated, on a larger scale, in the politics of Europe, and was responsible for most of the incredible atrocities which accompanied the conquest of Mexico, Central America, Peru. Already tacitly acknowledged as a maxim of national policy in a country which subsequently displayed its willingness to sacrifice the most obvious principles of public faith and morality for the exaltation of ecclesiastical power by the foundation of the Jesuit Order, the peremptory abrogation of a treaty with the votaries of a hostile faith was considered, during the epoch under consideration, rather a meritorious than a reprehensible proceeding. Therefore the King of Aragon, after he had rebuked his officious subordinates for their ill-timed energy and exhibited a plausible zeal for redress by restoring their possessions to the injured Moslems, felt no reluctance in committing the same offence against honor and justice as soon as his own plans were matured. His martial emulation had been excited by the exploits of Ferdinand of Castile in the West, and he feared that that monarch might be tempted to include in his ambitious projects the subjugation of the remaining Eastern states of Moorish Spain, which he himself already regarded as his own by the doubtful claims of geographical proximity and anticipated conquest.